The Towers of Trebizond was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness

I'm an admirer of Rose Macaulay's writing, and wouldn't share the critical judgement in this old London Review of Books article by Claire Harman. Still it does contain an irresistible trivial fact and a good joke at her expense:

Perhaps The Towers of Trebizond is the only one of Macaulay’s 23 novels in which a satisfactory balance between style and content is achieved. A charming detail is that this cosmopolitan story was partly written at Butlin’s in Skegness, where she had taken Gerald O’Donovan’s granddaughters for a holiday. 

Macaulay was not a snob, though she was taken up by snobs all her life, and relished a very active social life. Macaulay’s greatest claim to fame was the most perishable: she was a ‘golden talker’, valued by literary hostesses from her first appearance in print onward, and described by Naomi Royde-Smith in terms equally applicable to a patent corkscrew, ‘welcome at any dinner table, invaluable at weekends’.

So irresistible that it's our Trivial Fact of the Day.

The Joy of Six 1396

"Opportunities to object are limited. Roadblocks and checkpoints have been established at either end of the only lane in and out of the village. Cars are searched with sniffer dogs and ID demanded. All footpaths have been closed off, and unless you live here you stand no chance of getting in. Secret Service agents keep a watchful eye on the hordes of police who are doing their bidding. In short, we’ve been completely sealed off from the outside world." An anonymous contributor to The Oxford Clarion describes life in the Cotswold village of Dean during JD Vance's visit.

Shaun Thompson was wrongly identified as a criminal by new police cameras. He explains why, if this technology is rolled out across the country, or is used at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, as planned, such injustices will disproportionately affect Black people.

"Climate action does not just need good policy, it also needs good psychology. Understanding and addressing how people perceive climate measures is essential to avoid backlash and build lasting public consent." Wouter Poortinga looks at the psychology of winning public support for climate policies.

"The conference circuit, once lively with questioning and dialogue, now contends with a new problem: the 'ghost academic'. These are scholars whose names appear in conference programmes and proceedings, whose abstracts are listed, yet who never turn up to deliver their presentations. They accrue the CV line, but never share the substance." Anne Tierney and Doug Specht say the obsession with metrics in academia is imperilling the tradition open intellectual exchange that was the hallmark of scholarly life.

JacquiWine on Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness. Here is Macaulay's description of a London bombsite: "They climbed out through the window, and made their way about the ruined, jungled waste, walking along broken lines of wall, diving into the cellars and caves of the underground city, where opulent merchants had once stored their wine, where gaily tiled rooms opened into one another and burrowed under great eaves of overhanging earth, where fosses and ditches ran, bright with marigolds and choked with thistles, through one-time halls of commerce, and yellow ragwort waved its gaudy banners over the ruins of defeated businessmen."

Patrick Glen looks back to the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970: "The lineup included the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone and Gilberto Gil; Jimi Hendrix played one of his last performances before his death."

The Victorian age and the 1950s both took place in colour

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One of the best things about subscribing to the London Review of Books is that it grants you access to the magazine's archives. So it was that I was reading a book review by Jonathan Meades from 2018.

I've not read the book he is discussing – The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain by Lynda Nead – a lot of caveats apply to this post. And I'm pleased to see it has a photograph of St Saviour's Road, Leicester, on its dust wrapper. It's the same photo you see above.

Meades writes:

In The Tiger in the Smoke, fog and smog are ubiquitous. They are past and present, a continuum from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them­.... The 'characteristic colour' she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown.

He questions whether this is an adequate account of Victorian Britain, suspecting that Nead has been too influenced by Dickens and his fog, when in reality:

He lived in an age of polychromatic brickwork, dazzlingly bright inflammable crinolines, gilded smoking rooms, saturated ottomans, luminous painting, garish advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s 'rank growth'.

And I am going to question the book's account of the post-war era, at least as it is seen in this snippet on audience reaction to David Lean's Great Expectations that Meades quotes:

'What,' she wonders, 'did this fabulous cinematography mean to postwar audiences and how did it relate to the greyscale aesthetics of the fog and the bombsites?'

