Bloomsbury : The Clapham Sect.

The Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints were a group of Church of England social reformers based in Clapham, London at the beginning of the 19th century (active c. 1790–1830). They are described by the historian Stephen Tomkins as “a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its centre of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage”.^‪

Campaigns and successes

Its members were chiefly prominent and wealthy evangelical Anglicans who shared common political views concerning the liberation of slaves, the abolition of the slave trade and the reform of the penal system.

The group’s name originates from those attending Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common, an area south-west of London then surrounded by fashionable villas. Henry Venn the founder was curate at Holy Trinity (1754) and his son John became rector (1792-1813). Wilberforce and Thornton, two of the group’s most influential leaders, resided nearby and many of the meetings were held in their houses. They were supported by Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, who sympathised with many of their aims. The term “Clapham Sect” was a later invention by James Stephen in an article of 1844 which celebrated and romanticised the work of these reformers. In their own time the group used no particular name, but they were lampooned by outsiders as “the saints”.

The group published a journal, the Christian Observer, edited by Zachary Macaulay and were also credited with the foundation of several missionary and tract societies, including the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society.

They founded Freetown in Sierra Leone, the first major British colony in Africa, whose purpose in Thomas Clarkson’s words was “the abolition of the slave trade, the civilisation of Africa, and the introduction of the gospel there”.^‪

After many decades of work both in British society and in Parliament, the group saw their efforts rewarded with the final passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, banning the trade throughout the British Empire and, after many further years of campaigning, the total emancipation of British slaves with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. They also campaigned vigorously for Britain to use its influence to eradicate slavery throughout the world.

Other societies that they founded or were involved with included the Anti-Slavery Society, the Abolition Society, the Proclamation Society, the Sunday School Society, the Bettering Society, and the Small Debt Society.

The Clapham Sect have been credited with playing a significant part in the development of Victorian morality, through their writings, their societies, their influence in Parliament and their example in philanthropy and moral campaigns, especially against slavery. In the words of Tomkins, “The ethos of Clapham became the spirit of the age.”^‪

Members

Members of the Clapham Sect included:

• Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845), MP and brewer
• William Dealtry (1775–1847), Rector of Clapham, mathematician
• Edward James Eliot (1758–97), parliamentarian
• Thomas Gisbourne (1758–1846), cleric and author
• Charles Grant (1746–1823), administrator, chairman of the directors of the British East India Company, father of the first Lord Glenelg
• Katherine Hankey (1834–1911), evangelist
• Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838), estate manager, colonial governor, father of Thomas Babington Macaulay
• Hannah More (1745–1833), writer and philanthropist
• Granville Sharp (1735–1813), scholar and administrator
• Charles Simeon (1759–1836), Anglican cleric, promoter of missions
• James Stephen (1758–1832), Master of Chancery, great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf.
• Lord Teignmouth (1751–1834), Governor-General of India
• Henry Thornton (1760–1815), economist, banker, philanthropist, MP for Southwark, great-grandfather of writer M. Forster
• Henry Venn (1725–97), founder of the group, father of John Venn (1759–1813) and great-grandfather of John Venn (originator of the Venn diagram)
• John Venn (1759-1813), Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Clapham
• William Wilberforce (1759–1833), MP successively for Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire and Bramber, leading abolitionist
• William Smith (1756-1835), MP.

Bloomsbury : John Maynard Keynes.

by Unknown photographer, bromide print, 1933

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes,^‪ CB, FBA (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and the founder of modern macroeconomics.‬ His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics and its various offshoots.

In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. According to Keynesian economics, state intervention was necessary to moderate “boom and bust” cycles of economic activity.^‪ Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes’ ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. In 1942, Keynes was awarded a hereditary peerage as Baron Keynes of Tilton in the County of Sussex.^‪‬ Keynes died in 1946; but, during the 1950s and 1960s, the success of Keynesian economics resulted in almost all capitalist governments adopting its policy recommendations.

Keynes’s influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of problems with inflation that began to afflict the Anglo-American economies from the start of the decade and partly because of critiques from Milton Friedman and other economists who were pessimistic about the ability of governments to regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy.^‪‬ However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–08 caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.^‪

In 1999, Time magazine included Keynes in their list of the 100 most important and influential people of the 20th century, commenting that: “His radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.”^‪ He has been described by The Economist as “Britain’s most famous 20th-century economist.” In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals,^‪‬ a patron of the arts and an art collector, a director of the British Eugenics Society, an advisor to several charitable trusts, a successful private investor, a writer, a philosopher, and a farmer.

Keynes’s early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men.^‪‬ Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan.^‪ Keynes was open about his affairs, and between 1901 to 1915, kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters.^‪‬ Keynes’s relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortuitous, as Macmillan’s company first published his tract, Economic Consequences of the Peace.^‪‬

Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: “since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common”, wrote Bertrand Russell.^‪The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes’s great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey,^‪‬ though they were for the most part love rivals, and not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse,^‪‬ as well as Grant, both times falling out with a jealous Strachey for it.^‪ Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of “treat[ing] his love affairs statistically”.^‪

Political opponents have used Keynes’ sexuality to attack his academic work.^‪ One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.^‪

Keynes’ friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began dating and pursuing affairs with women,^‪‬ demonstrating himself to be bisexual.^‪‬ Ray Costelloe (who would later marry Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes.^‪ In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, “I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn’t male I haven’t [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take.”^‪

Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college,^‪ and at Bretton Woods he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal, beginning during negotiations for an Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as “absolute hell”.^‪‬ A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946 at the age of 62.^‪

Both of Keynes’s parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes’s brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010) (a physiologist) and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003) (an adventurer and bibliophile). His widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981. Keynes had no children.

People : Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey……. Top To His Friends

Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey Bt, (16 June 1875 – 14 March 1905), styled Lord Paget until 1880 and Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898, and nicknamed “Toppy”, was a British Peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. Regarded as the “black sheep” of the family, he was dubbed “the dancing marquess” for his habit of performing “sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances”.

The Complete Peerage says that he “seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, ‘foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.’

