Month: January 2018

A Chinese president and a non-takeaway

Today we visited somewhere we have driven past on countless occasions over the years, a classic example of tourist’s doorstep law (you don’t bother looking at things under your nose).  After a morning examining two ancient hillfort sites, one at Cholesbury Camp and one at nearby Pulpit Hill, we wandered into the Plough at Cadsden, a tiny hamlet near Princes Risborough.

The Plough has been around in one form or another for over 400 years, starting life as a coaching inn and, so the legend has it, hosting a wake for John Hampden as supporters brought his body back from Thame, where he died after the Battle of Chalgrove. More recently, several Prime Ministers have popped in for a drink; the ying and yang of British politics from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, and more recently David Cameron.

In 2015 Mr Cameron took Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, to the Plough for a pint and a fish and chip meal, as part of continuing negotiations over trade and diplomatic relations.  The following year, reports stated that the owner had sold the Plough to Chinese investors.  Less impressively, Mr and Mrs Cameron contrived to leave their daughter Nancy unattended at the pub for about 15 minutes, during the summer of 2012.  Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?

If the evidence of our visit today is anything to go by, this unfortunate incident hasn’t deterred other families from bringing their young children to the Plough for Sunday lunch.  As we left, a van with a group of young Chinese businessmen rolled up.  Even muddy-shoed walkers aren’t a problem, with overshoes available in the porch.  And the lunch – shoulder of lamb and steak and ale pie, in our cases – was a splendid reward for yomping up Pulpit Hill.

Marlow’s Siberian connection

Marlow has boasted several famous writers as residents: TS Eliot, the Shelleys, Isaak Walton. But the town’s most extraordinary author was surely Kate Marsden (1859-1931), who became a writer by chance: she was a nurse, who first became obsessed with the need to find a cure for leprosy while working on a Red Cross mission in Bulgaria. Later, in Constantinople, Marsden heard reports of the existence of a rare herb which could alleviate or even cure the disease – in the Yakutsk region of Siberia.

The superbly titled On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers (1892) tells the story of her journey, with another woman as assistant and translator, across 11,000 inhospitable Russian miles (by train and boat as well as sledge and horseback), searching for the elusive herb and treating the sick as she went.  Marsden travelled with the approval of the Empress of Russia and of Queen Victoria, who presented her with an angel-shaped brooch on her return.

Marsden became one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, and her efforts raised over £2,000 for a leper hospital in Vilyuysk.  Some pundits doubted her account of the journey – though it was no less improbable than those of male writers who had travelled in Russia around that time.  Others insinuated that Marsden was attempting to “atone” for acts of homosexuality.

Siberians, perhaps predictably, were and are more sympathetic.  Residents of Vilyuysk funded the construction of a special monument in Marsden’s memory, which was opened in 2014.

The carelessness of Queen Elizabeth II

I admit it – that heading’s clickbait. As it happens, my view is that our current monarch is one of the more blameless people in British public life today. She has served, stoically and dutifully, for well over 60 years. She’s even had to put up with weekly meetings with 13 different Prime Ministers. So I’m not really criticising Her Majesty. But I do have a bone to pick with her team – or rather my wife does – and, as per the title reference to a well-known play and film about one of her predecessors, it does have something to do with George III. Tell me more, I hear you say…

It’s all to do with Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world and one of HMQ’s official residences.  Surely the phrase “nothing to see here” was never less appropriate than here. You could end up with a permanently slack jaw and a cricked neck, and no doubt some of the hordes of visitors do.  Suit of armour, on a horse, by the Grand Staircase? Check.  The musket ball that killed Nelson? It’s here.  A special room to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo? Naturellement. And that’s before we even get to the State Apartments, built for Charles II and much altered since, or St George’s Chapel.

I could go on. But I shan’t. Because one of the best, if not the best line manager I ever had used to tell me: “Look for what isn’t there.”  Now Windsor Castle is justifiably proud, among other things, of its art collection. Some of it could claim your attention, and mental speculation, for hours if you weren’t in a hurry. For instance: The five eldest children of Charles I (Van Dyck, 1637) in the Queen’s Ballroom; is the dog unfeasibly large or are the children implausibly small?  But my attention is on a painting that isn’t there.

It used to be. George III and the Prince of Wales Reviewing Troops used to be in the State Drawing Room. The King commissioned it, the Prince was not in the preliminary sketches but sat for it later and the final work went to the Royal Academy in 1798.  A smaller version is in the collection (but not on display) at the National Army Museum.  The original was the work of Sir William Beechey (1753-1839), who escaped a possible career as a lawyer to specialise in painting portraits of royalty and other “people of quality” including Queen Charlotte and Lord Nelson.  Beechey may have been a bit of a toady to get all those commissions but his portraits, as someone wrote fifty years after his death, “have maintained a respectable second rank.”

William had two marriages – the second to a painter of miniatures – from which he fathered 21 children.  Of course, names do change, disappear and sometimes re-appear down the generations. But it so happens that my wife Helen’s maiden name was Beechey.  Since William came from Burford, not too far from the Buckinghamshire of my in-laws and their ancestors, a family legend has persisted that those ancestors include William.  It hasn’t manifested in an artistic career – Helen still remembers the woman who criticised a painting she made at the age of three – but that’s not the point. Art in the blood, as Sherlock Holmes said, is liable to take the strangest forms.

Anyway – George III and the Prince of Wales Reviewing Troops used to be in the State Drawing Room.  Then in 1992, the year of the great Windsor fire, it was the only painting at the Castle to be destroyed because – get this – it was apparently too large to move out.

Seriously?   These are people who ruled the largest Empire on Earth. They’ve come through war, revolution, industrialisation and hundreds of years of heaven knows what else, and they’re still our monarchs. And they couldn’t work out how to save one painting.  Well, if it was your (possible, and admittedly not likely) ancestor-in-law who’d painted it, you’d have something to say about that, I bet.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps it’s time to forgive and forget. Beechey’s work survives elsewhere. And – despite a bit of carelessness with one of his works – Windsor is still absolutely splendid.