Lost in Oblivion. Glorious Grenfell derby Tweed Overcoat found second hand. The buttons were missing.

Remembering Bunny Roger

Obituary: Bunny Roger

Clive Fisher Tuesday 29 April 1997

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-bunny-roger-5569824.html

Erstwhile couturier, wit, dandy, landowner, and social ornament, Bunny Roger was what obituary in its obliquer days styled a lifelong bachelor and what gossip columnists knew as a flamboyant homosexual.

Not that the phraseology of old Fleet Street would have distressed him: he was nothing if not implacably conservative and as the last of a kind he could scarcely expect new labels. Equally, the Queen's English (like anything else remotely royal) deserved veneration and there was one term he always resisted: "You can't call queer men 'gay'. Apart from anything else, they're all so miserable. The Greeks were more accurate when they called the Furies the 'Kindly Ones'."

Yet Bunny himself - so styled from infancy when his nanny imagined a likeness - was far from morose. As the second of Sir Alexander and Lady Roger's three sons he determined precociously to wrest parental attention from his better-placed siblings and all his life he retained a showman's resilience, an enthusiast's energy and a conviction that life is what one makes it.

His father was a City tycoon, self-made, Aberdonian, a magnate in international telecommunications, while his mother, also Scotch, was an extravagant beauty whose portrait by William Acton later surveyed Roger's drawing- room. What they can have been thinking when they gave their six-year-old middle son a fairy's costume of filmy skirts and butterfly wings, with the promise of a wand to further his caperings, it is hard to imagine; but the Rogers were a happy family and by the early Thirties, the Depression notwithstanding, they were also a wealthy one, and lived in opulence at Ewhurst Park in Hampshire as tenants of the Duke of Wellington.

Following a miserable schooling at Loretto outside Edinburgh, Roger read History at Balliol under F. F. Urquhart. "The Sligger's" celebrated Alpine reading parties failed to entice, and Roger instead joined Ouds (thereby meeting his lifelong friend Terence Rattigan) and danced the Charleston with any compliant Rugby Blue.

After a year, determined on a career designing clothes, he left Balliol for drawing classes at the Ruskin. Rouge and hair dye enlivened his prettiness and soon he passed as an unthreatening sweetheart among the virgin, girl- shy undergraduates. Osbert Lancaster presented him with a pekinese puppy; others pressed more unequivocal suits; but the authorities were watching and Roger was summoned before a donnish tribunal, accused of corrupting homosexual activities and banished from Oxford.

America he found disappointing and disenchantment was compounded when in Hollywood he was likened to the young George Arliss and not the next Marlene Dietrich. He crossed Hitler's Germany in one of his father's Rolls- Royces to visit a cousin in Poland. He frequented London parties (although stories that he and his brothers attended a Chelsea Arts Club ball as the Bronte sisters were apocryphal). He befriended and patronised the young Edward Burra. As an assistant in the studio at Waring and Gillow he helped furnish King Zog's palaces; later, at Fortnum's tailoring, he learnt about costing and cutting.

Finally, with encouragement and advice from Edward Molyneux and Victor Stiebel and pounds 1,000 backing from his father, he opened his own dress- making establishment, Neil Roger, in Great Newport Street in 1937. The showroom was decorated in Regency Gothic and for his first collection Roger invited everyone mentioned in the current Tatler and disguised his boldness by scrawling across each invitation the fictitious assurance, "Mary asked me to send you this". He numbered among his clients the Lygon sisters, Vivien Leigh and Princess Marina.

During the Second World War, conspicuously rouged in the Rifle Brigade, he saw active service in Italy and North Africa and after being demobbed he set up a new establishment in Bruton Mews before being invited to run the couture department at Fortnum's. Presently, with his friend Hardy Amies financially precarious, he invested a generous sum in the House of Amies and for a while operated from there. His investment was handsomely vindicated when Debenhams acquired his holding and he retired in 1973.

