Obituaries
Mark
Birley
Proprietor
of private members' clubs who established a luxury brand with
Annabel's, Mark's and Harry's Bar
Sunday 18 September
2011
Marcus Lecky Oswald
Hornby Birley, club proprietor and businessman: born 29 May 1930;
married 1954 Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart (one son, one
daughter, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1975); died London
24 August 2007.
Mark Birley had an
unerring eye for the rightness of things: the shape of a room, the
height of a table, the springing of an arch, the fall of a curtain
and proper presentation of food. From his lofty perch – he stood
6ft 5in in his immaculately-cobbled shoes – nothing, whether a
permanent or passing feature, escaped his glance.
It was this
perfectionist perspective that made the private members' clubs he
founded in London – Annabel's, Mark's and Harry's Bar principal
among them – the finest of their kind in the world. And which made
them last as long as they have. The Birley clubs have been the most
sought after – for their setting, service and clientele – since
the first of them, Annabel's, was opened as a night club in 1963.
Collectively, they represented a grande luxe brand as impeccable as
long-established names such as Cartier, Bulgari and Louis Vuitton.
At first, Birley had
had modest ambitions for his first venture. He had worked in
advertising, art-directing the Horlicks account for J. Walter
Thompson in the early Fifties, and later for the French luxury-goods
maker Hermes, while he and his wife, Lady Annabel
Vane-Tempest-Stewart, brought up their young family. In December
1961, he was offered the lease of the basement of 44 Berkeley Square,
in Mayfair, by their friend John Aspinall. Upstairs at 44, Aspinall
was restoring William Kent's exquisite Palladian interior with the
collaboration of the architect Philip Jebb and the decorator John
Fowler, making it the setting for the Clermont Club, gaming den for
London's high rollers. It was a restoration project that set new
standards for post-war London.
Accepting the lease
of the basement, just two rooms deep, Birley thought of setting up a
small piano bar. He took on Jebb as his architect, but did not invite
the imperious Fowler on board, getting help with the decoration from
the Peruvian artist Pedro Leito. Birley had all the talents to be his
own decorator, or indeed his own architect, and when he invited
collaboration it was with sympathetic partners. Jebb, like Birley
still in his early thirties, had already done extensive interiors
work in London, turning Belgravia houses into flats for Birley's
friend Douglas Wilson. Jebb suggested to Birley that they should
extend the basement as far back as 44 Hay's Mews by digging out the
garden, involving the hand-barrowing of tons of London clay.
The nascent piano
bar could thus become a full-blown night-club. It was named after
Annabel Birley. The club has always been a striking spacial
experience, at once intimate but theatrical. The visitor comes down
the area steps, under a heavy blue and gold awning, and into a small
lobby. From here a carefully modulated spinal corridor runs to the
dance floor at the back, passing the Buddha room on the left side,
the private dining room on the other, and the main bar and dining
area.
Mark and Annabel
Birley, one of the most glamorous married couples in London,
attracted a raft of their upper-crust friends to be founding members.
The club was an immediate success, and became a great meeting place
for swinging London, but no one thought the place would stay open for
more than a short period, still less for 44 years and counting. The
Clermont and Annabel's made 44 Berkeley Square the grandest
evening-out address in London. Sadly, Birley and Aspinall fell out in
tumultuous fashion over Aspinall's wish to use part of the basement
as a wine cellar for the Clermont. Aspinall recalled that the sole
witness of their argument described Birley as red with anger and
Aspinall white with rage. There remained a lasting chill between
them, although the two men were, according to Aspinall, in friendly
contact by letter in the years before Aspinall's death in 2000.
Birley's secret was
day-to-day presence; being on hand to make decisions as Annabel's
became established. As he told the writer Naim Attalah in 1989:
It's not so much
perfectionism I'm after in the way I run Annabel's, as the way I
think things ought to be. I just want to get everything right in the
way I think to be best. Of course it is a matter of going on and for
years and staying interested enough to try to improve things. I'm not
good on committees. One of my failings is a lack of patience. I'm
used to taking my own decisions... That rather autocratic way of
running things has advantages and disadvantages but one of the main
advantages is that makes for speed and makes your employees happier I
think. They like somebody who can say yes or no.
