Archive for the ‘Historical Gleanings’ category

Simon Raven’s Younger Brother: Myles Raven, the Terror of Tormore School

October 14th, 2011

The famous ‘Desert Boot’ was invented by Nathan Clark, who died on 23 June 2011. According to the obituaries, he was inspired by the rough suede boots, knocked up in the Cairo bazaar, that had been sported by officers of the Eighth Army during the war.

His design was not immediately appreciated by the stuffy directors of his family firm, James Clark and Sons. They ‘felt that there was something louche about suede as footwear. It was for bohemian and essentially unreliable characters.’

What, then, was one to make of Myles Raven, the legendary Latin and Maths master at Tormore School (my alma mater in Kent), and terror of generations of small boys? Raven, known as ‘Bird’, was reputed to possess forty pairs of suede boots. They lined the skirting board of his bed-sitting-room at the Old House, like soldiers on parade.

It was the horror of having Raven permanently on hand, as much as the lack of plumbing, that made the Old House the most unpopular boarding house at Tormore. As Bird lurched from his room of a morning, to shave from a bowl of boiling water on the landing, one saw far more of his flabby, six-foot-three-inch frame than was palatable. He was quite naked, apart from a white towel that hung precariously from his waist.

If I stole a glance past Raven in the direction of his fetid room, where the curtains seemed to be permanently drawn, it was only to verify the tales I had heard of his suede shoes – he certainly never wore anything else. Raven was dangerously unpredictable. He was prone to terrible, uncontrollable rages, in which his florid face would metamorphose into a livid purple. These were frequently triggered by the failure of individual pupils or an entire form to understand a particular lesson (such as ‘ut’ plus the subjunctive).

As they lined up at his desk to have him mark their work, boy after boy would offer proof of his incomprehension. Bird was like a simmering volcano. Suddenly, he would erupt, scoring his red Bic biro deep into the exercise book of the nearest boy. Others would have their books cast unceremoniously through the open French doors into the garden of the Court House, where they would invariably land in a muddy flower bed or a puddle.

Mercifully, the bell would eventually sound to mark the end of the lesson (potentially a long wait, if it was a ‘double’). Ashen faced, the released boys would alert the incoming form as to what was in store. ‘Birdie’s in a bait,’ they would mutter as they scurried away, leaving the trembling new arrivals to their doom.

A further ordeal was to be placed on Bird’s table at mealtimes. There were about a dozen tables in the school dining room and a further three in the adjacent library, where Bird presided. Each dining set, made up of boys of all ages, would progress weekly between tables, in an anti-clockwise direction. All of us dreaded the three weeks when we would be in the same room as Bird, and particularly the whole week that we would have to spend on his table.

It was particularly distressing to see him devour a substantial cooked breakfast on a daily basis, while we were permanently on short rations. (We were told, unconvincingly, that it was something to do with his diabetes.) He was also prone to revolting coughing fits and, when in one of his moods, was far from pleasant company.

It struck no one as odd that Bird should habitually chain-smoke during his lessons. He was a workmanlike teacher, who believed in learning by rote. Latin tenses and declensions were drummed into us (‘dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino, domino’; ‘bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello’ etc.). I doubt that he found his work rewarding. The hour devoted to ‘prep’ on winter evenings was an unpleasant enough experience, as the form-rooms were unheated. Under Bird’s supervision, it could be considerably worse. Heedless of our discomfort, he would sit outside the 4^th Form in his green Sunbeam Rapier, turn the engine on and warm himself by the car’s heater, whilst leaving the door of the form-room wide open so that he could keep an eye on us.

My brother tells another story which illustrates Bird’s remarkable lack of consideration for his charges. The First XI, with my brother as scorer, were conveyed to a fixture at Milner Court in the masters’ cars. It was a pleasant summer’s day and, on the way back, with numerous sweaty boys crammed into the Sunbeam, Bird spotted a stall selling fresh strawberries in a lay-by (my brother passed the spot recently and recognised it at once – it is between Howe Barracks and Littlebourne). Bird hauled himself out of the car, bought two punnets, and proceeded to consume the entire contents in front of the ravenous boys.

Bird’s antics have made more sense to me since I read Michael Barber’s book The Captain, a frank and entertaining biography of his elder brother, the writer Simon Raven. An extravagant, amoral hedonist, sacked from Charterhouse and the army (he had served in Kenya as a Captain in the King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry), a distracted Simon had been exiled to Deal by his publisher (‘Leave London, or leave my employ’). In my day, he lived in a tiny clapboard cottage across the road from the ‘Admiral Keppel’, which was conveniently positioned only a few doors down from the Old House.

The Raven brothers were both avowed homosexuals, yet Myles had once been engaged – to one of the under-matrons – and Simon had been briefly married. According to Barber, an anguished telegram from his abandoned wife – ‘WIFE AND BABY STARVING SEND MONEY SOONEST’ – had prompted a characteristic reply – ‘SORRY NO MONEY SUGGEST EAT BABY’. His reputation at Tormore was as the author of ‘dirty books’, which some boys’ fathers had read. Shortly after leaving Tormore I read one myself and it was, indeed, utterly filthy. (A typical line of dialogue, from a colonel addressing his mess: ‘I’ve f*****d women from every continent and most animals, but I’ve never had a woman like that!’) I remember the boys of my house, ‘Tanks’, being taken on a school treat to the cinema at Deal, to see On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Michael Webb briefed us beforehand that all the wittiest lines in the film had been written by Simon, whose name duly flashed up on the screen. Simon also scripted The Pallisers and Edward and Mrs Simpson for television, but it was only after the publication of The Roses of Picardie in 1980 that I became aware of his literary eminence.