Besides, party-giving, which happily combined Roger's passions for dancing and dressing up, had long constituted a second vocation. With his younger brother Sandy he had moved in 1946 to Walton Street and their large house, with its basement murals depicting a Highland Garden of Eden, soon became a celebrated, if louche, nocturnal destination. Their 1952 Quo Vadis? party, with no address supplied on the invitation, saw Bunny Roger scantily clad for slavery. The year 1953 marked the Coronation Ball, with its host bejewelled as Queen Alexandra, and 1956 the notorious Fetish Party, which provoked full-page dismay in the People. In their day these extravaganzas were outrageous; and even at the Diamond, Amethyst and Flame Balls, given to celebrate his 60th, 70th and 80th birthdays, Roger outshone and outdanced his guests from the worlds of theatre and fashion.

He dispensed sedater hospitality at Dundonnell, the estate in Wester Ross he shared with his brothers. A phenomenon of energy, even in his eighties, he interrupted his constant cooking, talking and card-playing to show guests the famous Chinese gardens created by his brother Alan or to don yet another astonishing suit. He was, after all, a Savile Row institution and his 150 suits catered, albeit theatrically, for every contingency.

He invented the tight-cut Capri trousers while on holiday on the island in 1949 and by the Fifties he was sponsoring a neo-Edwardian silhouette - four-button jackets with generous shoulders and mean waists, lapelled waistcoats, high-cut trousers - for plain, checked and striped suits. Accessories, whether a high-crowned bowler or ruby cuff-links, were indispensable; and even in his eighties the final effect, with Roger's eight-stone frame and white, much-lifted face turned vain singularity to artistry.

All dandies need an audience but Bunny Roger inspired what almost amounted to a following - partly because by word and deed he never stopped entertaining; partly because we are all nostalgic for style. Most crucially, however, he was true: beneath his mauve mannerisms he was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates a life enhancer and exemplary friend.

Clive Fisher

Neil Munroe ("Bunny") Roger, couturier: born London 9 June 1911; died London 27 April 1997.

 Neil Munro Roger was born 9 June 1911 in London to Sir Alexander Roger and Helen Stuart Clark, both from Scotland. He read History at Balliol College, Oxford, though only for a year; then studied drawing at The Ruskin. However, he was expelled for his homosexual activities.

In 1937, Roger established his dressmakers, Neil Roger, in Great Newport Street, London. One of his clients was Vivien Leigh.

He served in Italy and North Africa in the Rifle Brigade in World War II. Roger was a war hero known for his courage under fire. A story that may be apocryphal has him replying to a sergeant's question regarding approaching Germans, "When in doubt, powder heavily."

Following the war, he was invited to run the couture department at Fortnum & Mason. He invested in the House of Amies, and his stake was later acquired by Debenhams in 1973.

He is credited with inventing Capri pants in 1949, while vacationing at Capri in Italy.

Roger was a clotheshorse who bought up to fifteen bespoke suits a year and four pairs of bespoke shoes or boots to go with each suit; each suit was said to have cost around £2,000. He favored a neo-Edwardian look: four-buttoned jackets with broad shoulders, narrow waists, and long skirts. He favoured narrow trousers and a high-crowned bowler hat. He was particularly fond of spectator shoes and ruby cufflinks.

Roger was known for the lavish and outrageous parties that he held throughout his life. These events were often themed, as in the Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays, respectively.

Family Values: At home with Bunny, Sandy and Alan

Aesthetes, socialites and flamboyant bachelors, the Roger brothers collected art and fashion to assist their biggest production - themselves. Now their props are up for auction. By John Windsor

John Windsor Saturday 24 January 1998

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/family-values-at-home-with-bunny-sandy-and-alan-1140641.html

Even as a teenager, the late "Bunny" Roger - knew a thing or two about peroxide. During

the course of a board meeting of the family telecommunications business, to which he had been summoned by his father, the granite-hard, self-made Scottish tycoon Sir Alexander Roger, in the forlorn hope that he would take an interest, Bunny's hair was seen to change colour from brown to blond. Board members were incensed. Sir Alexander was apoplectic. Bunny was cock-a-hoop.