Family background
Paget was the eldest son of the 4th Marquess by his father’s second wife, Blanche Mary Boyd. However, rumours persisted that his biological father was the French actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin, a rumour that gained some currency when, according to some sources, after the death of his mother in 1877, when he was two years old, Paget reportedly was raised by Coquelin’s sister-in-law in Paris until he was eight. That story seems to have been a confusion of facts. The sister-in-law, née Edith Marion Boyd, was the fourth marquess’s aunt, one of his mother’s sisters, and she did not wed Coquelin’s brother Gustave until 1891. His stepmother from 1880 was an American, Mary “Minna” Livingston King, the widow of the Hon. Henry Wodehouse.

He attended Eton College, later receiving private tuition, and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. On 20 January 1898 he married his cousin Lilian Florence Maud Chetwynd (1876—1962). Upon the death of his father on 13 October 1898, he inherited his title and the family estates with about 30,000 acres (120 km²) in Staffordshire, Dorset, Anglesey and Derbyshire, providing an annual income of £110,000 (equivalent to £11 million per year in 2014).

Lifestyle
Paget swiftly acquired a reputation for a lavish and spendthrift manner of living. He used his money to buy jewellery and furs, and to throw extravagant parties and flamboyant theatrical performances. He converted the chapel at the family’s country seat of Plas Newydd, Anglesey, into a 150-seat theatre, named the Gaiety Theatre. Here he took the lead role, opulently costumed, in productions ranging from pantomime and comedy to performances of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and Shakespeare’s Henry V. For three years he took his company on tour around Britain and Europe. His wife disapproved of his lifestyle and obtained a decree nisi of divorce on 7 November 1900; it was later annulled due to nonconsummation, according to Lady Anglesey’s grandson by her second marriage, the historian Christopher Simon Sykes. The breakdown of his marriage effectively gave Paget more freedom to enjoy his self-indulgent lifestyle. By this stage he had already begun to mortgage his estates to raise money.

Theft
On 10 September 1901, Paget’s French valet Julian Gault took the opportunity of his employer’s absence at the theatre to steal jewellery to the value of £50,000. At the time, Paget was living in the Walsingham House Hotel in London. Gault, who was later arrested at Dover, testified in court that he had been instructed to steal the jewels by a French woman of his acquaintance called Mathilde (who had taken the jewels to France and was never found). Although Gault’s testimony was believed to be true, he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey on 22 October and was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Sexuality
Paget’s outrageous and flamboyant lifestyle, his taste for cross-dressing, and the breakdown of his marriage, have led many to assume that he was gay. Writing in 1970, the homosexual reformer H. Montgomery Hyde characterised him as “the most notorious aristocratic homosexual at this period”. There is no evidence for or against his having had any lovers of either sex – performance historian Viv Gardner believes that he was “a classic narcissist: the only person he could love and make love to was himself, because, for whatever reason, he was ‘unlovable'”. The deliberate destruction by his family of those of his papers that might have settled this matter has left any assessment speculative. The only certainty is that he did not have sexual relations with his wife who initially left him after just six weeks – “The closest the marriage ever came to consummation was that he would make her pose naked covered top to bottom in jewels and she had to sleep wearing the jewels..”

Financial trouble and death
By 1904, despite his inheritance and income, Paget had accumulated debts of £544,000 (£50 million in 2014)[3] and on 11 June was declared bankrupt. His lavish wardrobe, particularly his dressing gowns from Charvet, and jewels were sold to pay creditors, the jewels alone realising £80,000.

In 1905, Paget died in Monte Carlo following a long illness, with his ex-wife by his side, and his remains were returned to St Edwen’s Church, Llanedwen, for burial. The Times reported that despite all that was known of him, he remained much liked by the people of Bangor, who were sorry to hear of his death. Lilian, Marchioness of Anglesey, married, in 1909, John Francis Grey Gilliat, a banker, by whom she had three children.

The title passed to his cousin Charles Henry Alexander Paget, who destroyed all the papers of the 5th Marquess and converted the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel. It was at least in part owing to the debts left by the 5th Marquess that the family’s principal English estate at Beaudesert, Staffordshire, had to be broken up and sold in the 1930s.

Highclere Castle : The True Home Of Downton Abbey … And A Capability Brown Landscape To Boot

Highclere Castle is a country house in the Jacobethan style, with a park designed by Capability Brown. The 5,000-acre (2,000 ha) estate is in Hampshire, England, United Kingdom, about 5 miles (8.0 km) south of Newbury, Berkshire. It is the country seat of the Earl of Carnarvon, a branch of the Anglo-Welsh Herbert family.

Highclere Castle is the main filming location for the British television period drama Downton Abbey. The Castle and gardens are open to the public during July and August and at times during the rest of the year.

History

Early years

The castle stands on the site of an earlier house, which was built on the foundations of the medieval palace of the Bishops of Winchester, who owned this estate from the 8th century. The original site was recorded in the Domesday Book. Since 1679, the castle has been home to the Earls of Carnarvon.

In 1692, Robert Sawyer, a lawyer and college friend of Samuel Pepys, bequeathed a mansion at Highclere to his only daughter, Margaret, the first wife of the 8th Earl of Pembroke. Their second son, Robert Sawyer Herbert, inherited Highclere, began its picture collection and created the garden temples. His nephew and heir Henry Herbert was created Baron Porchester and later Earl of Carnarvon by George III.

19th century

The house was then a square, classical mansion, but it was remodelled and largely rebuilt for the third Earl following a design by Sir Charles Barry in 1839–1842, after he had finished with the construction of the Houses of Parliament. It is in the Jacobethan style and faced in Bath stone, reflecting the Victorian revival of English architecture of the late 16th century and early 17th century, when Tudor architecture was being challenged by newly arrived Renaissance influences.