At Annabel's, Birley
never let things stand still. A private dining room was added, and a
new bar. And all the time, under the watchful gaze of the superb
maître d'hôtel Louis, staff remained discreet about the members'
private liaisons. As the writer Candida Lycett Green recalled,
everyone at the club was slightly in love with Birley
It's something about
his elusiveness; the way he looks so inexorably sad; the way his
suits are immaculately cut; the way his eye for a picture never
falters and a certain wild bohemianism hovers in his closet.
That artist's eye,
that sense of that lurking bohemianism, was Birley's heritage as the
son of the portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley and his redoubtable
wife Rhoda Pike. Sir Oswald was the favourite artist of the royal
family, society figures, and of Winston Churchill, with whom he spent
painting holidays. The Birleys were patrons of the Russian ballet.
They had a Clough Williams-Ellis villa in St John's Wood, and
Charleston Manor, a perfect small Georgian house near West Dean in
Sussex.
Mark was educated at
Eton, and spent one year at Oxford, where his future wife first
encountered him, and was struck by his youthful air of languid
self-possession. In London, they met again, and Annabel noticed Mark
"swirling deb after deb" around the dance floor. They fell
in love at Queen's ice-skating rink, were married in 1954, and their
first son, Rupert, was born in 1955.
One of their first
married homes was the exquisite Pelham Cottage, half of a hidden
Georgian farmhouse close to South Kensington tube station. Mark took
charge of the alterations to the house, one of his earliest
collaborations with the architect Philip Jebb.
Birley and Jebb
started work on a second club, Mark's, at 46 Charles Street, around
the corner from Annabel's in 1969. Mark's is a hushed lunching and
dining club, in a converted Edwardian townhouse. In 1975 Birley took
a lease on a former wine merchant's shop at 26 South Audley Street,
200 yards northwest of Annabel's. Here, he and Jebb created Harry's
Bar. The name came from the famous Cipriani hostelry in Venice. But,
in Birley's view, his was a far more ambitious undertaking.
His Harry's Bar was
to be a meeting place, a private restaurant for the special Birley
clientele. The dining room there, he felt, was the most beautiful
room he had created thus far. The special feature is its low seating,
and the spacing of the tables, all to generate the feel of an
alfresco meal. The opening of Harry's Bar was probably Birley's
apotheosis, where he and his friends brought the Birley brand to its
highest pitch. Afterwards Birley created George, another dining club,
and the Bath & Racquets Club, a gentleman's gymnasium.
Birley was courted
by many international associates who wanted him to take Annabel's
international. There was a hotel project in Malta; approaches to
create an Annabel's in Hong Kong, another in Mexico City; the Ritz in
Paris asked him to set up an English bar. None of these projects came
to fruition. And probably just as well, as Birley knew that the
success of his brand depended on detailed personal supervision,
something that would have suffered with any sort of international
spread to his empire.
Birley widened his
net from clubs to shops in London: an interiors emporium in Pimlico
Road, in collaboration with the decorator Nina Campbell, in 1973, and
Birley & Goodhuis, a cigar and wine shop, in the Fulham Road in
1978.
His son Robin added
to the family brand when he opened his first Birley's sandwich bar in
Shepherd Market, Mayfair. The business really took off when Robin
launched branches in the City of London soon after, but from the
first his menu of exotic, good ingredients, hand-assembled with
edible bread, revolutionised lunchtime eating in London. It has been
much imitated globally.
Mark Birley was a
friend and patron of artists: his mother's contemporary Adrian
Daintrey; the glass engraver Lawrence Whistler; and the portraitist
John Ward. In 1983 Ward produced a triptych of the founding members
of Annabel's to mark the club's 20th anniversary. Birley liked cars.
When Annabel's held a members' raffle in the early days, the first
prize was an Aston Martin DBS. In the 1970 World Cup rally, from
London to Mexico, he co-piloted a Mercedes with the racing driver
Innes Ireland. And they led during the early European stages, until
their brake fluid boiled, the car became undriveable, and their race
ended, Birley at the wheel, nosefirst against a roadside tree.
For all his
old-Etonian bon ton corrrectness, Birley had something raffish,
self-branding and up-to-date about him. His cars, all with an MBA
number plate, could be seen parked outside his office or his house.