But bombsites weren't grey. Here's J.K. Adams writing the Guardian's Country Diary for 1 September 1948:

A gentle breeze was blowing as I walked through the badly bombed Cripplegate area of London the other day, and the feathery seeds of the rosebay willowherb were drifting before it like snowflakes. In the basements of what seven or eight years ago were shops, warehouses, and dwellings a waist-high tangle of willowherb, spear-plume thistle, and Oxford ragwort bore witness to the thoroughness with which nature reclaims the land as soon as man’s back is turned. More than that, here and there were birches and elders and various sorts of willow that had grown to a height that fully entitled them to be called trees.

It may have been a far cry to the complete return to nature envisaged by Richard Jefferies in After London, but the germ of that great reversion, one felt, was there. Even the birds have begun to return to this as to other parts of London that have gone wild. Within the past two years a linnet and both pied and grey wagtails have been seen there, and at migration time in 1946 three birds on passage looked in – a whitethroat, a wheatear, and a whinchat. Even more remarkable was the visit paid by a little owl during the autumn of that year.

Or to make it sound more exotic, here is Lucy Scholes writing about Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

I suspect London bombsites became less exotic as they were gradually cleared for redevelopment, but I still think of them as a home to lush vegetation and providing unexpected new vistas of Italianate churches.

Let's finish by going back to Victorian polychromatic brickwork. Here's something else I've found recently - a charity-shop copy of Nairn's London. In it, Ian Nairn writes of All Saints, Margaret Street:

To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. 

I'm not sure that it advances my argument, but I really want to quote it.

The Joy of Six 1349

"Kennedy has already indicated what he expects the 'findings' to be: that vaccines did it, even though all legitimate science shows that is false. To make sure no real science accidentally happens, he has put a non-scientist/non-doctor in charge of this non-study: David Geier, a man who has been fined for practicing medicine without a license. Worse, his 'treatments' of children are better described as pointless torture." Amanda Marcotte says RFK's pledge to discover the cause of autism isn't just a ploy: it's a war on children's health.

Viv Griffiths reports on the widespread support among MPs for rejoining the customs union and single market: "Lib Dem Paul Kohler summed up well the frustration and anger expressed by many others: 'The Tories' botched Brexit deal has been a disaster for our country… The Conservative government wrecked our relationship with the EU and the new Labour government refuse to take the necessary steps to repair it.'"

The Atlantic says dark times call for dark humour.

Over the years, scholars have turned to Monty Python and the Holy Grail to explore how the Middle Ages are portrayed - and parodied - in modern culture. Its lasting influence can be seen in classrooms, academic journals and discussions of medievalism. David D. Day offers a list of 10 open-access articles you can read that examine its legacy from multiple angles.

Chelsea won the Football League title in 1954/5 and should have been the first English club to play in the European Cup. As Tim Rolls explains, the men in blazers stopped them.

Helen Parry reviews Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu: "It is a sort of detective story, the piecing together of Macaulay and her life from scraps of paper and faded photographs, and a ghost story, pursuing an insubstantial version of someone who has long gone."

By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite

I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.

Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.

As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.

Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.

The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.

But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.

The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.

What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:

This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.

The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.

And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.

Invasion of the buddleias: When did it take place?

Since writing this, I have done what I should have done first and had a search in the British Newspaper Archive. It turns out there are plenty of wartime references to buddleias on bombsites. A second blog post will follow.

When did the buddleia invade England? I'm complicit in the invasion myself: I planted one because I like butterflies, but there are depressingly few of those to be seen now.

Buddleias, however, are everywhere, including places they shouldn't be - you often see them growing out of the masonry of neglected buildings. And they are everywhere on old railway land because the ballast resembles the riverside gravel where they grow in China.

But you never see buddleias mentioned in accounts of world war II bombsites. Here is a Guardian country diary from August 1946:

Many people in certain busy parts of London have recently looked about them in surprise at what at first appeared to be snowflakes drifting down before the breeze. 

But when the “snowflakes” settled on sleeves or hats they were found to be the small parachute-like seed-carriers of the rosebay willow herb, which grows so profusely on any waste ground and particularly favours the bomb-scarred areas of the City of London. 