During the 19th century there was a huge Renaissance Revival movement, of which Sir Charles Barry was a great exponent—Barry described the style of Highclere as Anglo-Italian. Barry had been inspired to become an architect by the Renaissance architecture of Italy and was very proficient at working in the Renaissance-based style that became known in the 19th century as Italianate architecture. At Highclere, however, he worked in the Jacobethan style, but added to it some of the motifs of the Italianate style. This is particularly noticeable in the towers, which are slimmer and more refined than those of Mentmore Towers, the other great Jacobethan house built in the same era. Barry produced an alternative design in a more purely Italian Renaissance style, which was rejected by Lord Carnarvon. The external walls are decorated with strapwork designs typical of Northern European Renaissance architecture. The Italian Renaissance theme is more evident in the interiors. In the saloon, in an attempt to resemble a medieval English great hall, Barry’s assistant Thomas Allom introduced a Gothic influence evident in the points rather than curves of the arches, and the mock-hammerbeam roof.

Although the exterior of the north, east and south sides were completed before the 3rd Earl died in 1849 and Sir Charles Barry died in 1860, the interior and the west wing (designated as servants’ quarters) were far from complete. The 4th Earl turned to the architect Thomas Allom, who had worked with Barry, to supervise work on the interior of the Castle, which was completed in 1878.

The 1st Earl had his park laid out according to a design by Capability Brown in 1774–1777, relocating the village in the process—the remains of the church of 1689 are at the south-west corner of the castle. The Lebanon Cedars are believed to be descended from seed brought to England from the Lebanon by the 17th-century seed collector Edward Pococke.

20th century

The castle became home to Egyptian artifacts after the 5th Earl, an enthusiastic amateur Egyptologist, sponsored the excavation of nobles’ tombs in Deir el-Bahari (Thebes) in 1907. He later accompanied archaeologist Howard Carter during the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.

In 1969, Henry Herbert, 7th Earl of Carnarvon, became racing manager to Elizabeth II. The 7th Earl was “great friends” with the Queen; she was a “frequent visitor until his death in 2001”.

21st century

By 2009, the castle was in dire need of major repair, with only the ground and first floors remaining usable. Water damage had caused stonework to crumble and ceilings to collapse; at least 50 rooms were uninhabitable. The 8th Earl and his family were living in a “modest cottage in the grounds”; he said his ancestors were responsible for the castle’s long term problems.” As of 2009, repairs needed for the entire estate were estimated to cost around £12 million, £1.8 million of which was urgently needed for just the castle. As of late 2012, the Earl and Lady Carnarvon have stated that a dramatic increase in the number of paying visitors has allowed them to begin major repairs both on Highclere’s turrets and its interior. The family attributes this increase in interest to the on-site filming of Downton Abbey. The family now live in Highclere during the winter months, but return to their cottage in the summer, when the castle is open to the public.

Details

There are various follies on the estate. To the east of the house is the Temple of Diana, erected before 1743 with Corinthian columns from Devonshire House in Piccadilly.”Heaven’s Gate” is a folly about 18 m high on Sidown Hill, built in 1749 by Hon. Robert Sawyer Herbert (d. 1769). Other 18th-Century follies that can be found on the grounds of the estate include Jackdaw’s Castle and the Etruscan Temple.

The hybrid holly Ilex x altaclerensis (Highclere holly) was developed here in about 1835 by hybridising the Madeiran Ilex perado (grown in a greenhouse) with the local native Ilex aquifolium.

Use as location

• 1982: It was seen as the home of a wealthy Englishman that Mr. Fortescue visited seeking money in the 1982 film starring Michael Palin, The Missionary. The castle exterior appears about 19 minutes and 30 seconds into the film.
• 1987: Shots from both the interior and exterior were used as the imposing Mistlethwaite Manor in the Hallmark Hall of Fame’s 1987 version of The Secret Garden.
• 1990–1993: Totleigh Towers, in the TV version of Jeeves and Wooster, was represented by Highclere Castle.
• 1991: The exterior appeared as Lord Graves’s house in the film King Ralph.
• 1992: It was portrayed as the home of the 23rd Earl of Leete in Jim Broadbent and Mike Leigh’s 1992 mock biopic A Sense of History.
• 1999: The salon provided a main interior location for Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
• 2001: The exterior appeared as the Raichand mansion in the Bollywood blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.
• 2002: The saloon appeared in the film The Four Feathers starring Heath Ledger.
• 2006: John Legend’s 2006 music video for “Heaven Only Knows” features the castle.
• 2010: The Temple of Diana featured in the movie Pride and Prejudice.
• 2010–present: It is the main setting for the British television period drama Downton Abbey, as a result of which The Tatler referred to the area around Highclere as “Downtonia”

People : DDDD Deborah The Dowager Duchess Of Devonshire, Gardener On A Scale Like No Other…

Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire DCVO (née Deborah Freeman-Mitford; 31 March 1920 – 24 September 2014), was the youngest and last surviving of the six Mitford sisters who were prominent members of English society in the 1930s and 1940s.

Life

Known to her family as “Debo”, Deborah Mitford was born in Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, England. She married Lord Andrew Cavendish, younger son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, in 1941. When Cavendish’s older brother, William, Marquess of Hartington, was killed in combat in 1944, Cavendish became heir to the dukedom and Marquess of Hartington; in 1950, upon the death of his father, he became the 11th Duke of Devonshire.

The Duchess was the main public face of Chatsworth for many decades. The Duchess wrote several books about Chatsworth, and played a key role in the restoration of the house, the enhancement of the garden and the development of commercial activities such as Chatsworth Farm Shop (which is on a quite different scale from most farm shops as it employs a hundred people); Chatsworth’s other retail and catering operations; and assorted offshoots such as Chatsworth Food, which sells luxury foodstuffs which carry her signature and Chatsworth Design which sells image rights to items and designs from the Chatsworth collections. Recognising the commercial imperatives of running a stately home, she took a very active role and was known to run the ticket office for Chatsworth House herself. She also supervised the development of the Cavendish Hotel at Baslow near Chatsworth and the Devonshire Arms Hotel at Bolton Abbey.

In 1999 the Duchess was appointed a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) by Queen Elizabeth II, for her service to the Royal Collection Trust. Upon the death of her husband in 2004, her son Peregrine Cavendish became the 12th Duke of Devonshire. She became the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire at this time.