His transatlantic social life meant he kept abreast of new trends in
the Seventies and Eighties, sporting a Sony Walkman or working out
with weights before either had become universal phenomena. Throughout
these years, young men on the make in banking or property aped his
manners in the hope of finding social prominence.
For the past four
decades he lived at a series of houses in South Kensington: first
Pelham Cottage; a house around the corner in Pelham Street after he
and Annabel were separated (they divorced in 1975, when she married
the business magnate Sir James Goldsmith); and Thurloe Lodge,
opposite Brompton Oratory, his final home.
At Thurloe Lodge
there was much work to be done. At first Birley perched in a small
sitting room, and he and Jebb did up rooms in turn as money allowed.
Jebb brought Birley back into contact with Tavener & Co, London's
leading builders and joiners. The firm had done work for Sir Oswald
and Lady Birley, and the brilliant Roger Tavener – part of the
Beatles circle and brother and backer of the composer John – thus
became the third generation of his family to work with the Birley
clan.
In Birley's houses,
as much as in his clubs, there were multiple reminders that he was
the son of two artists. At Thurloe Lodge, in its well-set, square
drawing room, he made a marvellous setpiece, where his hanging of
Edwardian art was all of a kind. In its homogenous initial impact it
was as arresting as any comparable drawing room in London: Sir
Brinsley Ford's salon of Richard Wilson landscapes in Mayfair; Lady
Diana Cooper's run of portraits of herself by Ricketts, Shannon and
McEvoy in Warwick Avenue; or Linley Sambourne's room of his own
drawings for Punch magazine, now preserved as museum in Stafford
Terrace, Kensington.
Birley suffered a
shattering blow in 1986 when his son Rupert disappeared while taking
a morning swim while working in Lomé, west Africa. His body was
never recovered. Birley organised an emotional funeral at St James's
Piccadilly, where the singing of the Inspirational Choir made a
heartbreaking occasion more moving still.
Towards the end of
his life, Mark Birley was regularly in ill-health, and spent long
periods in the Cromwell Hospital. He passed the running of Annabel's
to his children Robin and India Jane, who did much to revive the
membership of the venerable flagship. In June, the entire Birley
fleet of clubs was sold for a reported £90m. The Birley brand had
remained intact to the end.
Louis Jebb
Mark
Birley's art treasures for auction
The
contents of the Annabel's club owner Mark Birley's house are coming
up for sale at Sotheby's, six years after his death
By Matthew
Dennison8:00AM GMT 26 Jan 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9824189/Mark-Birleys-art-treasures-for-auction.html
Lucian Freud once
admitted that he had considered Mark Birley – son of the society
portraitist Oswald Birley, Old Etonian doyen of smart London
nightclubs, brother of Maxime de la Falaise and, famously, cuckold of
Jimmy Goldsmith – 'a very cold man' until he went to his house.
The house in
question stands four square and early Victorian, of dun-coloured
brick leavened with wisteria, opposite the Brompton Oratory, a
stone's throw from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Harrods. It was
Mark Birley's home for nearly 30 years, until his death in 2007.
Externally unrevealing, architecturally decorous, discreetly,
expensively elegant, Thurloe Lodge appears a reflection of Birley
himself: understatedly urbane, debonair. Perhaps, even, at a push…
cold. Internally, however, in Birley's day the house presented a
different portrait of its owner from that offered to the passer-by,
revealing in comfortable, suggestively opulent interiors that warmth
which surprised Freud. Its plumply upholstered rooms, densely hung
with pictures and crowded with objects, betrayed a sensuousness at
odds with that aloofness bordering on curmudgeonliness detected by
Birley's detractors: bronzes, china and masses of fresh flowers
coalesced into a backdrop more sybaritic than spartan.
This spring, 50
years after the opening of Birley's first and best-known club,
Annabel's, and a year on from the sale of Thurloe Lodge itself, the
contents of the house will be offered for sale by Sotheby's. Lots
include paintings by Augustus John and William Orpen, drawings by
Rossetti and David Hockney, a Mac cartoon about Annabel's originally
published in the Daily Mail, and a Cartier tie pin.