The occasional sighting of the caddish Simon caused a certain frisson – usually striding past the school, clad like his brother in a tweed jacket and desert boots, with the same snub nose, prominent eyebrows and florid complexion and the furtive look of a mischievous faun. I have no recollection of ever seeing him on school premises, and wonder if he had been banned (as he was from the Royal St George’s Golf Club). However, my brother assures me that he came into the school regularly to watch our cricket matches, and at one time he wrote witty reviews of them for The School Record.

Simon used to hold court at the ‘Admiral Keppel’, where most of the masters seemed to spend their evenings. Worldy, erudite and amusing, he was, I believe, a strong and, in many ways, beneficial influence on the younger staff, men like Michael Webb and Michael Strevens. I suspect they picked up many of their odder expressions and ideas from him, including – I rather fear – their habit of referring to us boys by rather surprising terms of endearment, including ‘dear heart’ and ‘duckie’.

According to Strevens – the dashing, aloof ‘Strev’ – Myles would consume four or five pints between nine o’clock and closing time and then would stagger home with a further four pints in a jug. He is said to have suffered from appalling flatulence and smelly feet, and also, occasionally, to have wet his bed, but was immune to any form of hangover. He also never wore underpants, a legacy of his own, very peculiar prep school, where they were banned. I have a feeling that we were aware of this surprising detail at the time, but shudder to think how we can have known it. One instinctively shunned him as one would an electric eel. However, I never heard of him touching any boy. Strevens told Barber that Bird had once made a botched attempt at doing so. It had been a humiliating experience and was never repeated.

Myles Raven, described by a school contemporary as ‘the idlest Scholar elected to Charterhouse in living recollection’, must have been frustrated in many ways, but schoolmastering made few demands on him and gave him limitless opportunites to indulge his obsession with cricket, not to mention his illicit fantasies about little boys. I have a vivid memory of his enquiring of us, in a Latin lesson, what part of speech ‘Eheu’ was. No one knew. ‘It’s an ejaculation!’ he said, with relish. He seemed distinctly out of place on his rare trips to London – ‘a big lump who smelt strongly of pubs’, according to one of Simon’s smarter friends. He fell down dead in 1976, at the age of 46.

Read further memories of Tormore: http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/archives/673

Readers comments are extremely welcome. The Administrator apologises if any recent comments have not been published. This is because of his reluctance to sift through the weight of spam that he receives daily through the website! In future, please email your comments to RupertWilloughby@btinternet.com.

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Posted in A Classical Education, Historical Gleanings

A Day at the Dig, Part II: Further Discoveries at Roman Silchester

August 11th, 2011

The second ‘open day’ at Roman Silchester on Saturday (6 August) was as festive as the previous one. It was attended by many hundreds of visitors of all ages. Most were locals, but others had travelled great distances, including a couple from Northamptonshire, such is the fame of the event.

Professor Michael Fulford and Amanda Clarke took turns to deliver hour-long guided tours. Deftly brandishing her microphone as if she were presenting X-Factor, Amanda brought us up to date with the latest discoveries. We were encouraged to look upon the dusty contours of the site with ‘archaeologists eyes’. She pointed to the remains of the first-century roadway that cut across a corner of Insula IX. Its orientation, apparently based on the rising and setting of the sun, would have been irksome to the Romans, who later imposed their preferred grid system on the town.

The early road was flanked on one side by a wooden palisade, with a ditch beyond it. On the other side, there were rubbish dumps and ‘natural geology’, as if it were on the very edge of town. One of the houses on this street was of high status (though wooden), and the owners had buried their little dog, perhaps a terrier, near one of the corners of the building. These people are said to have eaten fancy food off imported tableware.

A still more arresting discovery has been that of a latrine on the opposite side of the road, which will tell us all about their diet. This latrine is narrow enough to have been equipped with a wooden seat – all of which leads Amanda to believe that the indigenous population were far from being the ‘grunting savages’ of legend. (She admits that the expression ‘beautiful latrine’ is unlikely to be uttered by anyone other than an archaeologist.) Presumably, though, the urban population of Silchester were not typical of Britain as a whole. In any case, were not the Atrebates tribe themselves recent immigrants from the Continent?

On the subject of the ubiquitous latrines, they have discovered that a later well was carelessly sunk over the remains of one. Poisoned water from such ill-positioned wells may explain the abandonment of the city in the fifth century. Amanda will have the winter months in which to ponder the significance of such data.

On the Reading Museum stall, visitors were invited to handle some of the fruits of the Victorian and Edwardian excavations, of which they are the custodians. These included a delicate needle, looking as good as new, and a hair-pin from one of the Museum’s loans boxes, which are available for hire by schools and other organisations. The choicest artefacts on display were perhaps this glass jar – almost mother-of-pearl in its opacity – which was an import from the region of Haifa; and this unexplained round tile inscribed with the tiler’s stamp – LLVRIVSPRO-VL FECIT (Lucius Lurius Pro[c]ul[us] made this).

The bronze eagle on which Rosemary Sutcliff based her novel, The Eagle of the Ninth – recently filmed as The Eagle – is on permanent display in the Museum’s Silchester Gallery, along with further curious examples of the tiler’s art.

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Posted in A Classical Education, Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

A Day at the Dig: The Roman Town Life Project at Silchester, Hants.