Christened Neil Munroe Roger, Bunny was the most eccentric of three bachelor brothers whose furniture, antiques, artworks and clothes from two mansions - Dundonnell, on Loch Broom, Scotland, and in Addison Road, Holland Park, London - are being auctioned by Sotheby's in a bumper 1,600-lot, three- day sale, next Wednesday to Friday. It is expected to raise pounds 1.5m - a reminder of an era when money could buy the luxury of behaving as one pleased.

The exotic mauve catsuit with egret feather headdress that Bunny wore at his "Amethyst" 70th birthday ball in 1981, and the sequinned "Ball of Fire" costume in which, a decade later, he emerged through fire and smoke to the applause of 400 guests, are each estimated at pounds 300-pounds 500 in the sale - just two lots among his exquisitely tailored suits, collectables and camp accoutrements that are the remains of a life seemingly dedicated to a stylish re-enactment of the Oedipus myth.

Bunny, who founded the Neil Roger fashion house in 1937, invested in Hardy Amies and sold out lucratively to Debenhams in 1973, died of cancer last year, aged 86, having partied until a week before entering hospital. He still weighed a trim eight stone and had a waist measurement that, he said, was the same as Princess Diana's.

His father, whom he despised, was spared the Amethyst outrage, having died in 1961. But he was still hale enough to explode with anger when, in 1956, the People newspaper carried an expose with pictures of Bunny's New Year fetish party at his London home, at which men wearing leather bondage gear and high heels led women on the end of chains.

Lady Roger attempted to soothe Sir Alexander by marvelling that a man could spend an entire night in high heels. Whereas her husband had had no shoes at all as a boy in Rhynie, Aberdeenshire, where he sang for pennies, Helen, Lady Roger, was the daughter of a mayor of Leith in Lothian, where, presumably, shoe fetishism is less uncommon.

"The boys" - Sandy, the youngest, Alan, the eldest, and Bunny in the middle - clung to their mother, and to each other, throughout their lives. She was a stunning beauty and a matriarchal dominatrix of mythic scale. She collected papier mache furniture and turned her sons into aesthetes. It is to her that their queenliness - particularly Bunny's - must be attributed, though some credit should be given to the vigorous regime of Loretto School, Edinburgh, which Sir Alexander thought would turn his boys into men.

Sir Alex did not always get his way. When Bunny asked for a doll's house as a reward for being selected for Loretto's junior sports team, he got it. At the age of six, for reasons that one cannot begin to fathom, his mother and father had given him a fairy costume with diaphanous skirts and butterfly wings. As parents, they were a transvestite's dream.

All three boys went to Oxford. During the vacations they invited exotic friends to lavish parties at the big country houses that their parents rented. One house had 14 servants. Both parents had the partying habit - they were indefatigable socialites while on business trips abroad.

Bunny, by then an established roue, was sent down from Oxford, where he was known as a "beauty", after being accused of homosexual practices. He later mixed with Terence Rattigan and Freddie Ashton's set, derided by Evelyn Waugh as "lesbian tarts and joyboys". During a memorable summer holiday in Toulon, attended by the artist Edward Burra and the playboy-photographer Brian Howard, Bunny refused to sunbathe so that he could mince magically down the Rade like a white Greek god.

The brothers' aestheticism took different directions. Both Bunny and Alan - who died three months after him - collected the work of Burra and other contemporary artists. But Alan, who served with MI5 in Teheran and Hong Kong during the war, before being posted to Hong Kong after the defeat of the Japanese to deal with re-settlement problems, acquired an enviable collection of Chinese ceramics, textiles and scroll paintings, which he commissioned. He also championed the now-famous studio potters, the Viennese Lucie Rie and the German Hans Coper, wartime refugees working in London. They made him garden pots for the bonsai trees he popularised in Britain and for his meticulously tended horticulture.