The decision to sell was taken by Birley's daughter, the artist India Jane, for practical reasons: there is simply too much stuff to be accommodated in India Jane's own London house and her house in the country. Although she has kept a number of pieces, including a self-portrait of her grandfather and several small bronzes by Bugatti, she approaches the sale with mixed emotions. It is no secret that, following an acrimonious family rift which saw India Jane's surviving elder brother, Robin, effectively disinherited, Birley senior's chief legatee is his only grandson, India Jane's seven-year-old son, Eben. In accordance with the terms of Mark Birley's will, proceeds of the sale will be placed in trust for Eben until he attains his majority.
It is ironic that
the will, which lies at the centre of the present sale, should have
supplied such wellsprings of material for gossip columnists on both
sides of the Atlantic. Birley's success lay in his stylish yet
unassertive reinvention of London's nightlife, beginning in the early
1960s. Annabel's Club came first, in 1963, in the basement of a
William Kent house in Berkeley Square, occupying a relatively small
space once given over to wine vaults. It was named after Birley's
then wife, Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, whom he had married in
1954 (and who would later leave him for their mutual friend Jimmy
Goldsmith).
From the beginning,
the look was dubbed 'country house style': walls plentifully hung
with pictures or panelled, with soft banquettes for seating. In fact
it was anything but – too smart, comfortable and stylish for the
average English country house in those first decades after the war. A
school friend, Peter Blond, remembers that even at Eton, Birley was
determined to open a nightclub. At the age of 33, married with three
young children, he achieved his dream. For Blond, the success of
Annabel's was certain, its sophisticated indulgence contrasting with
'the ghastliness of post-war London nightclubs, with awful seedy pink
lampshades and no pictures. Such a shortage of elegance and style.'
Assiduously Birley
and his founder members gathered around them the great, the grand,
the glamorous and the glittering, many of them relations or near
relations of Birley and his wife. 'He knew he needed lots of
glamorous people to make the clubs work,' India Jane says. He played
host to guests who included the Queen, Lord Lucan, Aristotle Onassis,
Frank Sinatra and President Nixon. In their wake followed flotillas
of the socially aspirant. Prices were consistently vertiginously high
– Birley once upbraided a couple from the North who protested at
their lunch bill, pointing out that his Harry's Bar was no place to
eat on an economy drive. In return, guests could expect the best of
the best and the highest levels of service. It was, after all, only
what Birley wanted and expected for himself.
He spent every night
at Annabel's. Later he would divide his time among all five of his
clubs (after Annabel's he opened Mark's Club, Harry's Bar, George and
the Bath & Racquets Club), and no detail was too small for his
forensic attention, from the way butter was curled to the choice of
glass and, famously, the wrapping of lemon chunks in muslin to
contain their pips. As Blond comments, 'He was very, very aware of
how things should be done.'
On paper such an
approach smacks of snobbery, an etiquette-book approach to life. In
practice Birley's outlook was as much to do with ennui, snobbery the
fallback position. 'Mark was easily bored,' one friend remembers.
'That impatience created the discipline that ran the clubs so well.'
In 1963 Annabel's was remarkable among upper-class London nightspots
in not requiring a dinner jacket; later Birley abolished the
requirement for a jacket and tie, but afterwards gave in to popular
pressure and reintroduced it.
India Jane describes
her father as 'very modern'. His concern extended beyond the old
apparatus of social hierarchies and, despite his huge professional
acquaintanceship, he contrived not to appear overtly social. Save for
a talent for drawing which expressed itself most often in sketches of
women's legs complete with high-heeled shoes, he was an unlikely
nightclub denizen. 'He wasn't the easiest of people and not the
congenial club owner in any sense of the word,' Blond remembers. But
the stock-in-trade of the Birley empire, like that of Birley's own
life, was the pursuit of pleasure.
His small stable of
nightclubs and eateries offered their well-heeled, well-connected,
occasionally well-known clientele many blandishments, not least
discretion. In the ladies' room at Annabel's, for example, the
formidable Mabel, lured by Birley from Wilton's, was said to be able
to distinguish between a wife and a mistress at a single glance and,
if need be, to ensure that the two did not encounter one another. It
was all part of the service and typical of that fastidious, indeed
obsessive attention to detail that earned Birley a reputation for
perfectionism, which he himself preferred to describe as 'just
want[ing] to get things right in the way I think to be best'.