July 24th, 2011

Yesterday’s ‘Open Day’ at Silchester, or Calleva Atrebatum to the Romans, was a typically jolly event. Hosted by the University of Reading’s Department of Archaeology, it was an opportunity to view, at close quarters, what is currently the largest archaeological excavation in Britain.

Now in its fifteenth season, the ‘Town Life’ project focuses on a small part of the 170-acre site, the so-called ‘Insula IX’. The insulae are the various quarters of the town, neatly divided by the Roman grid system and numbered by the pioneering Victorian archaeologists for their convenience. Insula IX merits investigation as it stood at the intersection of the main north-south and east-west roads and was densely packed with humble dwellings and workshops, rather than the better-understood public buildings.

Amanda Clarke, the Field School Director, is pictured (above) beside the north-south road at its fourth-century level. The built-up surface of the street is as solid as concrete but the ground behind her has been dug down to a much lower level, that of the first century. She also points (left) to the well-scorched hearth of a small building of that period, just off the street, which is marvellously evocative. There is speculation that this might have been part of a complex of military buildings. There is also substantial evidence of early round houses in Insula IX, suggesting that the indigenous population lived side by side with their conquerors, but were slow to adapt to the Roman way of life. The team have yet to find a Roman ballista still lodged in the backbone of some unfortunate, such as was famously discovered at Maiden Castle, but they live in hope.

There is an air of Glastonbury surrounding the tented village that arises here each summer. I was amused to see that some of the young and attractive team of diggers (see left) have been daring enough to pose naked for a calendar – ‘without the permission of Reading University’. All profits from Naked Archaeologists are donated to the Silchester Town Life Project and the Inner Hebrides Archaeological Project, in which they are also involved. I particularly like the picture for May. Five girls, clearly perishing cold on what was presumably an early-morning photo-call, are gazing into the city from the south wall. Their shivering backs are adorned with intricate spiral patterns of woad. The caption wittily reads: ‘Boudicca and her warriors plan their attack on the Roman town’. The tableau is historically accurate. According to Roman writers, the Ancient Britons daubed themselves with woad and charged naked into battle. There is also evidence of destruction at Silchester at the exact time of the Boudiccan revolt. I hope these girls know the correct pronunciation of her name: Bow-deeka.

A more questionable image is that for November. Entitled ‘An evening of bar sports in the Calleva Arms’, a naked man, snooker queue in hand, cocks his leg over the side of the table and leans over it as he aims his shot. The Calleva Arms is a family pub so let’s hope the picture was taken out of hours. Otherwise the images are very tasteful, and all the models are undoubtedly good sports.

In this picture, Roger Hammett of BBC Learning, based at Southampton, handles a sample of Roman ‘poo’ with a fine air of professional detachment. I hope he was duly grateful to his assistant, Sophia, who had spent hours, the previous day, kneading these unsavoury objects into shape. Introducing passing children to the thrill of archaeology in a sandpit, Sophia (right) showed a considerable knack of engaging with them and instructed them expertly in the significance of their various ‘finds’.

Here Hannah, a budding Oxford Classicist, pauses to rest during a bout of energetic digging, having just nonchalantly excavated a substantial part of the rim of a large bowl. Roman Silchester had a strikingly youthful population, few of whom would have lived beyond the age of thirty. It is touchingly appropriate that their modern counterparts should be uncovering their lives with such energy, grace and commitment.

See also my previous blog on Roman tilers and their literacy in Calleva Atrebatum.

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Posted in A Classical Education, Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

Roman Silchester, St James’s Church, Bramley and the Little London Tilery

July 24th, 2011

(From the programme of the Bramley and Little London Music Festival, June 2011)

IF WALLS COULD SPEAK: ST JAMES’S CHURCH AND THE EMPEROR NERO

Bramley and Little London’s glorious parish church dates largely from the mid-1100s and contains notable fragments of its original murals – almost universal in medieval churches, but largely lost elsewhere – including a scene of the murder of Becket. The very walls of St James’s are thus redolent of tradition and continuity. Concealed behind the exuberant medieval paintings, there is even the possibility of a link with the Emperor Nero.

The 12^th-century builders must have been intrigued and baffled by the ruins, at nearby Silchester, of a once-mighty city – the work of giants, it was said, or of the Devil. Who else could have built the formidable walls, up to eight metres in height, that surrounded it? The Saxons had never colonised the place, fearing its mournful atmosphere and its ghosts.

The site had nevertheless yielded much detritus and occasional treasure, including gold coins. Some seemed to bear the name of the ‘giant’ king, Onion. There were great quantities of dressed stone, including that from the defensive outer walls, for the taking; and the plough regularly uncovered the fallen-in roofs of the houses, with their distinctive red tiles. These proved particularly useful to the builders of our church, who imported them by the cartload to Bramley, mixing them with flint to make up the three-feet-thick walls of the new nave and chancel.

Since the 18^th century, it has been understood that Silchester was a Roman city, identifiable with the Calleva Atrebatum of the Antonine Itinerary, and that the legendary Onion was probably a misreading of ‘Constantine’. Calleva has now been excavated with greater thoroughness than any other town or city in the Empire. Many magnificent objects have been discovered – from fine mosaic floors to the famous bronze eagle on which Rosemary Sutcliff based her novel, The Eagle of the Ninth – yet none, perhaps, is as evocative as those humble tiles.

They were clearly made from local material, and in 1926 Colonel Karslake of Silchester, a diligent amateur archaeologist, identified the remains at Little London, in a field opposite ‘The Plough’, of the tilery that was probably their main source. One of Karslake’s finds, a roller-patterned flue-tile, is from the period between 80 and 200 A.D.