Sandy, the youngest brother, who alone shouldered the burdens of the family business and was the first to die, 18 years ago, turned his late father's office overlooking the Thames at the Temple into what was compared to the citadel of a South American dictator.

It was Lady Roger's dressmaking account at Fortnum's, together with a grudging pounds 1,000 from Sir Alex, that launched Bunny as a couturier. He draped his clients, who included Vivien Leigh, Princess Marina and the Lygon sisters, in the sort of flowing gowns worn by his heroine, Marlene Dietrich (he once plucked his eyebrows to resemble hers). Neil Roger gowns were both sexy and tasteful. He developed an acute sense of colour, and a feeling for the weight and fall of particular fabrics.

But his own taste, both in dress and home furnishings, was a camp send- up of masculinity. During the war, serving with the Rifle Brigade in Italy and North Africa, he claimed to have advanced through enemy lines wearing a chiffon scarf and brandishing a copy of Vogue. It was a joke that he enacted, in one way or another, throughout his life. His suits - he bought up to 15 a year, costing pounds 2,000 each - were of macho military cut for day wear: padded shoulders, fitted waists and narrow trousers without turn-ups. His overcoats sometimes had two tapering rows of buttons, Hussar- style, emphasising the slim waist. But, crowned with a carnation, Watson, Fargerstrom and Hughes's tailoring achieved a pernickety dilettantism that was unmistakably feminine. In the evenings, he wore suits made of gay brocatelles, silk velvets and satins. At louche parties at Dundonnell, kilts were obligatory and Bunny revelled in the male/female double-take.

Among the Regency and Victorian architect-designed Gothic furniture from Addison Road is a pair of pine hall chairs with backs carved as a bull and a goat, symbols of rampant male sexuality - and a set of 12 ebonised chairs covered in cowhide by Elizabeth Eaton: rural rawhide transformed into closet camp.

The pictures in the sale are evidence of an intimate involvement with contemporary art and artists. There are two still lifes by Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987), whose work was bought cheaply by a small coterie of connoisseurs before the art market latched on to it. His Six Quinces is estimated at pounds 3,000-pounds 4,000, his Eight Pheasants' Eggs in Two Punnets, pounds 4,000-pounds 6,000. Hodgkin's meticulous photo-realism would have appealed to Bunny. But then, so would the broad, macho brushstrokes of Josef Herman (b1911), who gained fame by painting burly Welsh miners. Herman's Road to the Mountains is estimated pounds 800-pounds 1,200. Alan Roger supported the young Scottish artists William Maclean and James Hawkins.

That twilight world where the genders play tricks upon each another was a constant source of amusement for Bunny. When a taxi driver spotted him powdering his nose as he got out of his taxi and quipped, "You've dropped your diamond necklace, love!", Bunny retorted, quick as a flash: "Diamonds with tweeds? Never!"

The Roger Collection, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 28-30 January, 10.30am-2.30pm daily at Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1 (0171-293 5000)

 Neo - Edwardian Street fashion

Oxford Students 

TEDDY BOYS
 It is sometimes inaccurately written that the Teddy Boy style and phenomenon appeared in Britain during the mid 1950s as a rebellious side effect to the introduction of American Rock'n'Roll music. The Teddy Boy predates this and was a uniquely British phenomenon.

The subculture started in London in the early 1950s, and rapidly spread across the UK, then becoming strongly associated with rock and roll. Originally known as Cosh Boys, the name Teddy Boy was coined when a 1953 Daily Express newspaper headline shortened Edwardian to Teddy.

Wealthy young men, especially Guards officers, adopted the style of the Edwardian era. The Edwardian era had been just over 40 years earlier, and their grandparents, if not their parents, wore the style the first time around. The original Edwardian revival was far more historically accurate in terms of replicating the original Edwardian era style than the later Teddy Boy style. It featured tapered trousers, long jackets that bear a similarity to post-war American zoot suits and fancy waist coats.