She and the duke had seven children, four of whom died shortly after birth:

• Mark Cavendish (born and died 14 November 1941)
• Emma Cavendish (born 26 March 1943, styled Lady Emma Cavendish from 1944), mother of the fashion model Stella Tennant
• Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire (born 27 April 1944)
• An unnamed child (miscarried December 1946; he or she was a twin of Victor Cavendish, born in 1947)
• Lord Victor Cavendish (born and died 22 May 1947)
• Lady Mary Cavendish (born and died 5 April 1953)
• Lady Sophia Louise Sydney Cavendish (born 18 March 1957)

She was also a maternal aunt of Max Mosley, former president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), as well as the grandmother of Stella Tennant, a fashion model.

Death

Her death, at the age of 94, was announced on 24 September 2014. The Duchess was survived by three of her seven children, eight grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren.

Selected interviews

She was interviewed on her experience of sitting for a portrait for painter Lucian Freud in the BBC series Imagine in 2004.

In an interview with John Preston of the Daily Telegraph, published in September 2007, she recounted having tea with Adolf Hitler during a visit to Munich in June 1937, when she was visiting Germany with her mother and her sister Unity, the latter being the only one of the three who spoke German and, therefore the one who carried on the entire conversation with Hitler. Shortly before ending the interview, Preston asked her to choose with whom she would have preferred to have tea: American singer Elvis Presley or Hitler. Looking at the interviewer with astonishment, she answered: “Well, Elvis of course! What an extraordinary question.”

In 2010, the BBC journalist Kirsty Wark interviewed the Duchess for Newsnight. In it, the Duchess talked about life in the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler, the Chatsworth estate, and the marginalisation of the upper classes. She was also interviewed on 23 December by Charlie Rose for PBS. She spoke of her memoir and other interesting aspects of her life. On 10 November 2010, she was interviewed as part of “The Artists, Poets, and Writers Lecture Series” sponsored by the Frick Collection, an interview which focused on her memoir and her published correspondence with Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Titles from birth

• The Honourable Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford (1920–1941)
• The Lady Andrew Cavendish (1941–1944)
• Marchioness of Hartington (1944–1950)
• Her Grace The Duchess of Devonshire (1950–2004)
• Her Grace The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (2004-2014)

Plant Hunters : Tom Hart – Dyke, Young Inspirational Man on a Mission….. His Story Would Make For an Exceptional Film…..

Thomas Guy Hart Dyke (born 12 April 1976) is an English horticulturist and plant hunter. He is the son and heir of Guy and Sarah Hart Dyke at the family seat of Lullingstone Castle, Eynsford, Kent. He is the designer of the World Garden of Plants located on the property. The World Garden contains approximately 8,000 species of plants, many collected by Hart Dyke from their native environments. He presented an episode of Great British Garden Revival in 2013.

Early life and education

Hart Dyke attended a state primary school in Eynsford and then transferred to St. Michael’s School in Otford. He attended Stanbridge Earls in Hampshire until age seventeen and then entered Sparsholt College Hampshire, near Winchester, where he studied tree surgery and forestry.

In an interview in 2006, Hart Dyke credits his grandmother as having first interested him in plants at age three.

Tom Hart Dyke is first cousin of the English comedian Miranda Hart.

Kidnapping

Hart Dyke follows a tradition of Victorian and Edwardian British plant hunters, such as Francis Masson, who risked life and limb to acquire rare species of plant. In 2000, Hart Dyke was kidnapped by suspected FARC guerrillas in the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia while hunting for rare orchids, a plant for which he has a particular passion.

He and his travel companion, Paul Winder, were held captive for nine months and threatened with death. He kept himself going by creating a design for a garden containing plants collected on his trips, laid out in the shape of a world map according to their continent of origin.

Tom wrote about his experiences in Colombia in his book, The Cloud Garden. The story of his kidnapping ordeal was dramatised in the Sky1 documentary series “My Holiday Hostage Hell”.

World Garden of Plants

On his return home, Hart Dyke put his design into practice within the walls of the family’s Victorian herb garden. The story of the creation of The World Garden of Plants was the subject of a BBC2 6-episode series, “Save Lullingstone Castle” (KEO Films) in 2006. This was followed by a second 6-episode series, “Return To Lullingstone Castle” on BBC2 in 2007.

In May 2006, Hart Dyke managed to get an Australian Eucalyptus caesia plant (common name Silver Princess) to flower for the first time in the UK. He was inspired by orchids at his first school, St. Michaels, Otford, Kent.

Hart Dyke featured in the PBS Nova programme in 2002, Orchid Hunter that documented his return to hunting rare orchids in dangerous terrain in another politically unstable area in Irian Jaya in the rainforests of Western New Guinea.

Toms books are a fascinating read and a real inspiration and i highly recommend them both. As for the ‘World Garden’ this is developing beautifully now and i enjoy going throughout the season to appreciate differing elements. Well worth a visit, the whole family really welcome you and are happy to talk and explain. Tom’s enthusiasm is infectious and i challenge anyone not to want to pick up a trowel the moment you get home.

People : André Le Nôtre , From Versailles To Greenwich Park, Garden Designer to the Kings…..

André Le Nôtre (12 March 1613 – 15 September 1700, occasionally rendered as André Le Nostre) was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. Most notably, he was the landscape architect who made the design and construction for the park of the Palace of Versailles, and his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française.

Prior to working on Versailles, Le Nôtre collaborated with Louis Le Vau and Charles Le Brun on the park at Vaux-le-Vicomte. His other works include the design of gardens and parks at Chantilly, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain. His contribution to planning was also significant: at the Tuileries he extended the westward vista, which later became the avenue of the Champs-Élysées and comprise the Axe historique.