Karslake claimed that another of his finds (now lost) bore a round stamp with the name of the Emperor, ‘NER.CL.CAE.AVG.GR.’ (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus – the notorious Emperor Nero, 54-68 A.D.). Something similar had already been discovered in the baths at Calleva. The Little London tilery may thus have been an imperial concern, with the concession to satisfy most or all of Calleva’s requirements for tiles and bricks.

The particular fascination of the tiles (displayed in the Silchester Gallery at Reading Museum) is that many bear marks, inscriptions or even footprints. Each would be shaped in a wetted wooden mould and left to dry on the factory floor. The tile-maker would test its consistency with his finger-tips, leaving a distinctive impression. From time to time – much to his annoyance, no doubt – people and animals strayed into his yard, stepped carelessly on the wet tiles and left their footprints to harden in them and be preserved for all time. Among the culprits were a dog, a cat, a deer, a calf, a lamb, an infant and a man with a hob-nailed sandal, who had perhaps reeled out of an early forerunner of ‘The Plough’.

Remarkably and unexpectedly, the Silchester tiles are also evidence of the tile-maker’s literacy, for there are specimens on which he has written. Someone in the factory used an unbaked flue-tile as a surface for writing. He was an erudite man: the inscription ends with a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid: conticuere omnes – ‘all fell silent’. The text was probably meant to be copied as part of an on-the-job writing lesson, for tilers needed to keep written tallies. One tile is signed – fecit tubul[os] Clementinus (‘Clementinus made this flue-tile’), whilst a large brick is inscribed with the word Satis – ‘Enough’. These are truly Silchester’s equivalent of the Vindolanda tablets: intimate and personal, they are a hand-written evocation of life in Roman Britain.

RUPERT WILLOUGHBY

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Posted in A Classical Education, Historical Gleanings

From Petersfield to Margaret River – and Back: The Quest for Margaret Whicher

July 20th, 2011

The Margaret River region, in South-Western Australia, is famously wild and beautiful. It is now as well-known for its fine wines as for its whale-watching. This exotic picture has been kindly contributed by Jan Matthews of the Margaret River District Historical Society. She writes:

The view is of the Margaret River at its mouth, just about to break through to the sea. In the summer it is landlocked, but after the first winter rains it gains enough momentum to breach the sandbank and flow steadily until the next summer. I took this photo last week and since then it has broken through – an event always reported like that first cuckoo … We are enjoying a cold winter with quite a bit of rain, which is very welcome, as storages are low due to several below-average winters.

The time that my camera put on the photo is NOT accurate! It was something like 11.30am – much more civilised – and likely.

THE QUEST FOR MARGARET WHICHER

Margaret River, in South-Western Australia, is named after an Englishwoman, Margaret Whicher (1822 – 1915). A cousin of John Garrett Bussell, the pioneering settler and explorer of the region, Margaret was the eldest daughter of James Whicher, a surgeon of Petersfield, Hampshire (pictured left), and his wife Anna, daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles Norris Cookson, R.A.

John and his brothers had set sail from Portsmouth on the Warrior on 9 October 1829. While the ship was loading, the Whichers had generously sent down various treats from Petersfield. Such items as gingerbread and pickles proved to be a great comfort during the voyage, and the brothers were profuse in thanking their ‘Petersfield friends’.

In 1837, having founded Busselton, John Garrett Bussell had returned to England in search of a wife. His proposal to the pretty Margaret (she and her sisters were known in Petersfield as ‘the Bewitchers’) had unfortunately been rejected. She was only fifteen, and her father was reluctant to condemn her to a life of hardship and uncertainty in an undoubted ‘wilderness’.

John had married someone else – a capable widow – and within the year was back in Australia, helping the cartographer Arrowsmith to draw up the first map of the region. As James Whicher was one of backers of his proposed sheep-farming venture, he received the compliment of having a range of low hills named after him. The river that rises out of the Whicher Range was named after Margaret, the child-bride who might have been. John must have had a high opinion of her. None of the other ladies in his family (including his wife) has any sort of territorial feature named after her.

In 1852, Margaret (known as ‘Peggy’) married the Basingstoke solicitor Joseph Shebbeare, a man old enough to have been her father. Joseph died in 1860 and in 1876 she married Samuel Chandler, who had been Joseph’s junior partner. There were no children. Peggy’s home for nearly fifty years was a fine Tudor house (with later additions) in Church Street, known later as Queen Anne House. The building was demolished in 1966 to make way for the Basingstoke ‘megastructure’. It stood beneath what is now Marks and Spencer’s store.

As a great-great-great-nephew of Margaret, I have been delighted to assist members of the Margaret River District Historical Society in their quest for information about her (though I have usually found them to be one step ahead of me). In default of a portrait or photograph (none has been found), the search is on for her grave. On her recent visit to England, Jan Matthews and I inspected the Whicher tomb in Petersfield cemetery, but there is no evidence of Margaret being buried there. To our delight, however, we were able to tour the house on the High Street in which she was born.

Lyndum House, as it is now known, is used as offices by Dalton’s, a firm of solicitors. We were most grateful to Gill Moss-Bowpitt, the practice manager, and her cheerful staff for their hospitality. It is a large, timber-framed house of great age. We were impressed by its fine galleried staircase under a domed roof and by the master bedroom overlooking the back garden. Below it, on the ground floor, is a magnificent drawing-room with tall, shuttered windows. There would have been ample space for the many Whicher children. We even explored the spacious attic, with its series of rooms for the servants, and the narrow back garden which, at one time, ran down to the stream. It is altogether a most impressive and desirable property, sadly sold by my family after the death of James Whicher in 1875.

