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Save Hougoumont!

The following email was passed on from the Historical Novel Society and we in turn are now passing it on to you, as we feel it may be of interest.  During the Battle of Waterloo, Chateau Hougoumont was the scene of almost constant fighting, hour upon hour of artillery, fires, attacks from waves of soldiers. Hundreds of men died inside and out. It is certainly worth commemorating.

PROJECT HOUGOUMONT

Dear All,

I am sending this e mail to a number of friends who I think might be interested in history, or may know someone who has such an interest. I am on the committee of Project Hougoumont, the official organization that plans to restore the Farm at Hougoumont, on the battlefield of Waterloo. In cooperation with the local and federal authorities in Belgium, we are hoping to raise approximately 40% of the cost of the renovation of this historic centre of the battle that changed the course of history on June 18th, 1815.

Project Hougoumont also has the agreement of the Belgian Authorities to commission a monument that will be placed inside the gates at Hougoumont in memory of the British Army that fought at Waterloo. You may be surprised to learn that whilst there are monuments to the French, Belgian, Hanoverian, Nassau and Prussian forces that fought in the great battle, there has never been a monument to the British officers and men who formed the greater part of Wellington’s army.

To accomplish the above, we wish to set up a network of interested people who may wish to take part in this historic event. You may wish to help sponsor this project or at least be kept informed of its progress. The project has developed a very novel idea for fund raising that will name sponsors on a Roll of Honour that will be kept at Waterloo for all time. Future generations will be able to see the Roll of Honour on a computer and in a series of volumns located in the farmhouse at Hougoumont.

Project Hougoumont would like to e-mail you on a regular basis to up date you on progress with the restoration of the farm and the commissioning of the monument. We have set up a secure network that ensures that your e-mail address is not circulated to anyone without your permission, and we will require your agreement to put your name on our networking list. All of us at Project Hougoumont welcome your interest in this exciting project. Read more on our website.

Best wishes, Steve Stanton

Closing the Gates at Hougoumont, an imaginative painting
by Scottish artist Robert Gibb (1845-1932)

Youthful Politicians

Much has been made of the youth of new British Prime Minister David Cameron, 43, and Nick Clegg, deputy PM, also age 43. Perhaps it is a time of young men in power. Here are their facebook pages: Cameron and Clegg.


 Clegg is on the left and Cameron on the right, in the picture that is, and probably in their politics.
   
To lots of observers this seems like a real wonder. In fact, I think some early stories on both sides of the Atlantic talked about the youngest PM ever. Nonsense!!


Those of us who love history remember learning about several young PMs, not to mention U.S. Presidents. For example, William Pitt (1759-1809), usually characterized as ‘the Younger’ became Prime Minister at age 24. Yes, 24!!!

The portrait at right is attributed to Gainsborough. Pitt served two terms, separated by a few years. He died short of age 50, probably of stress and the effects of overimbibing his Port.

Some of the recent news stories about PM Cameron referenced Robert Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool (1770-1828), who took office as Prime Minister in 1812 at age 42. He occupied the office for fifteen eventful years, through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna, the disruptions of the postwar period and most of the rule of George IV as the Prince Regent and King after 1820. After a stroke in 1827, he resigned office and lived on just a short time, dying at 58, relatively young when one considers the age of Sir Winston Churchill who was PM for the second time until he was 81 and died at age 90.

Tony Blair, just a few years ago, became PM at age 43, though he was practically on the eve of the more respectable 44. Born in 1953, he retired as PM in 1997 at age 54.

U.S. President Barack Obama was 47 at his election. The youngest U.S. President was Teddy Roosevelt, at age 42.  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was 43, Bill Clinton, 46, and Grover Cleveland at 47 matched the current president.

Take a virtual tour of No. 10 Downing Street here.

The London and Waterloo Tour – Book and Print Sellers

Books, glorious books! What better reason to go to London than to browse the second hand and antiquarian book shops? Oh, the musty smell of the stacks, the light coating of dust atop the books, the heart stopping finds one occasionally makes! I once came home from England with, quite literally, a huge suitcase full of books. I crammed my personal items into a duffel and used the suticase for the books. The customs agent couldn’t believe it. Nor could either of us lift it.

On our London/Waterloo tour, Victoria and I have set aside a day to do the book shops on Charing Cross Road and the adjacent Cecil Court, to be followed by print buying at Grosvenor Prints.
Charing Cross Road runs immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles’ Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street) and then becomes Tottenham Court Road.

Charing Cross Road is renowned for its specialist and second-hand bookshops and more general second-hand and antiquarian shops such as Quinto Bookshop, Henry Pordes and Any Amount of Books. Oh, the books I’ve found at Pordes! This trip out, I’ll be looking for letters, diaries and journals of the day(s), as per usual, and anything Regency, as per usual, and whatever else I may fall over that strikes my fancy, as per usual. And I must make a list of all the authors I want to search for – British authors whose books are hard to find here. I know that Victoria will be looking for books by Angela Thirkell.

