Tommy Agar-Robartes's dressing table at Lanhydrock, complete with spats

Leafing through a recent edition of Hello Magazine (19 May 2014), I was struck by a picture of Johnny Depp, the distinguished tragedian, attending the ‘Met Ball’ in New York in white tie and tails, with white gloves, watch-chain, a silver-topped cane and spats. It was the spats that most intrigued me, as they are so seldom worn these days.

The other day, I went into a shop in Bloomsbury that specialised in vintage-style clothing. It was crammed with three-piece Harris Tweed suits, boaters and panamas, woollen ties and braces. There was a Penny Farthing parked outside. Yet the nattily-dressed assistant had never heard of spats.

Allow me to put him straight. Spats, short for ‘spatterdashes’, originated as military garments, and are still worn by pipers in the British army. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however, they were much in vogue, both in America and Europe, as stylish civilian wear for gentlemen:

Have you seen the well-to-do

Up and down Park Avenue

On that famous thoroughfare

With their noses in the air

High hats and arrowed collars

Wide spats and lots of dollars

Spending every dime

For a wonderful time

[Irving Berlin, Puttin’ on the Ritz, 1930]

Spats were made of white cloth or brown felt that buttoned round the ankle, their ostensible purpose being to keep the mud off one’s shoes and socks. A notable spat-wearer was Tommy Agar-Robartes, reputedly the ‘best-dressed man in the House of Commons’, whose pre-Great War spats are laid out in his former bedroom at Lanhydrock, Cornwall. The prevalance of spats in that period is apparent from Sir Leslie Ward’s ‘Spy’ cartoons for Vanity Fair, such as his portrait of the magazine’s proprietor, ‘Tommy’ Bowles. I also find them mentioned in Ezra Pound’s bitter masterpiece, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly: Ode pour l’élection de son sépulchre (1920):

The sky-like limpid eyes,

The circular infant’s face,

The stiffness from spats to collar

Never relaxing into grace …

The description, apparently, is of Sir Max Beerbohm, whom Pound mistook for a Jew.

Portrait of Tommy Agar-Robartes at Lanhydrock

In the preface to Joy in the Morning, P.G. Wodehouse laments the passing of the spat. ‘In the brave old days spats were the hallmark of the young-feller-me-lad-about-town, the foundation stone on which his whole policy was based, and it is sad to reflect that a generation has arisen which does not know what spats were. I once wrote a book called Young Men in Spats. I could not use that title today.’

Their principal purpose, he continues, was not to ‘protect the socks from getting dashed with spatter’, but to lend ‘a sort of gay diablerie to the wearer’s appearance. The monocle might or might not be worn according to taste, but spats, like the tightly-rolled umbrella, were obligatory.’ Despite an inhibiting ‘anaemia of the exchequer’, Wodehouse had his own pair, ‘white and gleaming, fascinating the passers-by and causing seedy strangers who hoped for largesse to address me as “Captain” and sometimes even as “M’lord”. Many a butler at the turn of the century, opening the door to me and wincing visibly at the sight of my topper, would lower his eyes, see the spats and give a little sigh of relief, as much as to say, “Not quite what we are accustomed to at the northern end, perhaps, but unexceptionable to the south”.’

My grandparents at their wedding at All Souls', Langham Place, in 1930, spats to the fore

In Right Ho, Jeeves (Chapter 4), it is not necessary to be ‘some terrific nib’ to give away the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School; ’anybody in spats’ will do, as Bertie Wooster discovers to his cost.

My own grandfather wore spats at his London wedding in 1930. (As he was about to set off on the train to his honeymoon in Eastbourne, his thoughtful batman brought the evening paper to his carriage.) The same morning suit was still in service when he gave away his daughter in 1964, and now is occasionally worn by my brother. Regrettably, the spats have been discarded and have fallen into general desuetude since the Second World War. I myself have been to a single wedding at which they were worn – that of A.A. Gill in 1989, who sported a fine pair, the best-man commenting on his ‘lifelong addiction to the “dressing-up box’.

Giving away his daughter in 1964 - the same suit, but no spats

The Central Methodist Hall, Westminster

Every second year, I am given a precious opportunity to address the NADFAS Annual Directory Meeting at the sumptuous Central Methodist Hall, Westminster. Established lecturers are allotted a mere minute in which to peddle their wares. The aim is to introduce new talks and to persuade the secretaries of the regional societies, by their charm, eloquence and originality, to book them.

