Kristine Hughes – Page 269 – Number One London

Happy 62nd Birthday, Prince Charles

On this day a few years back Prince Charles became the oldest of all Princes of Wales since the title was attributed. In January 2008 Charles became the world’s longest serving heir apparent, passing the record of 59 years and 73 days previously held by King Edward VII, when he succeeded his mother Queen Victoria and ruled for just nine years.

In 2008, a former aide told The Sunday Times, “Charles realised long ago that he would spend most of his life as heir, not as king. His is a family marked by longevity and his mother is in good health. He has made the most of it. He has enjoyed more freedom (than if he had been king) and achieved a tremendous amount in terms of charity and public life.”

You can watch a CBS retrospective of the Prince and his wait for the throne that was broadcast on this day two years ago here.

Regency Interiors – Do Not Try This At Home

Interior, Royal Pavilion, Brighton

Ah, the Regency and it’s interiors . . . a style so captivating that it’s essence has been re-vamped, re-thought and re-invented to this day. In his quintessential book on the topic, Regency Style, author Steven Parissien writes, “The Regency was a marvelous period for the visual arts. It was a time in architecture when Palladian grandeur was fused with Neo-Classical academicism and with the vivid visions of gifted designers such as Soane and Hope. Colours were more exotic and vibrant than they had been for centuries . . . ”

Nowhere was the Regency more exotic or vibrant than at George IV’s Brighton Pavilion. Awash in period fabrics and paints and filled with global geegaws and every concievable architectural embellishment, it still stands as an ode to excess.

Regency interiors on a much more realistic level can be seen at the Regency Town House in Hove, above, where I had the pleasure of visiting and meeting Dr. Nick Tyson several years ago. The Regency Town House is a five storey, Grade 1 Listed, terraced house of the mid 1820’s, designed by the Regency architect Charles Augustin Busby where Tyson heads a project to restore the townhouse to it’s original period state. The partition walls were pulled down and the original features painstakingly repaired or replaced. Tyson and his team made visits to neighbouring houses on the Square to search for examples of the original ceiling roses, fireplaces and plasterwork.Their efforts included painstakingly stripping the paint from the walls, layer by layer, and dating each color until they reached the original, Regency paint. Here, Regency architectural elements exist, but they are on a much more realistic, and liveable, scale than those found at the Pavilion.

A restored ceiling rose at the Regency Town House

Architecture aside, Regency furnishings were defined by Egyptian, Chinese and Neo-Classical influences – a fact which 20th – 21st century interior designers either never knew or choose to forget. The term “Regency” as applied to design has become distilled. Today, “Regency” is a designation applied to hotels, dry cleaners, limo services and a host of other businesses in the hopes of giving them a little class. In design, the essence of what defines the Regency has been re-interpreted through the years and all but vanished. The Hollywood Regency style was characterized by high glamour and glitz and emerged through the work of interior designers the likes of Dorothy Draper, Elsie de Wolfe, and William (Billy) Haines, who in the 1930’s decorated the homes of movie stars during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

In the 1930’s, Dorothy Draper took on a design project at Hampshire House, an apartment building located at Central Park South in New York, where she installed a mix of English and Italian baroque styles throughout, while adding oversized black and white doors, plaster reliefs carved in the ornate style of Grinling Gibbons and, of all things, chairs that look like nothing so much as modified Hall Porter’s chairs.

In fact, a few years back, decorators collectively took to installing Hall Porter’s chairs everywhere – including restaurants, such as that located within Bergdorf Goodman in New York, below.

In one of my parallel careers (magazine editor, travel writer, food critic), exactly which I cannot now remember, I reviewed a restaurant located within a Miami Beach hotel. It had just been revamped and the decorator had opted to use Hall Porter’s chairs as seating at some of the tables. After approving my review, the hotel’s PR person called to ask if I could change the phrase Hall Porter’s chair to Porter’s hall chair in the text. She thought it sounded better and that’s the term their decorator had used. I told her (emphatically) that I could not. And why. I did not tell her that her decorator obviously had no idea what a Hall Porter’s chair was, how it had been employed, much less why it was designed as it was -with it’s curving wing backs – in order to keep draughts off the heads and necks of the servants who had to sit in it all night long so as to be ready to open the door when their masters arrived home late at night. The fact remains that a Hall Porter’s chair was a piece of furniture meant to be used by a servant and no self respecting Regency homeowner would have used them otherwise. They certainly would not have felt honoured if made to sit in one whilst eating their dinner.

