Judith Johnson
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An Uneasy Night at Kilmeston Manor

29/3/2014

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Some years back I travelled to Hampshire for an alumni event, and was invited to stay at Kilmeston Manor, near Alresford. After supper in the kitchen, I was shown to my room for the night. This was in a wing that had been added to the house in the 18th century, and was on occasion slept in by the Prince Regent, the future George IV, when he hunted locally. An adjoining door led to another bedroom, where the Catholic widow Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, the Prince’s secret wife, was also accommodated.

The room’s windows had closed wooden shutters, and the furniture was quite sombre. For some reason, I felt a little uncomfortable and decided that I would keep the light on for the night, and that I would 'cross my legs' rather than negotiate the dark passageway leading to the nearest bathroom in the middle of the night. I had a fitful night’s sleep!

The next morning after breakfast Mike, my host, showed me round the house. He pointed out the painting of HMS Shannon, whose Captain Philip Broke RN, an ancestor of his, had captured the USS Chesapeake. We looked at the entrance, in the pantry, to what he had been told was a tunnel used in former centuries, and he showed me a cocktails cabinet inset beside a fireplace. In order to construct this 'must-have' item in the 1920s, a carpenter had removed an old wooden panel, and, as he opened it up, those present saw inside, standing upright the fully-preserved body of a Cavalier soldier. To the surprise of everyone present, or horror perhaps, as the air reached the body, the flesh immediately turned to dust and fell away, leaving just the skeleton inside the armour. Since the manor had been pro-Royalist at the time of the English Civil War, local historians reckoned that the soldier may have been wounded in battle, and perhaps hidden behind the panelling by the manor’s owners, who after sealing it up had subsequently needed to flee the house as Sir William Waller’s forces advanced, leaving the unfortunate soldier to die in his hiding-hole. This was most likely to have been on the date of the Battle of Cheriton 29 March 1644*, 370 years ago today.

At the end of the tour, I said, "So, Mike, a house this old must have a few ghost stories?"

"Well," he replied, "There was one funny thing that happened. A friend of ours came down for the weekend. She popped her things in her room and came downstairs for drinks. Afterwards she went back upstairs to freshen up, and when she came down for supper, she said "Mike, I didn’t know you had any staff."

"We haven’t," I said, "Why?"

"Well, someone laid out my things ready for dinner and turned down my bed, so I assumed it must be the maid."

Mike recalled that his mother had in earlier times occupied that room. Her maid had been with the family, still working and very much part of the household, until she died at the age of seventy. She had asked to be buried in the local churchyard, but her nephew had had the body cremated and took the ashes away.

"Wow," I said, "What room was that, Mike?"

"Oh ... actually, it was the one you slept in last night!"

*
Incidentally, another famous battle, not part of the English Civil War but the Wars of the Roses, and recorded as one of its bloodiest, took place, in heavy snow, on this date in 1461, at Towton in Yorkshire, when the Lancastrians suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of the Yorkist forces, with extensive casualties on both sides.


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Holland's Royal City

16/3/2014

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PictureHague skyline including the 'Lemon Press' & 'The Tits'!
Since Holland is so near and so connected with Britain historically, but an almost undiscovered country for me, I was very pleased to fly to Schiphol a few weeks back for a quick guided tour around the Royal city – The Hague.

February must be one of the least favourable times to show off most locations, but local guide Remco Dorr did a great job in communicating his affection for his home town. On the subject of guides: a qualified guide is really worth his or her hire in my opinion – you benefit from all kinds of interesting nuggets of knowledge as you sail past sights that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. I find audio-guides overwhelming, just too much information (the only exception, I’ve found so far, being the one at the Palace of Versailles, where it perfectly times your walk through the rooms). I’d much rather hear anecdotal stories from a walking talking guide.


PictureModel of the Cheese Market, Alkmaar
The Hague has a miniature city on a scale of 1:25, Madurodam, an entertaining visit for families with young children. It originated after the Second World War, when a local woman who was looking for a way to fundraise for children suffering from TB, thought of emulating the model villages popular in England as a visitor attraction. She found a sponsor, the Maduro family, whose son George, a Jewish law student from Curaçao and fighter with the Dutch resistance, had died at Dachau concentration camp in 1945. 

PictureLocal stork boards Stena Line ferry!
Since those days, Madurodam has been updated and now has lots of interactive water features that were keeping small children very happy the day we visited! Our guide pointed out that the town square of Alkmaar, where cheese has been weighed and traded for centuries, was also used for weighing suspected witches, who were then dunked in the adjacent canal. If they floated, they were deemed guilty and subsequently drowned. 

PictureModel of the Peace Palace
The Hague’s Peace Palace, opened on August 28, 1913, benefited from a donation of 1½ million dollars made by the great philanthropist Andrew Carnegie towards its construction. Its aim was to provide a symbolic home for the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a court created to end war, and today, the International Court of Justice. Even the building is a symbol of international co-operation: the architect Chardonnier was French, the bricks and gardens were donated by the Dutch, the gates by Belgium, the marble by Italy, the silk for furnishings by Japan, and the wall around it by Germany. 