A few days ago these dreary spaces were for a brief time magnificently clothed in rosy purple and here and there in gold where the Oxford rag-wort blooms. But now the beauty is fading and millions of seeds are being scattered far and wide by the wind.

No buddleias there, nor in this account of the exotic spaces the bombsites became from an essay on Rose Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

So the invasion of the buddleias appears to be a post-war phenomenon, but when exactly did it take place?

Post-war London as an exotic city: The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay

The great novel of London's bombsites just after the war is Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness. I read it years ago and recently bought a copy, which is now on my pile of books to read.

Luckily, you don't have to wait for me, as I've found an essay on the novel by Lucy Scholes for The Paris Review.

The novel opens in France in 1946, where 17-year-old Barbary and her younger step-brother Raul have grown wild from running with the Maquis. Their mother decides to send them to live, separately, with relations in London in an attempt to civilise them.

Scholes describes what happens next:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven: "It had familiarity, as of a place long known; it had the clear, dark logic of a dream; it made a lunatic sense, as the unshattered streets and squares did not; it was the country that one’s soul recognised and knew."

Barbary and Raoul swear their loyalty to fringe groups - first the Maquis in Provence, then the ragtag band of deserters, thieves, and black marketers they meet in London. They are united by their refusal to adhere to convention, law, and order. In the novel, tradition is juxtaposed with modernity. The annihilation of Barbary and Raoul’s childish innocence, and of society’s outdated Victorian sensibilities, is shown alongside the destruction of culture and civilization that the war has wrought. 

It is the exotic landscape I remember most from The World My Wilderness. We are told that London after the war was grey and miserable, but here the city has lush vegetation at its heart and new vistas of Italianate churches opened up by enemy bombing.

Don't wait for me: read the book yourself.

The All Saints, Margaret Street, Corpus Christi procession of 1959

All Saints, Margaret Street, which I have blogged about before, is so High it makes the Pope look like a Strict Baptist.

This silent video shows its Corpus Christi procession of 1959. Anglican nuns, women members of the congregation with their heads covered, choirboys in buckled shoes and God knows who else process a couple of blocks north of the department stores of Oxford Street.

It's Barbara Pym or The Towers of Trebizond come to life.

Malcolm Saville meets T.S. Eliot

On 3 May 1943 the Daily News reported:

Soho has a Mission to the Intelligentsia

What is described as "a kind of mission centre for the intelligentsia" is to be opened by the Bishop of London in Soho this week. 

Its quarters will be in St. Anne's House. Dean Street, the parish house of the famous church of St. Anne's. Soho. destroyed by enemy action. 

Two wardens. the Rev. Patrick McLaughlin and the Rev. Gilbert Shaw. have been appointed, available for interviews and inquiries. Meetings and discussions with well-known speakers are being arranged, dealing with religion. literature, drama and the arts generally. films. Journalism and broadcasting.

In this work the wardens are being assisted by a committee of the laity. Including Mr. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Maurice Reckitt. Mr. Charles Peake, Mr. Malcolm Saville, Mr Percy Rugg. the Baroness Ravensdale and Miss Helena Charles.

Malcolm Saville and T.S. Eliot? I've not heard of Saville moving in such circles before, though I believe he was a friend of Dorothy L. Sayers. The plot of his The Secret of the Gorge owes a lot to Sayers' The Nine Tailors.

Wikipedia tells us that St Anne's, Soho, was eventually rebuilt and also discusses the St Anne Society, which must be what the Daily News is talking about.

Though Saville does not get a mention there, many other names do besides Eliot. Among them are Charles Williams, Agatha Christie, Arnold Bennett, C.S. Lewis and Rose Macaulay.

The last named, a favourite writer of mine, was a churchwarden of St Anne's. And the website for St Anne's says Sayers was too.

During the war Malcolm Saville combined a day job as author and publicist with night-time duties as a fire warden. His wife and children had been evacuated to Shropshire, which inspired his first children's book Mystery at Witchend.