A full account of the Bussell brothers and of Margaret Whicher’s life in Petersfield and Basingstoke is included in my latest book, Basingstoke and Its Contribution to World Culture. See also:

http://www.petersfieldpost.co.uk/news/top_australian_wine_region_named_after_lost_love_from_petersfield_1_2666638

and

http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/archives/440

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Posted in Guest Blogs, Historical Gleanings

Constant de Thierry des Estivaux, Marquis de Faletans – Inventor of the Pencil Sharpener

July 20th, 2011

The invention of the ‘lead’ pencil is credited to the English in 1564. The inventor of the pencil sharpener was a Frenchman, Thierry des Estivaux. At Paris in 1847, he patented his design of the classic tube fitted with a narrowing cone and a blade. It was an invention that saved the fingers of generations of schoolchildren, who would otherwise have had to whittle the points of their pencils with their pocket-knives. It is an object that is universal and taken for granted.

Constant de Thierry des Estivaux was a gallant officer and patriot. He was born at Paris in 1797, the eldest son of Colonel Gaspard de Thierry, Baron des Estivaux in Lorraine, the dashing commander of the 9^th Hussars during the Wars of the Revolution, and his beautiful wife Romarine, Comtesse de Faletans et Digoine, a franc-comtoise.

In 1814, while still a schoolboy, Constant took part in the defence of Besançon, and in 1815, aged 17, fought beside his father at the Battle of Waterloo, where he five times wounded. He served in the Besançon Dragoons and, from 1822, in the Russian army, as personal aide-de-camp to his ‘uncle’, the General Comte de Langeron. One of the great men of his age, Langeron had saved the life of the ‘grand old’ Duke of York, fought the Turks under Potemkin and commanded a division at Austerlitz. A distant relative, he treated Constant as his own son.

Constant left Russia after Langeron’s death in 1831, intending to settle in Paris. At Briançon, on the French border, he was arrested, apparently on the orders of Adolphe Thiers, the Minister of the Interior. Constant’s baggage, containing Langeron’s voluminous papers, was seized. The documents eventually found their way into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, and various parts of them have since been edited and published. Without always acknowledging it, Thiers makes full use of them in his Histoire de l’Empire (published from 1845), which in turn was to provide Tolstoy with much of his background material for War and Peace (published from 1868). Langeron’s account of Weyrother’s briefing before the Battle of Austerlitz forms the basis of a particularly memorable scene (Book III, Chapter XI). Tolstoy has him toying with a gold snuffbox whilst he listens to Weyrother’s nonsense, an ironical smile on his face as he attempts to sting his vanity. Langeron, to whom Byron had already referred flatteringly in verse in Don Juan, would not have been displeased.

As far as is known, Constant was never again to be formally employed. Instead, he tried his hand as an inventor. In 1839 he took out a patent in England for one of his inventions, for some reason using the pseudonym ‘Morillon’. On 21 April 1846 he took out another patent, this time in France, for his design of a ‘palmiped propeller suitable for coastal and inland navigation’. His attempt at improved propulsion recalls the ‘pyroscaphe’, the pioneering steam-powered paddle propeller invented by his older relative, the Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, and tested on the Doubs at Beaume-les-Dames in 1776. In retirement at the Château d’Abbans-Dessus (Doubs) – pictured left – from 1816, Jouffroy d’Abbans had been a near neighbour of the Faletans (who had retreated during troubled times to their own château at Busy), perhaps passing on his passion for engineering to the young Constant. Jouffroy d’Abbans had received little reward or recognition for his invention, and had died, a needy pensioner in the Hôtel des Invalides, in July 1832. If not positively ruined by his efforts, Constant, likewise, was hardly enriched by them.

Constant de Thierry des Estivaux adopted the surname ‘de Thierry de Faletans’ in 1848 and in 1860, having settled at the Château de Faletans (Jura) – pictured left – was recognised as Marquis de Faletans, a title inherited from his uncle. He was my great-great-great-grandfather. Until recently, I had no idea that he had invented the pencil sharpener. This was surely Constant’s proudest achievement but, unfortunately, is not the basis of any family fortune. The mass production of pencils dates from the later 19^th century. The huge and continuing demand for pencil sharpeners, for use in schools and offices, took off in the early 1900s. Constant had died in 1871. He deserves to be better known.

See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taille-crayon

and

http://www.lolomolubdo.com/article-942886.html

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The Incredible Journey of Victor Hugo's Dog

Tormore School Remembered – at The Vyne and Upper Deal

June 8th, 2011

Earlier this year the National Trust mounted a splendid exhibition in the Stone Gallery at The Vyne. Slugs, Snails and Puppy Dog’s Tails documented the wartime occupation of the house by Tormore School, a preparatory school evacuated from East Kent. The story was of particular interest because I had three cousins (including two of the evacuees), an uncle and a brother at the school, and attended it myself in the 1970s.

The dining room at Tormore was adorned in my day by two large engravings of The Vyne (identical to those now in a passageway of the house) to remind us of the association. Every boy knew that F.G. (‘Fidge’) Turner, the redoubtable former headmaster and proprietor of the school, had served with Charles Chute, owner of The Vyne, during the Great War. Turner (educated at Westminster and Cambridge) was a Captain in the Dorset Regiment. Chute (Eton and Cambridge) served in a Public Schools Battalion and, like Turner, was awarded the Military Cross.