Biography

Early life

André Le Nôtre was born in Paris, into a family of gardeners. Pierre Le Nôtre, who was in charge of the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries in 1572, may have been his grandfather. André’s father Jean Le Nôtre was also responsible for sections of the Tuileries gardens, initially under Claude Mollet, and later as head gardener, during the reign of Louis XIII. André was born on 12 March 1613, and was baptised at the Église Saint-Roch. His godfather at the ceremony was an administrator of the royal gardens, and his godmother was the wife of Claude Mollet.

The family lived in a house within the Tuilieries, and André thus grew up surrounded by gardening, and quickly acquired both practical and theoretical knowledge. The location also allowed him to study in the nearby Palais du Louvre, part of which was then used as an academy of the arts. He learned mathematics, painting and architecture, and entered the atelier of Simon Vouet, painter to Louis XIII, where he met and befriended the painter Charles Le Brun. He learned classical art and perspective, and studied for several years under the architect François Mansart, a friend of Le Brun.

Career

In 1635, Le Nôtre was named the principal gardener of the king’s brother Gaston, duc d’Orléans. On 26 June 1637, Le Nôtre was appointed head gardener at the Tuileries, taking over his father’s position. He had primary responsibiliity for the areas of the garden closest to the palace, including the orangery built by Simon Bouchard. In 1643 he was appointed “draughtsman of plants and terraces” for Anne of Austria, the queen mother, and from 1645 to 1646 he worked on the modernisation of the gardens of the Château de Fontainebleau.

He was later put in charge of all the royal gardens of France, and in 1657 he was further appointed Controller-General of the Royal Buildings. There are few direct references to Le Nôtre in the royal accounts, and Le Nôtre himself seldom wrote down his ideas or approach to gardening. He expressed himself purely through his gardens. He became a trusted advisor to Louis XIV, and in 1675 he was ennobled by the King. He and Le Brun even accompanied the court at the siege of Cambrai in 1677.

In 1640, he married Françoise Langlois. They had three children, although none survived to adulthood.

Vaux-le-Vicomte

André Le Nôtre’s first major garden design was undertaken for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s Superintendent of Finances. Fouquet began work on the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1657, employing the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun, and Le Nôtre. The three designers worked in partnership, with Le Nôtre laying out a grand, symmetrical arrangement of parterres, pools and gravel walks. Le Vau and Le Nôtre exploited the changing levels across the site, so that the canal is invisible from the house, and employed forced perspective to make the grotto appear closer than it really is. The gardens were complete by 1661, when Fouquet held a grand entertainment for the king. But only three weeks later, on 10 September 1661, Fouquet was arrested for embezzling state funds, and his artists and craftsmen were taken into the king’s service.

Versailles

From 1661, Le Nôtre was working for Louis XIV to build and enhance the garden and parks of the Château de Versailles. Louis extended the existing hunting lodge, eventually making it his primary residence and seat of power. Le Nôtre also laid out the radiating city plan of Versailles, which included the largest avenue yet seen in Europe, the Avenue de Paris.

In the following century, the Versailles design influenced Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s master plan for Washington, D.C. See, L’Enfant Plan.

Other gardens

France

In 1661, Le Nôtre was also working on the gardens at the Palace of Fontainebleau. In 1663 he was engaged at Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Château de Saint-Cloud, residence of Philippe d’Orléans, where he would oversee works for many years. Also from 1663, Le Nôtre was engaged at Château de Chantilly, property of the Prince de Condé, where he worked with his brother-in-law Pierre Desgots until the 1680s. From 1664 he was rebuilding the gardens of the Tuileries, at the behest of Colbert, Louis’s chief minister, who still hoped the king would remain in Paris. In 1667 Le Nôtre extended the main axis of the gardens westward, creating the avenue which would become the Champs-Élysées. Colbert commissioned Le Nôtre in 1670, to alter the gardens of his own château de Sceaux, which was ongoing until 1683.

Abroad

In 1662, he provided designs for Greenwich Park in London, for Charles II of England. In 1670 Le Nôtre conceived a project for the Castle of Racconigi in Italy, and between 1674 and 1698 he remodelled the gardens of Venaria Reale, near Turin. In 1679, he visited Italy. His later advice was provided for Charlottenburg Palace and château de Cassel in Germany, and with plans for Windsor Castle.

Final works

Between 1679 and 1691, he was involved in the planning of the gardens of Château de Meudon for François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis.

His work has often been favorably compared and contrasted (“the antithesis”) to the œuvre of Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the English landscape architect.

People : Beverley Nichols, Gardener, Garden Designer, Journalist, Playwright, Author ……… etc.

John Beverley Nichols (9 September 1898, Bower Ashton, Bristol, England – 15 September 1983, Kingston, London, England), was an author, playwright, gardener, garden designer, journalist, composer, and public speaker.

Career

Between his first book, the novel Prelude, published in 1920, and his last, a book of poetry, Twilight, published in 1982, Nichols wrote more than 60 books and plays. Besides novels, mysteries, short stories, essays and children’s books, he wrote a number of non-fiction books on travel, politics, religion, cats, parapsychology, and autobiography. He wrote for a number of magazines and newspapers throughout his life, the longest being weekly columns for the London Sunday Chronicle newspaper (1932–1943) and Woman’s Own magazine (1946–1967).

Nichols is now best remembered for his gardening books, the first of which, Down the Garden Path, was illustrated – as were its two sequels – by Rex Whistler. This best-seller – which has had 32 editions and has been in print almost continuously since first published in 1932 – was the first of his trilogy about Allways, his Tudor thatched cottage in Glatton, Cambridgeshire. The books are written in a poetic manner, with a rich, creative language, evoking emotional and sensual responses, but also with a lot of humour and even a hint of irony. They were parodied by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman in Garden Rubbish (1936), where the Nichols figure was called “Knatchbull Twee”.

A book about Nichols’ city garden near Hampstead Heath in London, Green Grows the City, published in 1939, was also very successful. That book introduced Arthur R. Gaskin, who was Nichols’s manservant from 1924 until Gaskin’s death in 1966. Gaskin was a popular character, who also appeared in the succeeding gardening books.