There are differing accounts of where the Teddy Boy style actually started and the ensuing pattern of geographical expansion. Some writers[who?] maintain that the first Teds emerged in the East End and in North London, around Tottenham and Highbury, and from there they spread southwards, to Streatham, Battersea and Purley, and westwards, to Shepherd's Bush and Fulham, and then down to the seaside towns, and up into the Midlands until, by 1956, they had taken root all over Britain.There is however now more evidence to support the view that the working class Edwardian style and fashion actually started around the country at about the same time. Part of the reason that South London is seen as the birthplace of the working class Edwardian style is because the popular press of the day reported the emergence of the style. However, there are many reports of the style being adopted in other parts of the country in the early 1950s with young men wearing tighter than normal trousers, long jackets, 'brothel creeper' shoes and sporting Tony Curtis hairstyles.

In 1953, the major newspapers reported on the sweeping trend in men's fashion across all the towns of Britain, towards what was termed the New Edwardian look. However the working class Edwardian style had been on the street since at least 1951, because the style had been created on the street by the street and by working class teenagers and not by Saville Row or fashion designers such as Hardy Amies.

Although there had been youth groups with their own dress codes called scuttlers in 19th century Manchester and Liverpool, Teddy Boys were the first youth group in Britain to differentiate themselves as teenagers, helping create a youth market. The US film Blackboard Jungle marked a watershed in the United Kingdom. When shown in Elephant and Castle, south London in 1956, the teenage Teddy boy audience began to riot, tearing up seats and dancing in the cinema's aisles. After that, riots took place around the country wherever the film was shown.

Some Teds formed gangs and gained notoriety following violent clashes with rival gangs which were often exaggerated by the popular press. The most notable were the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, in which Teddy Boys were present in large numbers and were implicated in attacks on the West Indian community.The violent lifestyle was sensationalised in the pulp novel Teddy Boy by Ernest Ryman, first published in the UK in 1958.

Chanel: An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney / Coco Chanel: an Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney.mov

New Coco Chanel biography claims to have proof that fashion icon used drugs, had lesbian affairs and loved a Nazi spy

By Daisy Dumas

UPDATED: 08:21 GMT, 2 August 2011

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2021234/Coco-Chanel-biography-claims-used-drugs-lesbian-affairs-loved-Nazi.html

Coco Chanel's perfectly set hair, manicured hands, plucked eyebrows and hard stare are as recognisable as some of her enduring designs.

Less well known are allegations of drug use, Nazi dealings and even homophobia - something that contradicts the widespread acceptance of her lesbian relationships.

Now, a new book claims to have concrete proof of the fashion icon's dalliances and vices.

Lisa Chaney's forthcoming biography, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, lays bare hard evidence of the fashion maven's use of opiates, as well as new insights into Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's bisexuality, multiple affairs and love with a Nazi spy.

Penguin says: 'Drawing on newly discovered love letters and other records, Chaney's controversial book reveals the truth about Chanel's drug habit and lesbian affairs.

'And the question about Chanel's German lover during World War II (was he a spy for the Nazis?) is definitively answered.'

WWD goes one step further, saying the book is able to prove that the lover in question, Hans Günther von Dincklage, did indeed spy for the Nazis throughout the Second World War.

Quoting en email from Ms Chaney's Viking publicist, WWD cites: 'Whether Chanel was aware of this is unknown, but after that war she lived in neutral Switzerland for a while, to avoid any proceedings against her.'

In the book, due for release in November, Ms Chaney uses the newly discovered letters as well as documents from the Swiss Federal Archives to quell any doubt as to the truth of some of the less palatable aspects of Ms Chanel's colourful lifestyle.

Viking says of the 20th Century's most famous fashion designer: 'Her numerous liaisons, whose poignant and tragic details have eluded all previous biographers, were the very stuff of legend.

'Witty and mesmerizing, she became muse, patron, or mistress to the century's most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Dalí, and Stravinsky.'

Ms Chanel's infamous life has inspired many a graphic recounting of her rags-to-riches story.

The re-released biography, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie, which includes illustrations by Karl Lagerfeld, has drawn attention to Ms Chanel's reliance on opiates before, saying the designer saw morphine as a 'harmless sedative.'