Rupert Willoughby in conversation with John Wesley

The new lectures that I am offering this year are ‘The Normans – Conquest and Legacy’, and ‘Knight Errant: The Life and Adventures of William the Marshal’, which I have already delivered many times on the provincial circuit. It is almost a cruelty to have to compress one’s enthusiasm into a mere minute. If only I been allowed to speak for two minutes, I would have said the following:

Ladies and gentlemen, in 2016, it will be 950 years since the Normans invaded England. The roughest of company, they came to this country not to civilise, but to seize. A mere eleven men in Duke William’s inner circle enjoyed an unprecedented bonanza, receiving almost half the land of the conquered kingdom. There followed an orgy of building in what was described as ‘a new manner’ – castles, churches, monasteries and cathedrals – that all but effaced the physical traces of Anglo-Saxon England. It was their way of showing us who was in charge.

These fabulously rich Norman patrons, many of them crusaders who had witnessed the marvels of the East, enabled a great flowering of indigenous craftsmanship. The ebullience of ornament that characterised this period is termed ‘Norman’. It was, in fact, peculiarly English.

My account of the mass of post-Conquest masonry, from landmarks like Dover Castle to humble parish churches, is made personal by reference to individual invaders – men like the deeply unpleasant Baldwin de Redvers, lord of the Isle of Wight. Baldwin’s coterie of Norman knights have left a considerable physical and cultural legacy on the Island, as well as actual descendants. I can offer you an insight into the lives of these men – as well as the disgusting details of William the Conqueror’s funeral.

Not for the faint-hearted

Continuing the Norman theme, my lecture on William the Marshal thrillingly evokes a gorgeous world in which the knights were dominant. In their coats of mail like silk shirts and their golden spurs, these were ‘the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon’. William has a key role in the story of Magna Carta. He is a national figure of the stature of Drake or Nelson, and deserves to be better known.

By the way, if the diet of medieval stuff is too heavy for you, rest assured that ‘Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture’ is still available.

For the text of my address in 2012, outlining my other NADFAS lectures, see the earlier blog ‘Wooing NADFAS: Setting Out One’s Stall at the Annual Directory Meeting’, at http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/archives/912.

Westminster Abbey from the Central Methodist Hall

Christopher Willoughby, Basutoland Mounted Police

A fascinating Pathé news film from 1968 shows Basutoland, the country of my birth, as I barely remember it.

It describes the newly-independent country, re-named ‘Lesotho’, as a ‘proud, poverty-stricken mountain state’, where most of the population live in ‘mud-hut villages’. The landscape is spectacular, but blighted by a lack of trees. As a result, fuel is scarce. ‘Erosion is this country’s curse – and challenge. Acres of over-cropped topsoil can be lost in just one thunderstorm … It is subsistence farming for the most part, and primitive.’

A farmer bends over his plough which is drawn by two pairs of oxen. Another farmer appears to be driving a tractor, but, as the camera turns, it becomes clear that it has broken down and is also being drawn by a team of oxen.

Seven-year-old herd-boys lead flocks of sturdy sheep ever higher into the mountains in their desperate search for pasture. Woven mohair is one of Lesotho’s few exports, but more significant are the 100,000 men who migrate annually to neighbouring South Africa to work in the gold mines. The alternative is starvation, and their wages are ‘crucial to the country’s revenue’. However, Roman Catholic missionaries have long ago brought schools and hospitals, and deep faith, to Basutoland, which has the highest literacy rate in Africa. A ‘flying doctor’ service operates in the remoter parts.

Most Basutos get about on horseback. The young King, Moshoeshoe II, himself daily ‘rides among his people’. The most fascinating scenes are of Maseru, the capital town, which boasted the only metalled road in the entire country – the ‘Kingsway’, built for the visit of King George VI in 1948. The commentator describes Maseru as ‘something of a shanty town’, and there are lingering shots of ‘Main Street’, a dusty thoroughfare lined by thatched huts, stalls with cardboard awnings and a scattering of glass-fronted modern buildings in the local sandstone. (One that I particularly remember was a shop with a thatched roof in the shape of a Basuto hat.) It seems a sleepy place, like something out of the American Wild West, with lone horsemen ambling by, a procession of pack-mules and women wrapped in distinctive Basuto blankets carrying loads on their heads. Almost everything in Maseru has had to be imported, from the oranges sold in the market to the barber’s clippers and the cardboard that he uses for his awning.