A later trilogy written between 1951 and 1956 documents Nichols’s travails renovating Merry Hall (Meadowstream), a Georgian manor house in Agates Lane, Ashtead, Surrey, where Nichols lived from 1946 to 1956. These books often feature his gifted but laconic gardener “Oldfield”. Nichols’s final trilogy is referred to as “The Sudbrook Trilogy” (1963–1968) and concerns his late 18th-century attached cottage at Ham, (near Richmond), Surrey.

Nichols wrote on a wide range of topics, always looking for “the next big thing.” As examples, he ghostwrote Dame Nellie Melba’s 1925 “autobiography” Memories and Melodies (he was at the time her personal secretary – his 1933 book Evensong was believed based on aspects of her life). In 1966 he wrote A Case of Human Bondage about the marriage and divorce of writer William Somerset Maugham and his interior-decorator wife, Syrie, which was highly critical of Maugham. Father Figure, which appeared in 1972 and in which he described how he had tried to murder his alcoholic and abusive father, caused a great uproar and several people asked for his prosecution. His book about spiritualism was not well received, which disappointed him.

His main interest apart from the writing of his books was gardening, especially garden design and winter flowers. Among his huge acquaintance in all walks of life were many famous gardeners including Constance Spry and Lord Aberconway, who was President of the Royal Horticultural Society and owner of the Bodnant Garden in North Wales.

Nichols made one appearance on film – in 1931 he appeared in Glamour, directed by Seymour Hicks and Harry Hughes, playing the small part of the Hon. Richard Wells. The film is now lost.

In 1934, Nichols wrote a best-selling book advocating pacifism, Cry Havoc! By 1938, he had abandoned his pacifism; he later supported the British campaign in World War Two.

Personal life

He went to school at Marlborough College, and went to Balliol College, Oxford, and was President of the Oxford Union and editor of Isis. Nichols was homosexual, having had affairs with Harold Nicolson, Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward.

Nichols died in 1983. He is buried in Glatton, England.

Bloomsbury : Virginia Woolf , Bipolar Feminist Genius With A Room Of Ones Own….

Adeline Virginia Woolf née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (née Jackson) (1846–1895). Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was a founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work which would influence Woolf’s later experimental biographies. Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in British India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and first cousin of the temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Leslie first married Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), the daughter of William Thackeray, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891. Leslie and Julia had four children together: Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian Stephen (1883).

Sir Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, and Virginia’s honorary godfather, James Russell Lowell, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. She came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers, including her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens’ house, from which Virginia and Vanessa were taught the classics and English literature. Unlike the girls, their brothers Adrian and Julian (Thoby) were formally educated and sent to Cambridge, a difference that Virginia would resent. The sisters did, however, benefit indirectly from their brothers’ Cambridge contacts, as the boys brought their new intellectual friends home to the Stephens’ drawing room.

According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department and noted as one of the Steamboat ladies).Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department. On 2 May 2013, it was announced that Woolf was to be honoured by her alma mater when, in Autumn 2013, the Virginia Woolf Building of King’s College London would open on Kingsway, London.

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. She spent three short periods in 1910, 1912 and 1913 at Burley House, 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as “a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder”.Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.

Bloomsbury

After the death of their father and Virginia’s second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008). In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and the couple’s interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf’s development as an author.

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate … you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.” The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others. The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville-West in a letter to her husband dated August 17, 1926, was only twice consummated. However Virginia’s intimacy with Vita seems to have continued into the early 1930s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero’s life spans three centuries and both sexes. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son, wrote “The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her”. After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26.

Work

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother’s imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She is seen as a major twentieth century novelist and one of the foremost modernists.

Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf’s reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her importance was re-established with the growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s.

Virginia Woolf’s peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters’ receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Woolf has often been credited with stream of consciousness writing alongside her modernist contemporaries like James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings—often wartime environments—of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

Orlando (1928) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel.

Flush: A Biography (1933) is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog’s point of view. Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play was produced for the first time in 1932 by actress Katharine Cornell.

Her last work, Between the Acts (1941), sums up and magnifies Woolf’s chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse. While Woolf’s work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G. E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism, it is not a simple recapitulation of the coterie’s ideals.

Woolf’s works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Attitudes toward Judaism, Christianity and fascism

 Woolf was criticised by some as an antisemite, despite her being happily married to a Jewish man. This antisemitism is drawn from the fact that she often wrote of Jewish characters in stereotypical archetypes and generalisations, including describing some of her Jewish characters as physically repulsive and dirty. The overwhelming^[ and rising 1920s and 1930s antisemitism possibly influenced Virginia Woolf. She wrote in her diary: “I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh.” However, in a 1930 letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, quoted in Nigel Nicolson’s biography Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard’s Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, “How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality.”

In another letter to Smyth, Woolf gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous “egotism” and stating “my Jew has more religion in one toe nail—more human love, in one hair.”

Woolf and her husband Leonard hated and feared 1930s fascism with its antisemitism even before knowing they were on Hitler’s blacklist. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.

Death

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin Bell.

Hermione Lee’s 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf’s life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf’s life. It focuses on Woolf’s writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. Thomas Szasz’s book My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf ) was published in 2006.

Feminism

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer.

Woolf’s best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women in education and society. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir counts, of all women who ever lived, only three female writers—Emily Brontë, Woolf and “sometimes” Katherine Mansfield—who have explored “the given.”

Mental illness

Much scholarship has been made of Woolf’s mental illness, described as a “manic-depressive illness” in Thomas Caramagno’s 1992 book, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness, in which he also warns against the “neurotic-genius” way of looking at mental illness, where people rationalise that creativity is somehow born of mental illness. In two books by Stephen Trombley, Woolf is described as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a “victim of male medicine”, referring to the contemporary relative lack of understanding about mental illness.

Irene Coates’s book Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf holds that Leonard Woolf’s treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death. Though extensively researched, this view is not accepted by Leonard’s family. Victoria Glendinning’s book Leonard Woolf: A Biography argues that Leonard Woolf was not only supportive of his wife but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Virginia’s own diaries support this view of the Woolfs’ marriage.

Controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo reads most of Woolf’s life and career through the lens of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a young woman in her 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work.