Smaller second-hand and specialist antiquarian bookshops can be found in the adjoining Cecil Court, where shops selling specialist books (children’s, theatre, travel, etc) stand side by side and where both Victoria, Diane Gaston and myself have picked up prints and maps in the past. The shopfronts have not been altered in more than a century and the traditional hanging signs announce specialists in rare and antiquarian books, maps and prints and all manner of related printed material including stamps and banknotes. It was at David Drummond’s shop, Pleasures of Past Times, that I picked up a favorite Regency find – a ticket of admission to view the trappings installed at Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of George IV.

Victoria and I will be ending our day at Grosvenor Prints. You’ll find in a previous post that I’ve already been to this printseller’s shop and bought a number of prints related to the Duke of Wellington. While they have a searchable online catalogue, the bulk of their stock is kept in folders in the basement and when you arrive, you can tell the salesperson what you’re interested in. Then you sit down to wait for a few minutes and they return from the depth with treasures untold. This time, Victoria and I are going to email ahead in order to let them know what we’re looking for and when we’ll be in. While I’ll be seeking prints related to the Duke of Wellington (surprise!), Victoria is looking to add to her collection of fashion prints from 1800 to 1820 and for engravings of Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, Princess Charlotte, Lady Melbourne, Lady Cowper, Lady Palmerston and other ladies of the period. We promise to let you know what we find.

Continued below . . . .

As a side note, I wanted to let you know about another Charing Cross Road. A long-standing correspondence between New York based author Helene Hanff and the staff of a now defunct bookstore on the street, Marks and Co., was the inspiration for the book 84 Charing Cross Road (1970). The book was made into a 1986 film with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins and also into a play and a BBC radio drama. Any bibliophile, especially an American bibliophile, will be enchanted by the letters that pass from Ms. Hanff to the staff and vice versa during her years of placing orders with them. Friendships develop, news is exchanged and family events shared. Both the book and movie are both charming and touching and highly recommended.

England in the Movies, continued…

From Victoria…

In my last list were some great films. In this list, some of them were television series and all come from classic English novels.  Let me warn that I am not including any of the Jane Austen adaptations, because I intend to write about them in another post. Later.

Thomas Hardy was a great Victorian novelist whose long, dark novels can be the bane of English literature students. But he is also a brilliant prose artist, and he wrote many passages in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) which are absolutely poetic. My favorite film version is Tess by director Roman Polanski (1980) which captures the poetic quality of the countryside and in the personality of Tess, played by Nastassia Kinski.  Subsequent versions are not as well done, in my opinion.

George Elliot (aka Mary Ann Evans 1819-1880) wrote several novels I passed up for many years because I had to read Silas Marner in 7th grade. I hated it.  But when I finally discovered her Middlemarch (1871), I loved the book. The BBC version screenplay was written by Andrew Davies, one of Britain’s premier adapters of great novels for the screen.  I saw it first on Masterpiece Theatre in 1994, starring Juliet Aubrey and Rufus Sewell.

If you want to try Silas Marner or Mill on the Floss or other Eliot stories, you might be interested in this collection from BBC Video. Personally, I like Middlemarch the best by far.

My favorite of the celebrated films of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory is Room With a View (1985), from the novel of the same name written by E. M. Forster which appeared in 1908. Starring Maggie Smith and Helena Bonham Carter, the film is lyrical and compelling, both at the same time.  The trio of Merchant as producer and Ivory as director with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as screen writer is also responsible for two more favorites of mine: Howard’s End (1992), also based on a Forster novel, and Remains of the Day (1993), based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray has been filmed or on television in at least six versions.  I can’t pretend to have seen all of them, but the last several I have watched and my choice among them is the miniseries from the BBC from 1998 starring Natasha Little as Becky Sharp, one of literature’s most fascinating non-heroines. Thackeray called Vanity Fair a novel without a hero and so it is. The screenplay for the 1998 version was written by Andrew Davies and the extended length allows the whole story to unfold. See an excerpt here. The music is not from the film but the thought is correct!

Cold Comfort Farm is humourous novel by Stella Gibbons, published in 1932 which parodies many novels comparing urban and rural life. The 1995 film starred Kate Beckinsale as Flora, Eileen Atkins as Judith Starkadder, and Rufus Sewell as Seth.  It is very funny and worth watching several times.

If you think I am obsessed with the films of Rufus Sewell in these two movie posts, just wait until I do a post just about him. Sigh. 

Can’t wait, can you?

The Curiosity Corner

Where, in London, was the picture below taken? You’ll have to make a lofty guess. If so, email us with your guess.The person with the first correct guess wins a copy of Kristine’s research CD containing both the Guide to Research and the London Almanac. Hint: it is not in the City of London proper, meaning the Square Mile.

We have a winner! Kathleen Hendeson correctly guessed the Kensington Roof Gardens, off Kensington High Street, a restaurant and entertainment venue owned by Richard Branson.




We will definitely have to make these harder from now on . . . . .