Letters

As Elizabeth Goldring notes, the names of various titled women have been proposed in an effort to identify the ‘patriotic lady’ whose eleventh-hour donation allowed Holbein’s Christina of Denmark to be ‘saved’ for the nation in 1909 (LRB, 23 April). But we should question our assumption that only a wealthy noblewoman could have had means and motive. Back in 1909 the donor’s name was sealed on slips of paper inside two envelopes marked ‘To Be Opened by One without Scruple’, one apiece retained by the director and the chairman of the National Gallery and the Art Fund respectively.

The name also appears, twice, on a typed letter that the Art Fund sent to the donor’s bank, the Bank of England, a letter preserved in the fund’s archive, held at Tate Britain. One of the names has been cut out, the other blacked out in ink, leaving the title ‘Miss’ visible. I identified several letters under the ink by holding the paper up to the ceiling lights inside the reading room. When I returned the next day, the letter had been replaced with a photocopy, with a note recording that the original had been placed in a safe. When I requested to see the original, I was told: ‘Everything you need to know is on that photocopy.’

Undeterred, I followed the money. Relatively few individuals (members of staff and their relations) are permitted personal bank accounts at the Bank of England. With the assistance of a more helpful archivist at the Bank, I looked through a list of account holders from the period, and came across Miss Mary Mansfield Balston (1841-1921), whose wealth derived from a Maidstone paper manufactory. The 1911 census records her living in a household with a butler, a footman, two cooks, three housemaids and a kitchen maid. Balston died unmarried and without issue, leaving an estate valued at £84,822 18s 3d. Seen in this context, her anonymous donation of £40,000 to the Art Fund campaign is remarkably generous. This was a period of Suffragette activity, including an attack on another painting ‘saved’ for the National Gallery (Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus), and one wonders if Miss Balston’s request for anonymity (assuming it was her) was motivated in part by concerns about the public perception of women’s agency.

In his majestic panorama of E.W. Hornung, his creation of Raffles the gentleman thief and his sunlit cricketing times, Ferdinand Mount doesn’t mention that a real Raffles followed the fictional one (LRB, 2 April). The Hon. Victor Hervey, later 6th marquess of Bristol, was a leading member of the Mayfair Playboys, a group of public schoolboys who, between the world wars, carried out a spectacular series of London jewellery and fur robberies. Hervey operated in fashionable Mayfair, sometimes raiding shops but often targeting the homes of his own aristocratic contemporaries. He was finally arrested after an opulent jewellery theft in 1939, and given a three-year sentence.

Hervey can’t have known Hornung, who died in 1921. But like almost everyone around him, he must have read the wildly popular Raffles stories, and can only have seen himself as a conscious successor. Did the marquess play cricket, like Hornung and his Raffles, on the lawns of his drum-shaped country mansion at Ickworth? My own brush with patriotic cricket came as a wartime child, reading a comic about ‘Rockfist Rogan of the RAF’. He spitfired about the Empire, braining enemy agents with his cricket bat, which was revered by the awed natives as ‘Klicky-Ba’.

I was surprised to read, in Ferdinand Mount’s piece about Raffles, that Arthur Conan Doyle chastised Willie Hornung for making his hero a criminal. His own hero, Sherlock Holmes, certainly wasn’t above the occasional transgression – in the cause of justice, naturally. Holmes has a particular penchant for burglary and housebreaking: in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (the first of the short stories), he gains unlawful entry to Irene Adler’s house in order to obtain compromising photographs; in ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ he burgles the premises of the spy Oberstein to obtain vital information; and in ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’ he breaks into the villain’s lair to steal documents Milverton is using to blackmail his victim. What’s more, Holmes witnesses Milverton’s murder but doesn’t come forward with the information. In ‘A Case of Identity’ he threatens the malefactor with physical violence though he has not committed any punishable crime; in ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange’ he lets Crocker off the hook after he confesses; in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ he turns a blind eye to Dr Sterndale’s murder. And so on and so on.

Neither does Holmes make any bones about the criminal nature of his activities. ‘You don’t mind breaking the law?’ he asks Dr Watson in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. ‘Not in the least,’ Watson replies. ‘Nor running a chance of arrest?’ ‘Not in a good cause.’ ‘Oh, the cause is excellent!’ ‘Then I am your man.’ Thus Watson is a willing, even enthusiastic, accomplice. And the police are sometimes, albeit reluctantly, in on the game. In ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ Inspector Lestrade is party to the burglary and laments: ‘We can’t do these things in the force, Mr Holmes.’