Woolf’s fiction is also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class and modern British society.

People : Herbert Baker, Global Architect Extraordinaire, but Always In Lutyens Shadow ?

Herbert Baker (9 June 1862 – 4 February 1946) was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.

Among the many churches, schools and houses he designed in South Africa are the Union Buildings in Pretoria, St. John’s College, Johannesburg, the Wynberg Boys’ High School, Groote Schuur in Cape Town, and the Champagne Homestead and Rhodes Cottage on Boschendal, between Franschhoek and Stellenbosch. With Edwin Lutyens he was instrumental in designing New Delhi, which in 1931 became the capital of the British Raj. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey.

Life and career

The fourth son of nine children of Thomas Henry Baker and Frances Georgina Davis, Herbert was from the outset exposed to a tradition of good craftsmanship, preserved through isolation in the neighbourhood of his home. As a boy, walking and exploring the historical ruins found in the area were his favourite pastimes. Here he observed and learned to appreciate the time-honoured materials of brick and plaster, and the various aspects of timber use, especially in roof construction—tie-beam and arch-braced collar-beam trusses. He was profoundly influenced by the stone construction used in Norman cathedrals and Anglo-Saxon churches, as well as the ornamentation and symbolism of the Renaissance buildings in Kent. This early influence is apparent in the churches, schools and houses he later designed in South Africa.

He was educated at Tonbridge School. In 1879 he was articled to his cousin Arthur Baker, embarking on the accepted pattern of architectural education comprising three years of apprenticeship and the attending of classes at the Architectural Association School and the Royal Academy Schools. Study tours of Europe were regarded as an essential part of the course. In 1891 Baker passed his examination for Associateship of the Royal Institute of British Architects and was awarded the Ashpitel Prize for being top of his class.

He worked initially for Ernest George and Harold Peto in London from 1882–87, then opened his own office in Gravesend, Kent in 1890. From 1902 – 1913 he developed his career in South Africa. In 1913 he returned to England and began practice in London in partnership with Alexander Scott. Near the end of this most productive phase of his career, Baker received a knighthood, was elected to the Royal Academy, had conferred on him the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1927, and received honorary degrees from Witwatersrand and Oxford Universities. Baker’s autobiography ‘Architecture & Personalities’ was published in 1944.

South Africa

He embarked for South Africa in 1892 ostensibly to visit his brother, and was commissioned in 1893 by Cecil Rhodes to remodel Groote Schuur, Rhodes’ house on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town, and the residence of South African prime ministers. Rhodes sponsored Baker’s further education in Greece, Italy and Egypt, after which he returned to South Africa and stayed the next 20 years.

He had the patronage of Lord Milner, and was invited to the Transvaal to design and build residences for the British colonials. Much taken with the country, and notably with the Cape Dutch homes in the Cape Province, Baker resolved to remain in South Africa and to establish an architectural practice, which went under the name of Herbert Baker, Kendall & Morris. Baker undertook work in widespread parts of the country including Durban, Grahamstown, King William’s Town, Bloemfontein, George and Oudtshoorn, and even further afield in Salisbury, Rhodesia where he designed the Anglican Cathedral and a house for Julius Weil, the general merchant.

In 1902 Baker left his practice at the Cape in the hands of his partner and went to live in Johannesburg, where he built Stonehouse. On a visit to Britain in 1904 he married his cousin, Florence Edmeades, daughter of Gen. Henry Edmund Edmeades, bringing her back to Johannesburg, where two sons, the first of four children, were born. Baker quickly became noted for his work, and was commissioned by a number of the “Randlords” (the wealthy mining magnates of Johannesburg) to design houses, particularly in the suburbs of Parktown and Westcliff. He also designed commercial premises and public buildings.

Some Herbert Baker buildings in South Africa

• St Boniface Church Germiston
• Bishop Bavin School St. George’s
• Bishop’s Lea, George
• Cecil John Rhodes Cottage, Boschendal
• Champagne Homestead, Boschendal
• Dale College Boys’ High School, King William’s Town
• Glenshiel, Johannesburg
• Grey College, Bloemfontein
• Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley, Northern Cape
• McClean telescope building, Royal Observatory, Cape Town
• Michaelhouse, Balgowan, KwaZulu-Natal
• The Outspan, Parktown, Johannesburg
• Pallinghurst, Parktown, Johannesburg
• Northwards, Johannesburg
• Pilrig House, 1 Rockridge Road, Parktown
• Pretoria Station
• Rhodes Memorial, Cape Town. Baker used a design similar to the Greek Temple at Segesta.
• Rhodes University, Grahamstown
• Roedean School, Johannesburg
• Sandown House, Rondebosch, Cape Town. Built for MP John Molteno.
• School House, Bishops Diocesan College, Rondebosch, Cape Town
• South African Institute for Medical Research, Johannesburg
• Andrew’s College, Grahamstown chapel
• St Andrew’s School for Girls, Johannesburg
• St Anne’s College Chapel in Pietermaritzburg
• George’s Cathedral, Cape Town
• John’s College, Johannesburg
• St Margaret’s (1905) Rockridge Road, Parktown
• St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg
• St Michael and All Angels, Observatory, Cape Town
• St Michael and All Angels Anglican Church, Boksburg
• Stone House, Rockridge Road, Parktown. Baker’s own house and the first he built in Johannesburg
• Union Buildings, Pretoria
• Villa Arcadia, Johannesburg
• Workers Village at Lanquedoc, Boschendal
• Welgelegen Manor, Johannesburg
• Wynberg Boys’ High School, Cape Town

Union Buildings, South Africa

In 1909 Herbert Baker was commissioned to design the Government Building of the Union of South Africa (which was formed on 31 May 1910) in Pretoria. Pretoria was to become the administrative centre for the new government. In November 1910 the cornerstone of the Union Building was laid.

Lord Selborne and H. C. Hull, a member of the first Union Cabinet, chose Meintjieskop as the site for Baker’s design. The site was that of a disused quarry and the existing excavations were used to create the amphitheatre, which was set about with ornamental pools, fountains, sculptures, balustrades and trees.