'For my father, perfectionism meant his perfect idea of beauty,' India Jane remembers, 'but it was a concept that embraced an edge of imperfection. He had an incredibly broad, grand approach and his was a painter's perfection: if the colour of a lampshade was wrong, he would change it like an artist changes the colour in a painting.' And so Birley's collection includes a handful of works of the highest quality – David Hockney's 1993 pencil portrait of a dachshund, Boodgie (£12,000-18,000), and Sir Edwin Landseer's The Poor Dog (£25,000-35,000), one of four Landseers included in the sale. Birley claimed that it was among Landseer's very best pictures, painted 'before Queen Victoria got hold of him'.
In another instance he followed happily in Queen Victoria's wake. Good Friends, of 1889 (£80,000-120,000), an image of a small girl and a large St Bernard dog, is a first-rate example of the work of Charles Burton Barber. A leading animal portraitist, Barber spent much of the last quarter of the 19th century employed by the Queen to record her vast kennel of many breeds. One club regular remembers the painting in Mark's Club. Birley frequently moved paintings and objects between his home and his clubs – a blurring of the distinction between work and play, art and life, stage and gallery.
Thurloe Lodge also
offered Birley levels of comfort bordering on sumptuousness. The
interior designer Nina Campbell, who redesigned Annabel's Club in her
early 20s, went on to open a shop with Birley on Pimlico Road selling
Fauchon sweets and luxury linen, and afterwards worked on other
Birley venues, describes his 'wonderful ways of making things
comfortable'. In the five years after his purchase of the house in
1980, he converted the four-bedroom family home into a space ideally
suited to his own needs and those of the succession of dogs with
whom, with greater effusiveness than he appeared to reserve for any
person, he shared his life. Its large, square drawing-room opening on
to a panelled dining-room, remembered by India Jane as 'so
ravishingly beautiful', successfully combined a hedonist's instinct
for personal comfort with an old-fashioned eschewal of ostentation:
deep sofas surrounding a crackling log fire were serviced by a
plethora of drinks tables and low-level lighting. In the background
walls covered in a distinguished collection of mostly 19th-century,
mostly canine paintings suggested the successful anglicisation of a
decidedly Proustian mise-en-scène.
If the effect was
rich, it was an old-money richness unconcerned with anything outside
its own four walls. It was the same look Birley repeatedly brought to
his clubs and key to the success of those ventures which, despite an
element of hauteur, were at the centre of London social life
throughout the Swinging Sixties. In the decoration of his home Birley
was guided exclusively by personal preference. Ignoring changing
fashions, he was happy to indulge magpie instincts which he
orchestrated with flair and taste. 'My own passion for collecting is
a sort of acquisitiveness, I suppose,' he once admitted. 'If I had
time to go around all the salesrooms, there would be no end to the
stuff I could get interested in.' As India Jane remembers, 'He did
everything to suit himself precisely. Not for the clubs' members but
always to please himself.' It made for a vision undiluted by
compromise – and one that, from the outset, became instantly
recognisable and instantly popular.
India Jane Birley is
not selling the entire contents of Thurloe Lodge. A recent purchase
has enabled her to keep a selection of pieces from her father's
collection. For India Jane has bought Charleston Manor, the house in
Sussex which formerly belonged to her grandparents, Oswald and Rhoda
Birley. Eleventh-century in origin, remodelled in the 18th century,
it has small rooms with long views. 'It was the house I went to now
and again as a child and easily the most significant place I knew,'
she recalls. It was also, she feels, the principal influence on her
father growing up and the house to which his thoughts turned
repeatedly at the end of his life.
Today the house is
once again embellished with paintings by Oswald Birley, alongside an
antique tapestry and a 17th-century refectory table latterly housed
at Thurloe Lodge. It provides for India Jane a sense of coming home.
But it is not only she who has returned. With her are her father's
last, beloved dogs, Tara, an 18-year-old alsatian, and George, a
16-year-old labrador. Surely, too, something of her father has
returned to the Sussex of his childhood along with his daughter and
only grandson. 'Pup's ghost must be fluttering about…'
Mark Birley – The
Private Collection is at Sotheby's on March 21 (020-7293 5000;
sothebys.com)
 |
A mock-up of the
drawing room in Thurloe Lodge. Friends and relatives are devastated
that India Jane has sold items that Mark Birley spent a lifetime
collecting Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND
|
Mark
Birley: 'His things were thrown to the wolves’
India
Jane Birley’s auction of her father’s belongings has outraged her
brother Robin and deepened the family feud
By Sarah
Rainey8:36PM GMT 22 Mar 2013
The original version
of this article on 22 March said that Robin Birley had been the
subject of allegations that he had stolen money from his family
business. We accept that no money was stolen by Mr Birley and we
apologise unreservedly to Mr Birley. The reference has been removed.