Successful 2009 movie, Coco Before Chanel, drew criticism for playing down some of Ms Chanel's less savoury antics, while Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, also released in 2009, throws a spotlight onto the designer's love affair with the Russian composer.

Ms Chaney's version of a story oft misread is, no doubt, set to capture the attention of yet another generation of Chanel enthusiasts.

Chanel: An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney – review

Lisa Chaney has done much original research for her biography of Coco Chanel but chooses to ignore unpalatable truths about her subjec

Rachel Cooke

@msrachelcooke

Friday 23 September 2011 11.30 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2011/sep/23/coco-chanel-intimate-life-chaney

I have a hunch that Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel's latest biographer, must be suffering from an even greater dose than usual of pre-publication anxiety. Unfortunately for Chaney, her book stalks into the picture a mere eight weeks after Hal Vaughan's "controversial" Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, which suggested that the designer, already known to have been a "horizontal collaborator" during the second world war, was also a German spy (Abwehr agent F-7124, codenamed "Westminster" after her former lover, Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster). Are Vaughan's claims credible? I think they are. Apart from anything, he has paperwork to back them. For Chaney, who does not go so far – Chanel, she theorises, was a supreme pragmatist, but not, in the end, a traitor – this must have come as something of a blow.

Still, she can at least console herself with her own discoveries (and it is a wonder, when some 60 books have already been written about Coco Chanel, that there is anything left to find out). Chaney has seen a previously unknown cache of letters from Arthur "Boy" Capel, the English businessman who was the love of Chanel's life, and she is the first biographer to have had access to the diaries of Dmitri Pavlovich, another lover. In combination, these documents suggest that Chanel was not always the cold-hearted prune she later became; that she had her vulnerabilities. She adored Boy, and must have been, for all her modern views, agonised by his dithering – the extent of which is now fully clear – over the matter of whether he would marry an aristocratic English rose called Diana Wyndham. Pavlovich, the exiled "heir" to the Russian throne, usually gets short shrift in Chanel biographies, largely because the designer herself characterised him as a spoony young man with whom she went to bed only as a favour. Chaney, though, makes it clear that she needed and enjoyed his companionship; in 1919, Boy had been killed in a car crash, a blow from which Chanel was struggling to recover. Worth noting, too, is Chaney's discovery that Bel Respiro, the French country house bought by Chanel in 1920, was the same property that Boy had purchased for his new wife. I have always wondered about her grief at Capel's loss: was it just more role-playing? But this suggests that it was both real and extremely painful (Chaney says that in the months Coco spent living in this shrine, she was "half-cracked").

Elsewhere, though, we are on familiar ground. Gabrielle Chanel – she took the nickname "Coco" as a young woman from a song she liked to sing in a cafe patronised by cavalry officers – was born in 1883, illegitimate and poor, in the Loire. Her father, absent, was a market trader. Her mother died when she was 11, at which point Chanel was placed in a convent in Aubazine, Corrèze, where the nuns taught her to sew. Chaney is good on the early years – though she makes no connection between the garb of the nuns, and Chanel's famous palette of beige, black and white. In particular, it had not occurred to me before that Chanel would have grown up speaking patois – a fact that reminds you all over again how daring it was of her to promote unloved fabrics such as jersey, and cheap fur such as rabbit: a less self‑confident woman, once funds were available, would have been in thrall to silk and mink.

Ah, yes. Those funds. Chanel was a good businesswoman and as she moved from making hats to couture and then, finally, to jewellery and perfume, she amassed a pile of money. But in the beginning, she made good use of other people's fortunes. In Vichy, where she headed after leaving the convent, she met an ex-officer, Étienne Balsan, who installed her in his chateau as his mistress. Balsan introduced her to Boy, who helped her to finance her first shops (her triumphantly successful Deauville boutique opened in 1913). When Boy died, and following affairs with Stravinsky and Pavlovich, she took up with the Duke of Westminster, known as Bend'Or to his friends, the richest man in Britain. This relationship clearly worries Chaney. She refuses to believe that Bend'Or was a boor and a thicko, asking: "Why would she have associated herself with someone who was utterly obnoxious?" (Answer: women sleep with obnoxious men all the time.) She also omits to mention his well-documented antisemitism.