Christopher Willoughby leads a parade at the Police Training School, Maseru

It is reassuring to see ‘the precision drill of their new police recruits’ at the Lesotho Mounted Police Depot in Maseru, knowing that the high standards set by my father have been maintained. As his last job in Basutoland, my father co-raised the paramilitary ‘Police Mobile Unit’ of the Basutoland Mounted Police, which was to be the nucleus of the defence and security force of Lesotho. He maintained that his recruits were addicted to drill and enjoyed practising it in their spare time.

I suspect that my father came to Basutoland, a British protectorate since 1880, in search of adventure rather than professional advancement. Even as they travelled out in 1958, my parents knew that it was being groomed for independence. To my mind, my father typified the professionalism, selflessness and incorruptibility of the colonial administrator. By the time I was born, Christopher Willoughby was an acting Senior Superintendent, commanding Basutoland Special Branch at Maseru. With subversives deemed to be everywhere, he could not afford to take any chances. A friend, Colin Smith, recalls joining him for some target practice:

‘Chris Willoughby had a smart automatic pistol, a 9mm Beretta I think it was, and I took my rickety Browning, and off we went shooting at beer cans in a suitably secluded bit of countryside up near the race course.

‘It was then that the scales fell from my eyes. Chris, who gave the impression of being a slightly simple but tall, handsome and extremely well bred gentleman, was in fact a crack shot. It is a mistake to underestimate such men. Beer can after beer can flew away when he was shooting, while mine remained stubbornly in place. I began to treat the Special Branch, which I had previously seen as a bit of a joke, with more respect.’ (Colin Smith, Green Mountain Doctor (Beaminster, 2000), p.133.)

The Oldest Man I Ever Knew 

It was in this improbable, timeless landscape that I roamed barefoot during my early years. I have only vague memories of the place, one of the strongest being of our last few days in Maseru.

My barefoot childhood (front left), with my brother Simon (back left) and friends

Having packed up all our belongings for shipment back to England, we took up residence in the Lancer’s Inn on Kingsway, which passed for Maseru’s smartest hotel. It was – and is – more of a ‘motel’, with guest accommodation in a jumble of single-storey blocks at angles to the main building.

While there, my elder brother and I encountered a permanent resident of the Lancer’s, a retired trader and old South Africa hand by the name of Bacon, who was reputedly 99 years old. He would therefore have been born in 1867, and would have been in his thirties at the time of the Boer War. Though I do not recall him regaling me with stories of that time, I suspect that not many people can precisely identify the oldest person they have ever known.

My mother recalls that, during our stay at the Lancer’s, there was a commotion one evening as a dead body was stretchered out with a sheet over its head. She frantically tried to shield our impressionable eyes from the grisly scene. It seems we had encountered this living relic in the nick of time!

When I was eighteen months old, I had been taken to Vicksburg in the Orange Free State for a minor operation, and had been put in a ward full of adult men. They were Afrikaaners and spoke no English. My mother would find me at visiting times being dandled on the knees of these old Boers who were attempting to comfort me. It seems very likely that there would have been veterans of the Boer War among them. My own great-grandfather (born in 1869), had also served in the war, on the opposing side, but of course I never knew him.

The 1968 Pathé film about newly-independent Lesotho can be viewed at http://www.britishpathe.com/video/emergent-africa/query/maseru. Pictures of the Lancer’s Inn are at http://www.lancersinn.co.ls/index_files/Page390.htm.

Wednesday 11 July: at 8.15 on a warm, sunny morning in Reading, the ‘Olympic Torch’ is carried through Valpy Street into Blagrave Street. The tune blaring from speakers on the supporting bus is, inevitably, ‘The Final Countdown’. I follow the procession into Broad Street, where the flame is transferred from a male to a female torch-bearer, who looks like Sheila Hancock. Large and enthusiastic crowds line the streets, ‘whooping’ their approval. The torch-bearers are elated.

The event seems strange and artificial, yet it is impossible not to be caught up in the festive atmosphere. In recent days it has been attended by moments of high comedy. One of the torch-bearers in Oxfordshire, the chef Raymond Blanc, came to a clumsy halt when he dropped his mobile phone. In Henley, a male ‘streaker’ stole the show. Possessing more obvious athletic prowess than the official ‘torch-bearer’, he raised the louder cheer, before being hustled away in a blanket by the police. I hope he has not been charged.

Later, I see film of the torch changing hands on Whitley Road, the bearers genuflecting in the course of some strange ritual that reminded me of the Greek evzones. A voice from the crowd utters a derogatory remark. I see pictures of two bearers elsewhere performing some sort of jig. Presumably these routines are choreographed by individual participants on the bus on the way in.