Ferdinand Mount notes ‘the decline of cricket as a cultural influence’ in England after the First World War. ‘The game went on’ he says, ‘but innocence had departed.’ He attributes this partly to ‘the steady and remorseless professionalising of the game’, reflected in England’s ‘bodyline’ tactics on the tour of Australia in 1932-33. But a ‘professional’ attitude had always been present in cricket, even in its most amateur and gentlemanly days. The career of W.G. Grace himself is testament to the pull of money and the bending of rules, and the amateur bowler Frank Foster flirted with a form of ‘bodyline’ on England’s tour of Australia in 1911-12. Such tendencies were always counterbalanced by an enduring commitment in the cricket establishment to the idea of the amateur: he who played not for money but for the love of the game. Larwood, the bodyline fast bowler of 1932-33, a professional, was scapegoated and never played for England again. But even Douglas Jardine, England’s amateur captain (Winchester and New College, Oxford), was eased out after a subsequent tour of India as punishment for his bodyline tactics.

As for ‘innocence’, if it were ever present in English cricket it showed up mostly in the game’s literature. In the interwar years especially, cricket’s ‘aesthetic’ – its southern rural origins, its being led by an amateur social elite, the grace and beauty of its performance – is there in Edmund Blunden, in Hugh de Sélincourt, in A.G. Macdonell (with a more jaundiced Scottish slant) and in Bruce Hamilton’s overlooked Pro: An English Tragedy (1946). The game came to represent a lost golden age, an era of normality shattered by the trauma of the Great War, perhaps best captured by Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘The Flower Show Match’ in Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man (1928), with its ‘blazing hot day’ of ‘unclouded jollity’.

Vadim Nikitin’s review of Christopher Steele’s book Unredacted repeats claims made about me in a story published in the Washington Post in 2021 and in Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, commissioned by Donald Trump’s attorney general William Barr in 2019 and published in 2023 (LRB, 2 April).

My work as a PR consultant in Moscow, and as a volunteer on the Clintons’ presidential campaigns, led to my being targeted as a participant in a purported conspiracy to implicate the Trump campaign in collusion with the Russian government. I had nothing to do with any plot and no knowledge that a dossier of such collusion was being assembled.

Two criminal cases were brought to trial by Durham subsequent to his investigation, and both resulted in not guilty verdicts. Derivative civil lawsuits failed too. The outcome of Barr and Durham’s four-year, $6.5 million effort to uncover what Trump claimed was ‘the crime of the century’, confirmed that the Barr/Durham investigation was an entirely political exercise.

Moreover, Durham’s report did not refer to the US district judge Donald Middlebrooks’s order that Trump’s attorneys pay $50,000 in penalties to the court, as well as my legal fees, when he dismissed Trump’s civil suit against me. ‘These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims,’ Judge Middlebrooks ruled. ‘It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.’ Trump appealed the verdict, but the Appellate Court upheld the original ruling.

Durham falsely pronounced that ‘there appears to be a real likelihood that Dolan was the likely source of much of the Ritz Carlton … information in the Steele reports.’ That groundless supposition, couched in conditional language, illustrates the way in which Durham, at least as far as my involvement in the case was concerned, was clutching at straws.

Tom Crewe writes about Gustave Caillebotte’s enigmatic pictures of men looking down from their Paris balconies (LRB, 2 April). I was reminded of a passage in the unpublished diaries of Andrew George Kurtz (1825-90). Kurtz became a Liverpool industrialist and noted art collector, but on 10 November 1841 he was a teenager staying with his aunt in Paris. He was suffering from a cold, so spent the day indoors at his lodgings in the 6th arrondissement and passed the time by describing what he could see from his window. ‘Whatever is that clanking coming down the street?’ he wondered.

Ah one of the horse soldiers – certainly a handsome well-made fellow! How proud does he not look in his helmet of brass & his high military boots – he evidently is very well contented with himself, he would not even look at the canaille of this street I’ll be bound! Wouldn’t he tho’? I was deceived – well I declare if he has not dismounted at the cabaret & is kissing all the men round – two kisses a piece. How delightful that hare’s foot of a moustache of his [must] feel [on] each of the men’s faces.

At this point Kurtz’s tone changes abruptly: ‘They deserve to be kicked one and all – Disgusting proceedings – what would some of our English horse guards & workmen think of such? What does any rational being think? I won’t put my thoughts down here, they would be too dreadful.’ The young Kurtz was clearly fascinated by the soldier’s manly military glamour, down to the vividly imagined feel of that moustache. His protestations of disgust, on the other hand, seem less credible. Was he mocking English chauvinism? Was the reference to ‘horse guards’ intentionally ironic? Guardsmen from West End barracks were well-known pick-ups for wealthy gay men in 19th-century London. Indeed, the high-profile case of William John Bankes, caught with a soldier of the Foot Guards in Green Park, had been widely reported in the newspapers only two months earlier. Later diary entries, written in adulthood, suggest that the bachelor Kurtz was himself attracted to men and that he formed unusually intimate emotional relationships with male friends. Perhaps his ‘disgust’ was meant to pull the wool over the eyes of anyone sneaking a look at his teenage diary. Watching men from his window, imaginatively engaged with them while physically distant, Kurtz seems to embody Crewe’s ‘cruising eye’ forty years before Caillebotte’s paintings.