Nowadays, there has evolved yet another incarnation of the Regency design – Vogue Regency. And a 2008 book called Regency Redux: High Style Interiors: Napoleonic, Classical Moderne, and Hollywood Regency written by Emily Evans Eerdmans attempts to explain the various incarnations of Regency style through the 1940’s.

What remains inexplicable is why designers do not avail themselves of comtemporary sources, beginning with Rudolph Ackermann, in order to get the basis for their designs right. I suppose I might not be so aghast at some in the design world reinterpreting Regency style if they had any idea of the actual origins of the concept. Porter’s Hall chairs . . . . I ask you!

An Account of a Duel at Bath

The following is an extract from “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay (1841):

A barbarous and fiercely-contested duel was fought in November 1778, between two foreign adventurers, at Bath, named Count Rice and the Vicomte du Barri. Some dispute arose relative to a gambling transaction, in the course of which Du Barri contradicted an assertion of the other, by saying, “That is not true!” Count Rice immediately asked him if he knew the very disagreeable meaning of the words he had employed. Du Barri said he was perfectly well aware of their meaning, and that Rice might interpret them just as he pleased. A challenge was immediately given and accepted. Seconds were sent for, who, arriving with but little delay, the whole party, though it was not long after midnight, proceeded to a place called Claverton Down, where they remained with a surgeon until daylight. They then prepared for the encounter, each being armed with two pistols and a sword.

The ground having been marked out by the seconds, Du Barri fired first, and wounded his opponent in the thigh. Count Rice then levelled his pistol, and shot Du Barri mortally in the breast. So angry were the combatants, that they refused to desist; both stepped back a few paces, and then rushing forward, discharged their second pistols at each other. Neither shot took effect, and both throwing away their pistols, prepared to finish the sanguinary struggle by the sword. They took their places, and were advancing towards each other, when the Vicomte du Barri suddenly staggered, grew pale, and, falling to the ground, exclaimed, “Je vous demande ma vie.” His opponent had but just time to answer, that he granted it, when the unfortunate Du Barri turned upon the grass, and expired with a heavy groan. The survivor of this savage conflict was then removed to his lodgings, where he lay for some weeks in a dangerous state.

The coroner’s jury, in the mean while, sat upon the body of Du Barri, and disgraced themselves by returning a verdict of manslaughter only. Count Rice, upon his recovery, was indicted for the murder notwithstanding this verdict. On his trial he entered into a long defence of his conduct, pleading the fairness of the duel, and its unpremeditated nature; and, at the same time, expressing his deep regret for the unfortunate death of Du Barri, with whom for many years he had been bound in ties of the strictest friendship. These considerations appear to have weighed with the jury, and this fierce duellist was again found guilty of manslaughter only, and escaped with a merely nominal punishment.

Curiosity Corner – We Have a Winner!

Diane Gaston is the winner. Oh, Lord, Diane. I know just how you found out and I could kick myself. Sigh. You’re the winner, no matter your methods. Your loyalty to our blog excuses all and you’re certainly a clever puss. A wine cork retriever it is. And you can bet I won’t make THAT mistake again! Email me your snail mail and I’ll get the dvd out to you pronto. . . good guesses, Kat! Thanks for playing everyone! Look for a brand new type of contest coming soon. Hint: Sharpen your pencils.

The first person to correctly identify this item will win a DVD of the Amanda Root/Ciaran Hinds version of Persuasion. Please place your guess by using the “comments” link below this post.

Please Note: Only registered followers of this blog shall be eligible to win. You may register now by using the link in the right sidebar under “Those Who Call Number One London Home.”

Good Luck!

London A – Z

The London A-Z, that indispensable guide to the streets and landmarks of the City, has been used by countless numbers of people seeking to navigate London’s streets. Everyone has heard of the London A-Z, though most have no clue as to it’s origins.