Tucked away in a
discreet corner of South Kensington is Thurloe Lodge, the £17
million former home of Mark Birley, founder of the exclusive London
nightclub Annabel’s. Creeping wisteria clings to its fawn-coloured
bricks, its neat front garden edged with trimmed hedgerows and spring
flowers. Large vaulted windows, their frames painted pristine white,
are draped with heavy curtains, as if concealing treasures within.
For nearly 30 years,
Thurloe Lodge was a shrine to Birley’s life. An arbiter of taste
and avid collector of art and antiques, the house was a catalogue of
his finest acquisitions. Inside, an elegant drawing room opened on to
a panelled dining hall, where deep sofas faced a marble mantelpiece.
The table was impeccably set with silver cutlery, even when Birley
dined alone, and a Hermès backgammon board, personalised with a
tapestry surface so the dice wouldn’t rattle, sat open by the
window, ready to play should friends call round.
Fires always
crackled in the grates. The lighting was soft, echoing the dimly lit
interiors of Annabel’s, and the air teemed with cigar smoke. The
walls were a jigsaw of paintings – a Hockney, a Rossetti, several
Munnings – and hand-picked artefacts from around the world were
propped up on low tables: china figurines; cocktail shakers;
monogrammed cigar boxes.
In 2011, four years
after his death, India Jane, Birley’s only daughter, sold Thurloe
Lodge. Then, on Thursday, she put the contents of the house up for
auction at Sotheby’s in London. More than 500 objects went under
the hammer, among them Birley’s most personal belongings:
hairbrushes, tie pins, signed paintings of his dogs by the artist
Neil Forster.
Now, friends and
relatives – including her brother Robin, from whom India Jane is
said to be estranged – are devastated she has got rid of items that
Birley spent a lifetime collecting. “It was,” one admits, “like
[his possessions] were thrown to the wolves.”
In the auction room,
a wooden statue of Birley’s beloved dog Blitz (Lot 171, sold for
£26,000), was placed at the front, as if standing guard over his
master’s property. Lot 460, a collection of gentleman’s dressing
accessories, including three ivory hairbrushes engraved with an “M”,
sold for £3,800. His four-seated red sofa; a hat stand; silverware;
the contents of his wine cellar; even his bath fittings (Lot 485,
green and silver Art Deco taps) – all went to new homes. There was
a heated bidding exchange for Lot 232, the prized backgammon board,
which eventually went to a telephone bidder for £16,000, 10 times
its estimate.
Some of Birley’s
friends were present, hoping to stop his possessions falling into the
hands of strangers. But his son Robin, 55, refused to attend,
branding the auction a “tragedy”.
“I want nothing to
do with it, and no one in my family will have anything to do with
it,” he sighs. “Everyone is appalled. I could understand if my
sister was desperately in need, but the opposite is the case. Why not
treasure his things? Why not give things away to staff who worked for
my father for 30 years? Why not give things away to his friends? All
these things financially mean little to her and a tremendous amount
to them. I think it’s pitiful.”
In 2006, Robin was
unceremoniously cut out of his father’s will. Birley, who died aged
77, left the bulk of his £120 million fortune to India Jane, in
trust for Eben, her son, with Robin getting a token £1 million – a
share that later rose to £35 million after an out-of-court
settlement.
India Jane, 52, says
she sold her father’s belongings because there were simply too many
to fit into her London home and her new country estate, Charleston
Manor in East Sussex. Friends suggest her father’s possessions were
also “too grand” for her tastes. Explaining her motivations for
the auction in the Sotheby’s brochure, India Jane admits it was a
“difficult decision”. “I like to think [my father] approves of
the sale, for being an artist he understands my need to carve out my
own space,” she adds.
