What I did in 1996
Alan Bennett
3 January. To ‘Dynasties’, the exhibition of Tudor portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the embroidery or work out the folds and flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein’s portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he’s not the weed that he’s normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he’s never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child’s brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster that he saw had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Letters
Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997
From Haig of Bemersyde
May I please ask you to allow me to correct two statements made in Alan Bennett’s account of 1996 (LRB, 2 January). The diaries handwritten by my father, Field-Marshal Douglas Haig, were typed by my mother as she received them during the First World War. After questions about their accuracy were raised by Denis Winter the typed manuscripts were checked against the handwritten diaries by John Hussey and found to be accurate. It is also a fallacy to say that my father ‘never visited the actual front’. Many visits are recorded in his diaries. It is for historians to understand the purpose and the results of those visits. In my view the programme on Timewatch on 3 July last year tried to do that and was certainly no whitewash. It did do something to record some of the achievements in the war rather than denigrate, which is what Alan Bennett is trying to do.
Haig of Bemersyde
Melrose, Roxburghshire
From D.J. Walsh
Alan Bennett errs in consigning the railway station at March, Cambridgeshire to the dustbin of history. Though dilapidated, the station still exists and can be reached by overheated railcoach from Peterborough or Ely. Bennett missed not only the extant state of the station but also the conversion of one of its buildings into the Alpine Fitness Centre – a nice irony given its location at the centre of a vast plain. The far-back quality of the Fens also lives on. On my return from a recent trip the ticket collector told me that at Peterborough it would be ‘Platform Two for Londinium’.
D.J. Walsh
London W11
From Montagu Bream
Alan Bennett is right to say that the Barnes and Noble emporia are congenial places to sit and read. Certainly the English chains are merely tacky when they try to do something similar (on a recent visit to Brighton, I marvelled that Blackwell’s, Dillons and Waterstone’s all had such misshapen stores and truncated opening hours). One must, though, lament that Manhattan is losing so many of those independent stores whose staff know the whereabouts of the stock – and its contents – without recourse to a keyboard.
Montagu Bream
Chinnor, Oxfordshire
Vol. 19 No. 5 · 6 March 1997
From Joan Anholt
May I add a footnote to Alan Bennett and Maggie Smith’s remarks (LRB, 2 January) on the ribwort plantain and its association with Cymbeline? I, too, regret the unavailability in print of Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora. But I possess an equally informative, if less academic, source-book for the origins of flower-names: Gareth Browning’s The Children’s Book of Wild Flowers and the Story of Their Names. Browning devotes four and a half pages to the various nicknames of this plant and the games associated with it. In the Scilly Isles, he writes, children call it ‘black-men’ and ‘chimneysweep’, because its ‘dark-coloured spikes remind them of negroes and the sweeps who get almost as black as negroes when they sweep our chimneys.’ He goes on to describe ‘the game of Cocks, or Kemps, as it is called in Scotland, in which each child plucks one of the tough stems, with its hard head’ – they then take turns to slash at each other’s stems and try to knock the heads off. The child whose stem remains unbroken is the champion. ‘That is why the game is called Kemps, for Kemp is a very old word which meant a warrior, or champion.’ In many parts of Scotland, he continues, the game is also called ‘Carl-Doddie’, which he derives from Bonnie Prince Charlie and George II. Finally, he mentions another name for this game: ‘Cocks’ or ‘Fighting-Cocks’ – ‘which reminds us of a very wicked sport which men used to enjoy a long time ago’.
Joan Anholt
Lyme Regis
Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997
From Betty Spice
Alan Bennett and Joan Anholt (Letters, 6 March) might be interested to know that The Englishman’s Flora by Geoffrey Grigson is indeed in print. It can be obtained from Helicon Publishing Limited, 42 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford. I bought a copy from my bookseller last autumn.
Betty Spice
Winchester