The author is just a little timid, too, about the second war (during the first, Chanel had cashed in, her new "practical" designs suddenly appealing). Having shut up the House of Chanel – though she cannily kept the perfume business going – Coco moved in to the Ritz, and took up with a German intelligence officer, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a charmer who had presciently divorced his half-Jewish wife shortly before the passing of the Nuremberg laws. Chaney carefully puts Chanel's convenient new relationship in context. Thousands of Frenchwomen, she says, took up with German soldiers during this period; in wartime, a girl does what she has to do. I think this is – up to a point – a fair argument. The difficulty in the case of Chanel was that, first, she was rich and famous enough not to need the protection of a German lover, and second, that she continued the relationship in Lausanne after the war.

So where, among the rows of Chanel books, does this one fit? I'm not sure. There is no doubting Chaney's tenacity as a researcher, and her attitude to the work comes as a relief: she admires it without ever making it seem – as fashion writers are apt breathlessly to do – more revolutionary than it was. (She notes that it was Poiret, not Chanel, who first suggested women ditch their corsets, and she makes the very good point that, ironically, most women needed a corset more than ever before if they were to get away with wearing Chanel's narrow, less structured frocks.) But there is something desultory about her narrative, and she sometimes struggles to say what she means. She also – a classic error, I think – mistakes taste for intelligence. Chanel was exceptionally chic, and as wily as a fox. But she was not a thinker, for all that I agree with her about miniskirts (yuck). Perhaps this is one reason why her conscience seemed hardly ever to trouble her – though as Chaney also reminds us, at the end of her life (she died in 1971) her sleepwalking was so bad, her staff would tie her to her bed. "I am not a heroine," Chanel told Paul Morand, the author of her famous "memoir", and I believe that on this matter, if nothing else, she was speaking from the heart.

We are getting there ! The perfect combination between high tech electric powered and the romantic retro ! / VIDEO below: Morgan EV3 #UK1909 Selfridges Edition

Intermezzo / "Remains of the day"

Andrew Sachs dies aged 86 / VIDEO below: Funny English Errors: Fawlty Towers' Top 10 Funniest Miscommunications

Andrew Sachs, the much loved Fawlty Towers actor, dies aged 86

Hannah Furness, arts correspondent

2 DECEMBER 2016 • 9:06AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/01/andrew-sachs-much-loved-fawlty-towers-actor-manuel-role-dies/

Andrew Sachs, the actor who rose to fame in Fawlty Towers has died at the age of 86 after a four year battle with dementia.

The actor, best known for playing hapless Spanish waiter Manuel in John Cleese's sitcom, passed away in a care home last week, his wife has revealed.

Melody Sachs, who cared for him in his final years, disclosed he had suffered vascular dementia, losing his capacity to speak and write in later life.

She said: "He had the best life, and the best death you could ever have."

Sachs won a place in the nation's hearts for his role in Fawlty Towers, where he played a clueless Spanish waiter who became the butt of John Cleese's jokes.

His catchphrase, "I know nothing", and Basil Fawlty's dismissive "He's from Barcelona" have gone down in British comedy history, with the 1970s sitcom regularly voted among the best-loved BBC programmes ever made.

Despite his stellar career, Sachs is remembered in recent years for being the innocent victim of a BBC furore in which presenters prank called him.

In 2008, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made an obscene calls to him in which they joked about Brand sleeping with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie.

More than 500 people protested to the BBC, which was forced to apologise to Sachs for these "unacceptable and offensive" remarks.

In 2014, Sachs said he remained "disgusted" by the incident, with his wife telling the Daily Mail the episode had been "absolutely horrific".