But David
Wynne-Morgan, a PR guru and one of Mark Birley’s oldest friends,
disagrees. “She is completely wrong,” he insists. “I mean, he
told me. I lived in his cottage, I was on his board for 40 years. I
was very close to him. He was ill at the end, his mind was not good
and his short-term memory had gone. But I did say to him, 'Why did
you change your will and leave the house and everything to India
Jane?’ And he said, 'Well, I think she will treasure the house and
its contents.’”
The Birley family’s
history is marred by tragedy, rifts and betrayals. Mark’s eldest
son, Rupert, disappeared aged 30 while swimming off the coast of West
Africa in 1986. At the age of 12, Robin was mauled by a tiger at a
private zoo in Kent, leaving him facially scarred. It is rumoured
that he and his father never resolved their disagreement over the
rewriting of his will; Mark famously kept a scathing letter from
Robin in his jacket pocket, in which his son disowned him as a
father. Robin, having made his money from a lucrative chain of
sandwich shops, is now a nightclub owner himself, having opened 5
Hertford Street in Mayfair last June.
And there is another
side to the extended family. Mark’s wife, Lady Annabel, had two
children with his friend Sir James Goldsmith (writer Jemima Khan, and
Conservative MP Zac) during their marriage. She divorced him in 1975
and married Goldsmith (with whom she had a third child, Ben) in 1978.
When approached by The Daily Telegraph this week, neither Lady
Annabel nor any of the three Goldsmith children wanted to comment on
the auction.
Willie Landels, the
founder of Harpers & Queen magazine and a long-term friend of
Mark’s, says he understands why family members would rather
distance themselves from the sale. “It is not for us to talk about;
it is not our place,” he says. “Obviously when there’s so much
stuff it has to be sold, but there were some things that were very
personal to Mark, like his brushes. I find the whole thing rather
sad… It was like they were thrown to the wolves.”
Landels was not at
the auction on Thursday, but Wynne-Morgan was, along with Nina
Campbell, the interior designer who worked with Birley on the décor
of Annabel’s. “When you’ve known somebody incredibly well and
known the house well, there is a sort of sadness when you see these
things that you’ve known or you’ve sat on or you’ve looked at
or you’ve drunk out of or you’ve eaten off, suddenly stripped
down,” says Campbell.
She is careful not
to criticise India Jane, adding: “Mark was an inveterate shopper,
so there’s tons of stuff. She’s kept the things that mean
something to her and hopefully the other things will have gone to a
good home to be used by people who love them.” Sir Evelyn de
Rothschild, another close friend of Birley’s, agrees that there was
“an awful lot in his home”. He adds: “The auction was an
example of what [Mark] collected and his joy of dogs.”
Wynne-Morgan,
however, found a preview of the auction, attended by a number of
Birley’s friends, “rather uncomfortable”. “India Jane is
perfectly entitled to do what she likes,” he concedes. “But it
was a very strange thing, seeing all these things set out. I find it
a great pity. I mean that house; he created it. The man’s taste was
quite amazing. He did it superbly well. I think it would have been
nice for it to have been handed down to future generations and for it
to be seen as a symbol of what he’d done.”
Birley had many
loyal staff at Thurloe Lodge, including housekeeper Elvira Maria and
his butler, Mohamed Ghannam. Wynne-Morgan is disappointed that India
Jane didn’t give more of her father’s personal belongings to
them. “He loved getting Christmas presents from the staff. We used
to give him things, usually in silver, often with all our signatures
engraved on them. An awful lot of those have been sold. The employees
I talked to were horrified.”
Such sadness
pervaded the Birley sale. Remnants of the old Annabel’s (now owned
by restaurateur Richard Caring) – pastel drawings, posters
commissioned for the cloakrooms – were sold to anonymous bidders.
Several of Birley’s friends walked out when they failed to win lots
– in Wynne-Morgan’s case, his backgammon board. “I reckon I
lost about £30,000 to him over the years, because he was a much
better player than me,” he recalls. “He used to say, 'David, you
were terribly unlucky tonight.’”
Luck didn’t come
into it: the auction was an unprecedented success, raising £3.85
million – money that will be put into trust for Eben until he turns
18. A fitting tribute, some might say, to the man who for 40 years
put on London’s finest parties: even in death, Birley can throw the
best auction in town.
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