Meet Phyllis Pearsall – the eccentric British artist who single-handedly mapped London’s A-Z and created a publishing phenomenon. Born Phyllis Isobella Gross, her lifelong nickname was PIG. The artist daughter of a flamboyant Hungarian Jewish immigrant, and an Irish Italian mother, her bizarre and often traumatic childhood did not keep her from becoming one of Britain’s most intriguing entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires. Pearsall was left to her own devices as a teenager, especially after her father had gone bankrupt and fled to the U.S. Pearsall herself told an interviewer that one day soonafter, she returned home to find the door was answered by the fully decked-out Maharajah of Patiala, who was in the midst of having his portrait painted by Alfred Orr, Phyllis’s mother’s lover. ”Then mother said: ‘Alfred has an artistic temperament and couldn’t possibly have a little girl in the house. Get a live-in job,’ ” Mrs. Pearsall related.

Displaying much pluck, at the age of 14 Pearsall went to France to teach English at a girls school at Fecamp. With French as her second language she went on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, always living on the edge of poverty, sleeping on the street under a newspaper blanket and drying her laundry on library radiators.

Eventually earning a meagre living by painting portraits and writing articles for various magazines and newspapers, Pearsall returned to England and in 1926 met and married Richard Pearsall. The marriage lasted for about eight years, during which time she had established a reputation for her writing and for her etchings and painting and the couple moved to Spain. Eight years later, the 30-year-old Pearsall became a divorcee, returned to London and turned to full-time portrait painting in order to support herself.

Some accounts say that it was the difficulty Pearsall had in finding the homes of her portrait sitters in London that prompted her to create the A-Z. Others that she couldn’t find the address of a party she wanted to attend in Belgravia. Still other accounts relate that Pearsall’s father, Alexander Gross, wrote to ask her to publish in England a map of the world produced by the map company he’d built in the United States – after losing the map company he had originally established in Fleet Street. Reluctantly she agreed, and had to learn all the technical jargon involved in reproduction and printing before setting about selling direct to the customer. It was on one of these selling expeditions that she got lost because of the out-of-date London street map she was using. This was the beginning of her idea of how useful an up-to-date map would be – a map that all could use for business and pleasure.

Without hesitation she covered London’s 23,000 streets on foot during the course of one year, often leaving her Horseferry Road bedsit at dawn. Pearsall collected street names, house numbers along main roads, bus and tram routes, stations, buildings, museums, palaces etc, in addition compiling the street index in alphabetical order.To publish the map, and in light of its enormous success, she set up her own company, The Geographer’s Trust, which still publishes the London A-Z and that of every major British city. The first A-Z was published in 1936. She abandoned the traditional design of the large fold out map in favour of a book format where each page was a small section of a large-scale map. All of the streets were coded to enable them to be referenced, indexed and searched for. Pearsall printed 10,000 copies of her maps, selling them as indefatigably as she had compiled them. She persuaded a reluctant buyer at W. H. Smith, the British bookseller, to place an order for 250 copies, promising a refund if they went unsold. The maps were an instant success, and have sold countless millions of copies since.

Pearsall ran her publishing company successfully for many years and reported to work well into her 80’s, arriving in a red Mercedes that she bought at the age of 59, when she passed her driving test after taking more than 200 lessons.

Mrs. Pearsall wrote several books, including an account of her trips through Spain, a collection of short stories, a company history and a volume describing her business philosophy, in which she advocated generosity (”bonuses to everyone”), courtesy (”no aggressive selling”) and frugality (”Micawber housekeeping”). In 1986 she was made a Member of the British Empire.

Phyllis Pearsall died at Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex on 28 August 1996 at age 89.

What a dame.

Blue Plaque at Pearsall’s former home in Court Gardens Lane, London

To read further on the subject, we suggest Mrs.P’s Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map by Sarah Hartley.

Victoria here, chiming in to remind readers of the historical A to Z series, of special value to researchers and writers. You can acquire them from several sources – just Google it. I bought my copy of The A to Z of Regency London at the Guildhall in the City of London. Good research library there too! The six versions of the A to Z’s of historic London are: Elizabethan, Restoration, Georgian, Regency, Victorian and Edwardian. Make your choice(s) according to the focus of your interests.

Here is the London Topgraphical Society description: “Our A to Z series consists of six books, which provide fully-indexed maps of London at roughly 100 year intervals. Each reproduces a key map of the period. The indexes allow users to identify the position of streets and buildings, in some cases right down to small courts and alleys. They appeal to anyone interested in the development of London and are invaluable for those researching family history. The A to Z volumes are published in association with Harry Margary and the Guildhall Library.”