The newspaper last night reported the actor had been battling dementia for the past four years and died in a care home last week.

"My heart has been broken every day for a long time," she said, adding that the actor had remained positive to the end.

"I never once heard him grumble. It wasn’t all doom and gloom; he still worked for two years.

"We were happy, we were always laughing, we never had a dull moment. He had dementia for four years and we didn’t really notice it at first until the memory started going.

"It didn’t get really bad until quite near the end. I nursed Andrew, I was there for every moment of it."

Mrs Sachs said her husband had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2012. The disease, the second most common form of Alzheimer's, in characterised by the often sudden loss of language, speech and memory, along with mood changes.

Mrs Sachs said the actor only lost his capacity to speak in the last few weeks, after suffering three bouts of pneumonia. He spent eight months in a care home, in which his family would read to him and enjoy summer in the garden.

"Don’t feel sorry for me because I had the best life with him," Mrs Sachs said last night. "I had the best husband and we really loved each other.

"One thing about Andrew is that I never once heard him grumble, I never found him once without a smile on his face.

"We’re both as daft as brushes, we were married for 57 years. We loved each other very deeply and it was a pleasure looking after him. I miss him terribly."

His co-star Cleese paid tribute to him on Thursday night, saying: "Just heard about Andy Sachs. Very sad.... I knew he was having problems with his memory as his wife Melody told me a couple of years ago and I heard very recently that he had been admitted to Denham Hall, but I had no idea that his life was in danger.

"A very sweet gentle and kind man and a truly great farceur. I first saw him in Habeas Corpus on stage in 1973. I could not have found a better Manuel. Inspired."

"If you meet Andrew you would call him almost retiring, very quiet, almost academic, studiously polite," he said. "Then suddenly he clips on his moustache and something else in his personality just slips in."

Cleese, 77, the co-creator of the 1970s sitcom, told Radio 4's Today programme on Friday he was in "a little bit of shock" by the news.

He said acting with Sachs was "like playing tennis with someone who is exactly as good as you are".

"Sometimes he wins and sometimes you win but somehow there's a rapport and it comes from the very deepest part of ourselves. You can work on it, but in our case we never had to work on it, it all happened so easily."

Cleese added that Sachs "turned into a completely different human being" when wearing his familiar Manuel moustache.

Asked of his favourite scene with Sachs in Fawlty Towers, Cleese told Today it had been The Kipper and the Corpse - episode four of the second series of the hit comedy.

"I think that was some of our very best physical comedy and working out all that stuff like getting the body into the basket and getting it out again I think that was so much fun.

"Occasionally you come across someone who loves physical comedy and although he was such a quiet demeanour, Andy absolutely loved it. "He was wonderful."

Cleese said he last saw Sachs "eight or nine months ago" when they were being photographed together.

He said he realised then he "wasn't totally present" but added the news of his death was "a little bit of a shock".

"Although I knew his memory was not so good, despite that he was very special."

Born in 1930 Germany, Sachs fled the Nazis with his family in 1938 and eventually settled in North London.

He married Melody, who starred in one episode of Fawlty Towers herself, in 1960, going on to have three children.

Beginning his acting career on BBC radio, he went on to appear in The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk and The History of Miss Polly, with guest appearance in Casualty and Doctor Who.

He worked into his 80s, when he appeared in a live tour of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

The actor died on November 23, the Daily Mail reported, with family and close friends commemorating him in North London yesterday.

Blackadder actor and comedian Sir Tony Robinson paid tribute to his "true friend".

He wrote on Twitter: "So sad that Andrew Sachs has died. A true friend and a kindred spirit. I still have the wonderful baby pictures he took of my children. RIP."

Samuel West, whose mother Prunella Scales starred alongside Sachs in Fawlty Towers, added: "Creator of one of our most beloved EU migrants. Such warmth and wit; impossible to think of him without smiling."

Comedy writer Edgar Wright said Sachs "spun comic gold as Manuel in Fawlty Towers".

Andrew Sachs discusses "Fawlty Towers"