It has also been interesting to observe the official Metropolitan Police escort of young men and women in grey outfits, who take turns to jog along with every runner and must by now be in peak condition. They take a dim view of anyone straying onto the road. At one point recently, a young lad wobbling around on a BMX bike appeared to be wrestled to the ground. On another occasion, also shown on television, a woman on crutches hobbled out of the crowd and attempted to approach the passing torch-bearer, who was in a wheelchair. The escort swooped into action and she was quickly removed. The nearest policeman was heard to say, ‘Sorry mate. Did you know her? We’ve got to keep things moving.’ Animals are, of course, less easy to control and a police runner was nearly tripped up by an enthusiastic Jack Russell that darted out into the road.

The funniest moment (somewhere up north) was when two ‘urchins’ attempted to wrest the torch from the hands of the bearer, who clung on to it for dear life until the tiny assailants were removed, bodily, by the escort. So there can be no question of shaking the torch-bearer’s hand or patting him on the back as he passes.

Oddly enough, I saw the real Sheila Hancock the following day in the London Library – unless, of course, the woman in question was merely an even more convincing ‘lookalike’.

The annual ‘Directory Meeting’ is a key event for NADFAS lecturers, as they are able to advertise their wares and take provisional bookings from clients – the secretaries of the regional Decorative and Fine Arts societies – who assemble there en masse. It is a great and splendid occasion.

On Tuesday 27 March, the meeting was held for the first time in the sumptuous Westminster Central Hall, a venue much approved of by the writer, who photographed the above view of the nearby Abbey from its entrance.

Newly-accredited lecturers are given a precious opportunity to ‘market’ themselves by means of a two-minute presentation on stage. It is their one-and-only chance to make an impression and stand out from the crowd, on which their future lecturing career may well depend. These are followed by the one-minute presentations of established lecturers, who will have competed by ballot for the limited slots. The occasion is somewhat reminiscent of the auditions on X-Factor: those exceeding their allotted time are ruthlessly silenced by having their microphones turned off.

My new colleagues are all as brilliant as they are congenial and, in successive addresses, each of sparkling originality, they contrived to fascinate on the obscurest of topics. I hoped in my own presentation (the ‘Ws’ came last!) to epitomise the spirit as well as the content of my NADFAS lectures. It is clear that humour, and a strong element of social history, were much appreciated by the audience.

Apparently I am alone in offering a lecture, the teasingly-named ‘Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture’, about the most notoriously over-developed town in England. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Rudigore, the word ‘Basingstoke’ is said to ‘teem with hidden meaning’. Apparently it teems with it to this day as the mere mention of it had the hall in stitches. The joke seems to have been enjoyed by branch secretaries from as far away as Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, who hastened to book the talk.

Indeed, well over half my bookings that afternoon were for ‘Basingstoke’. There was a tense moment when I was approached by representatives of the Basingstoke DFAS. Luckily they were all smiles and it appears that I will be able to deliver the talk to their group in 2014 without the prospect of being lynched.

Here, then, is the text of my address:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am an historian of domestic life. I am interested in fundamental things like fashions, hairstyles, and the living arrangements of both rich and poor.

First, I offer a lively introduction to the Bayeux Tapestry. I demonstrate that the Normans were a bunch of skinheads, and that they attributed the downfall of the English to their girly hairstyles.

Or I can take you on a room-by-room tour of Simon de Montfort’s castle in Hampshire. I will reveal the most intimate details of Simon’s home life, even down to his undergarments.

Or let me guide you through the world of Jane Austen, peeping into peasants’ cottages on the way. I will elaborate on the peasant’s smock and the gentleman’s knee breeches, on powdered wigs and pigtails and on the shocking introduction of the trouser. 

Or I can show you my family photos from the 1890s and early 1900s – scenes of people wearing the latest fashions in the Bois de Boulogne, sitting on bicycles, posing with a new motor car or indulging in mixed bathing, all of which offended or even shocked the conservatively-minded at the time.

Finally, let me commend to you ‘Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture’. It is about the post-war development of a typical English town. What motivated the planners who imposed the absurdities of Modernist architecture on our landscape? It is a story that neatly illustrates the ugliest episode in England’s architectural history. You will be thrilled to discover the largest phallus on public display in Britain. You will marvel at the sudden rise of the chav. Hilarity is guaranteed. Please book now to avoid disappointment! Thank you very much.