It seems that Turner had raised the possibility of evacuating his school to The Vyne in the event of a future war, to which Chute had readily agreed. Tormore’s location in East Kent, at Upper Deal, had been vulnerable at the time to Zeppelin attack. When German bombing resumed in 1940, Turner, by now an experienced headmaster, renowned for churning out record numbers of scholars and exhibitioners at leading public schools, took characteristically decisive action. On 17 May, the entire school, consisting of teaching staff and sixty boys, with bedding and other furniture, pitched up on Chute’s doorstep. They had travelled for ten hours in a pair of buses, picnicking on Reigate Heath on the way. ‘Hitler will never find you here,’ the disorientated driver had remarked as he negotiated the lanes to their final destination. Chute was equally bemused. He had been given two days notice of their arrival and – so I have been told by his relative, Francis Chute – had forgotten all about his earlier promise.

Lessons were resumed at noon the following day, mostly in the Stone Gallery, though younger boys were taught in the Tapestry Room and Further Drawing Room. The Tormore dormitories, all named after imperial heroes, were reconstituted in rooms upstairs – Wolfe, Kitchener, Clive and Nelson in the Oak Gallery; Drake, Roberts, Gordon and Wellington in the East Tower. Each boy had his own chamber pot and was entitled to a single bath per week.

The normal routine of the school was replicated as closely as possible. The boys assembled twice a day for prayers in the Chapel, with Chute himself (‘very churchy’, according to Francis) conducting the morning service. The Brewhouse was used for choir practice, gym and boxing, and also for the annual ‘Pancake Scrum’, a Westminster tradition, in which the tougher boys attempted to seize the largest portion of a pancake for a prize of half a crown. Turner, who was notoriously strict, set up his study in the Print Room, where he kept a selection of canes in an umbrella stand.

Like all schools in the war, Tormore was rapidly drained of its younger, fitter male staff, who were replaced by injured or elderly men, or by women. Some of these were decidedly eccentric. Miss Hassard was an ardent communist who taught the boys Soviet propaganda songs. It is hard to believe that Turner would have approved. There was a Miss Carey, who sounds a rather spiteful woman. She received her come-uppance during a swimming lesson in the lake, when she lured a terrified non-swimmer off the diving-board into her waiting arms. ‘His frantic struggles managed to strip Miss Carey to the waist, much to the amusement of the audience of small boys.’ The beautiful Miss Longuet-Higgins (daughter, I presume, of the Vicar of Lenham, near Ashford, and sister to two distinguished scientists), was, on the other hand, much appreciated for her charms as well as for her skills as ‘a demon fast bowler’. She left after a couple of terms, but not before a gallant Secker-Walker ma. had presented her with a Valentine’s Card ‘on behalf of all her admirers’.

Food became an obsession among boys whose morning staple was ‘tepid lumps of plaster in a sickly gruel that passed for porridge’. It was noticed that the staff enjoyed thinly-cut slices of bread with butter and marmalade for their breakfasts, while the boys had to make do with thinly spread margarine and barely perceptible quantities of jam. For lunch they were regularly treated to ‘spinach floating in water and smelling of manure’. There were instances of the staff pilfering the treats that had been sent to individual boys. At least they could count on their ‘tuck’, an allocation of boiled sweets, for which they had to queue up in alphabetical order. Some hungry boys resorted to desperate measures: ‘I. Welchman is said to have eaten a slug whole and raw,’ reported a gleeful Secker-Walker to his parents.

There was, however, seemingly endless space in which to roam, one old boy stating that, in spite of the hardships, he ‘loved the Vyne with the same intensity that I hated Upper Deal’. In Morgaston Wood, there was even the thrilling spectacle of an army ammunition dump. The boys were constantly exposed to the realities of the war. In the Chapel on Sunday evenings, they would occasionally sing a hymn chosen by a boy whose father had been reported missing or killed. There was an incident in which the aptly named Slaughter ‘walked into the staff room with an unexploded incendiary bomb’. The excitement was palpable in the build-up to D-Day. Whilst the boys were waiting for a train at Basingstoke Station at the end of term, ‘a train full of G.I.s pulled in on the opposite platform and we were showered with bars of chocolate’. On 6 June 1944, the boys saw the sky ‘filled with planes’ as the American airborne troops took off in their gliders from Aldermaston airfield, the first wave of the invasion. However, it was not until the end of the Easter Term 1945 that Turner considered it safe enough to return to Deal. Chute counted himself lucky to have been spared the destructive presence of the army.

It struck me while viewing the exhibition that the school had barely changed at all by the time I attended it in the 1970s. It still occupied its original premises – a Georgian mansion on Rectory Road, Upper Deal, with converted stables and outbuildings and, I think, thirteen acres; also The Court House, The Old House and The Yews nearby. The uniform – grey shorts and jersey, black and white tie and cap – was certainly identical; so were the names of the dormitories and of the school houses – Tanks, Terriers, Torpedoes, Tigers and Tadpoles (I was in Tanks); the daily routine (with morning and evening prayers held in the ‘Mem’ Room, a dignified shrine to the school’s casualties in both World Wars); even the annual ‘Pancake Scrum’ held in the school gym. There were also the weekly distributions of ‘tuck’, for which we still had to queue up in alphabetical order, an arrangement considered most unfair by those whose names began with W.

Turner was still alive and his influence was still felt in the school, though he had retired in the 1950s. I remember him well. Members of Tormore ‘dynasties’ like myself were invited once a term to take tea with him and his wife, a dapper, diminutive couple, at Orchard House in Deal. One was on one’s best behaviour and conformed to a strict routine. After games of bowls in the beautiful garden we would launch ourselves on a lavish tea. Mr and Mrs Turner – he was always immaculate in a three-piece suit and tie – would ask after the health of my grandmother. A fulsome ‘bread-and-butter’ letter, strictly vetted by the current headmaster who was on his best behaviour as much as we were, would be composed that evening, ready for prompt dispatch the following day.