The design consisted of two identical wings, joined by a semicircular colonnade forming the backdrop of the amphitheatre. The colonnade was terminated on either side by a tower. Each wing had a basement and three floors above ground. The interiors were created in the Cape Dutch Style with carved teak fanlights, heavy doors, dark ceiling beams contrasting with white plaster walls and heavy wood furniture. Baker used indigenous materials as far as possible. The granite was quarried on site while Buiskop sandstone was used for the courtyards. Stinkwood and Rhodesian teak were used for timber and wood panelling. The roof tiles and quarry tiles for the floors were made in Vereeniging. The Union Buildings were completed in 1913, after which Herbert Baker left for New Delhi from where he returned home to England.

Rhodes Cottage, Boschendal South Africa

In 1897, Cecil John Rhodes started large scale fruit farming in the Drakenstein Valley and commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to design his country retreat on the farm Nieuwedorp at Boschendal. In contrast to the spectacular mountain views, the brief was to design a simple country cottage combining Cape cottage features and incorporating indigenous yellowwood and stinkwood in the interior. It was intended to accommodate only Rhodes, his secretary and a butler.

The first name recorded in the guestbook was that of Sir Alfred Milner, erstwhile Governor of the Cape Colony and British High Commissioner at the outbreak of the South African War (Boer War). The cottage was later to host the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Earl of Athlone, former Governor-General of South Africa and his wife Princess Alice, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

In the 1990s the cottage was revamped and refitted while preserving its character. It stands on Estate 20, one of the Founders’ Estates which form Phase 1 of the residential development of Boschendal.

India

In 1912 Baker went to India to work with Lutyens, and went on to design the Secretariat Building, New Delhi and Parliament House in New Delhi and the bungalows of Members of Parliament. Baker designed the two Secretariat buildings flanking the great axis leading to what was then the Viceroy of India’s Palace, now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House).

United Kingdom

Works from 1913 include:

• War Memorial Building, Harrow on the Hill (English Heritage TQ1534987385)
• South Africa House, the South African High Commission building in Trafalgar Square, London
• India House, Aldwych (1925–1930), the Indian High Commission, opened by King George V on 8 July 1930.
• The Port Lympne Mansion (now a zoo) in Kent in south-east England
• One of the grandstands at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London; Baker presented the Marylebone Cricket Club with Old Father Time, a weather vane in the shape of Father Time, which adorned his stand until it was replaced in 1996. The weather vane, now a famous symbol of the home of cricket, was moved to another stand at the ground. He also designed the Grace Gates at Lord’s.
• The North Range of Downing College The design was based on that of the original architect of the college, Williams Wilkins, but ‘changed the original design just enough to annoy’
• Rebuilding of the Bank of England, London, demolishing most of Sir John Soane’s original building. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner in ‘Buildings of England’ as “the greatest architectural crime, in the City of London, of the twentieth century”.
• The War Cloister in Winchester College.
• Rhodes House in Oxford, headquarters of the Rhodes Scholarships.
• Goodenough College, London.
• Busby’s House, Westminster School, situated at 23 Great College Street. The building was erected in 1936.

Belgium

Following the First World War, Baker was approached to assist in the design of suitable monuments to the efforts of British Commonwealth soldiers. Out of this came the design for Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British war cemetery in the world sited in Passchendaele near Ypres in Belgium, unveiled in July 1927. Baker had earlier designed the war memorial at Winchester College, influences for which he carried over to his work on Tyne Cot.

Kenya

Sir Edward Grigg, Governor of Kenya from 1925 to 1931, invited Baker to visit Kenya in 1925.

Baker wrote: “The Governor and Director of Education were much concerned to provide a healthy education for the European youth under the conditions of the climate. So with their encouragement I designed a school at Nairobi with a crypt as a playground – like the undercroft of Wren’s library at Trinity College, Cambridge, – where the boys could stay at mid-day instead of going home under the vertical rays of the sun. At the larger ‘public school’ at Kabete all the detached classrooms and houses were designed and built with connecting colonnades, in which respect I followed the excellent example set by [United States] President Jefferson in his beautiful University of Virginia.” The use of colonnades accords with advice given to Baker by T. E. Lawrence, who regarded the tropical sun as “an enemy” and told him “All pavements should be covered over with light vaulting.” The foundation stone was laid by Sir Edward Grigg on 24 September 1929, and the Prince of Wales School was opened in 1931 – (the original idea for the name of the school was Kabete Boys Secondary School, but the first headmaster, Captain Bertram W. L. Nicholson,[9] thought this to be too clumsy and therefore the name of The Prince of Wales School was suggested and eventually adopted).

Other impressive buildings in Nairobi designed by Baker and completed with his assistant, Jan Hoogterp, include the Law Courts and Government House (now State House), described as a Palladian mansion. However, the building with the closest resemblance to the Prince of Wales School may well be Baker’s Government House (now State House) near the lighthouse at Ras Serani, Mombasa. Not only has it “large columned loggias”, but it also has an archway, through which can be glimpsed the Indian Ocean, leading Baker to wax poetic: “One can live out between these columns both by day and night in the warm and soft sea air.”

• Prince of Wales School, Nairobi

France

Post the First World War, Baker’s worked on cemeteries in France including:

• Adanac Military Cemetery
• Australian Imperial Force burial ground
• Delville Wood Cemetery and Memorial
• Courcelette Memorial, Canadian war memorial
• Dantzig Alley British Cemetery
• Flatiron Copse Cemetery
• Le Trou Aid Post Cemetery
• London Cemetery and Extension
• Loos Memorial, Loos-en-Gohelle
• Ovillers Military Cemetery
• Quarry Cemetery

Australia

Fairbridge Chapel was built at Pinjarra, Western Australia in 1924 according to Herbert Baker’s design, which he provided free of charge. The farm was started by Kingsley Fairbridge as part of a scheme to help destitute English children improve their lot by emigration to Australia and Canada.

• Fairbridge Church, Pinjarra Western Australia