It would astonish modern prep school children to know that we were still served the same lumpy porridge for our breakfasts (with brown sugar and milk) as our wartime predecessors. Each loaf of sliced bread would be served repeatedly until finished, although the stale left-over slices, identifiable by their curling edges, would sometimes reappear in the sickly-sweet bread-and-butter puddings with which we were also regaled. I shudder to think of them. We were consistently underfed.

As far as I remember we also had only one bath a week (or no more than two) though we were required to wash ourselves daily, queuing up in our underpants to use the washbasins, our efforts being vigorously inspected by the fearsome Matron, Miss Edith Gardiner. This harpie, sometimes kindly, sometimes manically hysterical, would twist our limbs agonisingly in order to inspect every corner of our bodies, and occasionally apply a scrubbing brush or pumice stone to those who had, in her opinion (which varied according to her mood), failed to wash themselves properly. Those of us boarding in The Old House, as I did for a term (it was run by a sad, bibulous widow, Mrs Alcock ‘and no balls’, who reeked of sherry and occasionally sprouted a black eye), depended on hand basins, which one of us had to fill from a jug of water that had been boiled downstairs.

The central heating at Tormore consisted of hot pipes around the skirting board, exactly like those in the Stone Gallery at The Vyne, on which the prefects were allowed to scald the hands of recalcitrant younger boys. There was none of that in my day: the pipes were rarely turned on, and it was punishment enough to be freezing cold all winter. I do remember that the cane was retained in the headmaster’s study as a constant threat. I never received it myself, though I was ‘slippered’ on at least one occasion (when, as the senior boy in ‘Drake’, I was the scapegoat for the whole dormitory during a rowdy ‘midnight feast’). Such punishments may have been character-building, but they are now illegal.

I remember with horror having to go out for ‘Games’ on freezing winter days, sometimes, it seemed, in raging blizzards; chapped legs and chilblains were endemic. As my brother remarks, there is no hardship he cannot face after Tormore. It was certainly a Spartan institution, in a bleak, remote, windswept setting. Boarders at the school were no better off than prisoners, confined for weeks on end to its four walls, and probably with fewer comforts. I rarely saw my parents in term-time and was constantly homesick, which amounted to prolonged trauma for a child. However, I think of Tormore with great gratitude and affection for the skill and commitment of the masters and for the first-class education that they provided. I think particularly of my last headmaster, John Hare (an old Tormore boy himself, then Repton and Brasenose), who began gradually to modernise the school. His last job had been at Millfield. I was delighted by one of Hare’s early pronouncements, on ‘tuck’ day: ‘The distribution of sweetmeats will be conducted in reverse alphabetical order’. His beautiful wife ‘Mo’, known as ‘Nefertiti’, made many improvements to the menu, even introducing egg and chips as a Saturday evening treat. Hare was a rigorous, gifted teacher, whose lessons were exciting and challenging. He and characters like Myles Raven, Michael Webb, John Budden and Adrian Rawlins gave me the groundwork of knowledge on which I have depended ever since, with the emphasis on the Classics, the Scriptures, British history, political geography, English literature and French, all subjects that are more or less sidelined in modern schools. For good or ill, Tormore has made me the man I am today.

For the history of the school in brief see http://www.eastkenthistory.org.uk/place:tormore

For details of my book, Sherborne St John and The Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen, please refer to my ‘Books’ page.

The Vyne now has an individual website which includes a note about Tormore and a link to this page (click on ‘Things to see and do’, then ‘The House’) – http://beta.nationaltrust.org.uk/vyne.

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Peter Fleming and Nettlebed Church: Reflections on Mortality

February 7th, 2011

After lunch with my enchanting, hospitable cousins at Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, we repaired to the adjacent churchyard. I was interested to see the grave of Peter Fleming (1907-1971), one of my literary heroes, as the epitaph inscribed on the headstone, composed by Fleming himself, is a particularly fine example of this art form.

He travelled widely in far places:

Wrote, and was widely read.

Soldiered, saw some of danger’s faces,

Came home to Nettlebed.

The squire lies here, his journeys ended –

Dust, and a name on a stone –

Content, amid the lands he tended,

To keep this rendezvous alone.

R.P.F.

Peter Fleming, who lived at Merrimoles House on his 2,000-acre estate at Nettlebed and was married to the actress Celia Johnson, is best known for his Brazilian Adventure (1933) and for accounts of his travels in Asia. His wartime service was with the Grenadier Guards and as head of ‘D’ Division in south-east Asia.

In a single sheet of instructions headed ‘R.P.F.: FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS’, Fleming anticipates that the epitaph ‘may require a “Faculty”, and involve a skirmish with ecclesiastical bureaucracy’, but any such impediments were, happily, overcome. This is said to have been ‘the only serious poem he ever wrote’. (Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (London, 1974), pp.400-1.)

Such panache even in death! Fleming was fortunate also to have John Piper as a near neighbour, who designed this beautiful stained-glass window (top) as his memorial in the church – and it boasts a second, even finer Piper window in memory of Dr Robin Williamson, also illustrated here (left).

The best epitaphs are those which cause one to pause and reflect on mortality. With incredible coolness and composure, Sir Walter Ralegh recast the final verses of his earlier poem, ‘Nature that washed her hands in milk’, on the eve of his execution in 1618. He is said to have left them ‘att the Gate howse’ of Whitehall Palace, as if intending them as an epitaph:

Even such is time which takes in trust

Our youth, our Joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust:

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

And from which earth and grave and dust

The Lord shall raise me up I trust.

Perhaps the finest example of an epitaph in the English language is that of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) on his headstone at Drumcliffe, County Sligo –

Cast a cold eye

On life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!

– though these are actually the last lines of one of Yeats’s final poems, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, and were not composed specifically as an epitaph.

I have recently come across a touching epitaph from a place near Melitene (Malatya, Turkey) in the Byzantine period, when the local population were bilingual in Greek and Arabic and tolerant of each other’s religions. A stranger from what is now Iraq had settled there and had befriended a local man, possibly a doctor. When the stranger died, his friend had him buried according to Islamic custom – oriented towards Mecca – and had the following Arabic verses carved on his tomb:

I went on long journeys,

travelling hither and thither in search of wealth,

and the misfortunes of time overtook me,

as you can see.

I wish I knew whether my friends cried

when they lost me

or whether they even knew.

(From The Book of Strangers: Medieval Arabic Graffiti on the Theme of Nostalgia, trans. Patricia Crone and Shmuel Moreh (Princeton, 2000), p.40.)

However, the pithiest epitaphs are from the classical world, the most famous of all being that by Simonides, which, according to Herodotus, was inscribed on a slab on the burial-mound of the Spartans at Thermopylae:

Go tell them in Lacadaemon, passer-by,

That here, obedient to their word, we lie.

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Macintosh versus Burberry: Basingstoke’s Greatest Contribution to World Culture?

January 18th, 2011

Mr Toad models Burberry

The Daily Telegraph has reported (13 January 2011) the ‘Stylish return of the mac’. Apparently, ‘classic Mackintosh (sic) looks from the archives’ are to be re-worked by the Japanese company that has bought the brand, and sold in up-market shops.

However, the true pioneer of the raincoat was not Charles Macintosh but Thomas Burberry, the Basingstoke draper. The rubberised ‘Macs’ were sticky, smelly, easily punctured garments, apt to melt in hot weather and to stiffen in cold – a crude concept compared to Burberry’s silky ‘Gabardine’. Burberry’s ‘Trench Coat’, originally intended for officers in the Great War, came to be considered the height of sophistication and chic, but no person of fashion has ever dreamed of wearing a ‘Mac’.

Burberry modelled his gabardine on the peasant smock, which in the 1870s was still a common sight in Basingstoke. The story of Burberry is told in my new book, Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture.

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The Homing Instinct of Dogs

July 21st, 2010

On 1 June, it was reported in The Daily Telegraph that a nervous whippet-terrier cross named Jack, who had fled into woods whilst on a country walk with his owners, had somehow made his way home to Penistone (sic), South Yorks, along an unfamiliar and hazardous 15-mile route that would have involved his crossing both a by-pass and the M1 motorway. His delighted owner discovered him asleep on the doorstep, exhausted and with his feet covered in sores, a day and a half after he had gone missing. The case is further remarkable evidence of the homing instinct of dogs.

Perusing that obscure but delightful monograph, Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt, by a Sexagenarian (1865), I discover two more. The anonymous author is Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen’s favourite nephew. He writes (p.17) that, in the mid-18th century, Lord Craven would bring his hounds every season to Dummer, near Basingstoke, and hunt the adjoining country. ‘Two or three draft hounds had been sent by Lord Craven to Blair Athol in Scotland, and had been taken part of the way by sea, but found their way back to the kennel at Dummer in some marvellously short space of time.’

He further writes: ‘A relation of mine knew of an instance somewhat similar. A neighbour of his, who kept harriers in the Cotswold Hills, had sent a hound to a pack in Essex, about twenty miles beyond London; I do not know whether on foot or in a carriage. When he was taken out with the pack in Essex, he was observed to be with them when the first hare was killed, but was missed soon afterwards. Some time in the next day, he was found at his old kennel in Gloucestershire. Both these cases seem to prove that dogs are directed to their point by some inexplicable instinct, though they know nothing of the intermediate space which they have to traverse.’

Perhaps the most spectacular example is part of my own family legend. Victor Hugo had a poodle (not a toy poodle, rather the sturdy, water-retrieving type) named Baron, of whom he was very fond. Baron nevertheless demanded constant attention and interfered with his master’s writing. One evening, early in 1877, my grandmother’s grandfather, the Marquis de Faletans, was attending Hugo’s salon in his fourth floor apartment in Paris, at 21 rue de Clichy. Hugo noticed him making a fuss of the dog. ‘Does Baron please you?’ he said. ‘He’s yours!’ Eight days later they departed for Russia, where my ancestor was to reside for a time with his wife at Great Bokino, her country estate, some 200 miles south-east of Moscow.

Regular news was sent to the Hugos, but in mid-December, after a period of ominous silence, the Marquis reluctantly reported that the dog was missing, feared seized by a wolf or a bear.

Hugo, who had resigned himself to the loss, was roused from his bed on Christmas morning by his cook, who lived on the ground floor. An exhausted, emaciated Baron had appeared on the doorstep, and announced himself with frantic barks. Old Hugo was touched to the core, and amazed that Baron had travelled a distance of nearly 2,000 miles in less than a month. He resolved that they should never again be parted, and, indeed, Baron accompanied the family to Guernsey and later to a new apartment in Paris, where he died, a few months before his master, in 1884. Despite extensive investigations, none of the details of his incredible journey had ever been discovered.

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