Scheveningen, a fishing village originally, whose name derives from the Anglo-Saxon for “looking out over” (the water) is the seaside face of The Hague. The fisherwives were famed for their muscular arms (extra money earned lifting the middle-class visitors in and out of their bathing-wagons) and loud voices. Widows and orphans were daily thrown fish which hadn’t sold. The fishing boats were built flat and wide to hold their cargo (reminiscent of old Thames barges I’ve seen moored at Maldon, Essex) but were dangerously unstable for rough seas, and extremely heavy to pull up onto the beach.
PictureGuide at the Panorama explains perspective
The artist Mesdag and his workshop created a marvellous panorama painting of the village and long beach of Scheveningen in the 19th century, which has been renovated and can still be viewed locally. Around 1818, the village started to become fashionable as a bathing resort, particularly favoured by Russians and Germans.

If you were planning a stroll along the promenade at Scheveningen (we spotted ships on the horizon, ready to enter the container port of Rotterdam, our guide Remco pointed out that they wait out at sea until the prices for their cargoes are most favourable), you might like to follow your walk with a visit to the Kurhaus for an elegant afternoon tea under its spectacular domed ceiling. The hotel was built on the former site of the first wooden bathing house, and hosted some famous concert artists in its glory days including Bing Crosby, Vladimir Horowitz, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich and the Rolling Stones.


PictureRemco Dorr at the Gemeente Museum
And then there’s the art. The Mauritshuis is due to re-open on 27 June after renovation, but its ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ is still away on tour (Martin and I judiciously avoided the massive queue for it in New York in December!). Meanwhile the collection has been given a foster home by the Gemeente Museum of Modern Art. We toured the old masters with an excellent guide, who wisely selected just a few paintings to stop by and illuminate us on their place in art history. Among these were Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Robert Cheseman, who was Henry VIII’s Head Falconer (these and four other Holbeins are the only ones in the Netherlands, and were brought over by William and Mary from England, another example of art which might be a candidate for return to its original home!); Henrik Avercamp’s beautiful ‘On The Ice’, Johannes Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’, which features a fantastically painted light breeze on the water, and Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Old Woman and a Boy with Candles’. Deserving particular mention, two marvellous Rembrandts – ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Nicholaes Tulp’, one of the artist’s first big commissions when he was in his 20s, and a late ‘Self-Portrait’. Rembrandt died in 1669.He was poor, completely out of fashion, and by then had lost his wife and only surviving son.

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We went on to the Gemeente Museum itself, and again were expertly guided through a succession of paintings from the Impressionists Cezanne, Van Gogh, Monet etc. through to the Expressionists, Egon Schiele and Kandinsky. We also viewed some mid and late 20th century works by Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon and Bruce Naumann. The final rooms featured artists such as Germany’s Anselm Kiefer and the Cobra artists. The Museum itself, a striking yellow-brick geometric structure, is the work of the influential Dutch architect, HP Berlage, who designed it to make maximum use of natural light.

Lastly, we visited the Escher Museum, particularly exciting for me as I’ve been a huge fan of Escher for many years. It was fantastic to see so many of his original works in one place, and the experience was heightened by the setting in a beautiful old Royal Palace. Its enthusiastic director has taken steps to make the most of this – as you go through the museum you are also informed about the former residential use of each room, and a series of stunning chandeliers which were commissioned from Rotterdam artist Hans Van Bentem. The third floor is dedicated to the optical illusion aspects of Escher’s works and there are some fun interactive exhibits for younger visitors.

PictureChandelier at MC Escher in Het Paleis
We rounded off our trip with a visit to the Van Kleef Distillery, where we had a very amusing talk given by Fleur about the origins of the genever (gin basically) industry and its relationship with local culture, plus some tasty drinks and eats – those assembled rather more bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and voluble by the time we left!

I certainly hope to visit The Hague again. We heard a lot about the sharp division between the ‘posh’ side of town and the other side of the tracks, and being generally more interested in dustbinmen than duchesses, I’d love to explore some its working-class history and culture, especially its Jewish heritage.



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The Unreturning Army

1/3/2014

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Huntly Gordon, the author of this superb memoir of a field gunner in Flanders during the First World War, wrote that he offered it for ‘those who wanted to know, without reading volumes of history, what it was really like to be there on the spot’, and one of his wartime friends the artist Keith Henderson, wrote to him on its publication, ‘Dear Huntly – well done! But those nightmares, you have revived them, and what I have tried these many years to forget is as vivid and lurid as ever…”

This really is a wonderful book. Gordon’s humanity, his good-nature and general lack of self-pity come shining through, all these years on. I would love to have met this man, who in later life, among other things, initiated food trains during the Blitz for the thousands sheltering in the London Underground.

When I researched the war dead commemorated on the Southborough War Memorial, I had to keep focused on their individual circumstances, as there were over 250 of them, but with every book I read on the First World War, I gain more knowledge. The Unreturning Army doesn't disappoint – it informed my understanding, conveying to me something of the reality of what many of the Southborough and High Brooms men must have gone through.

When I visited Ypres a few years back I went for an early morning run through the Menin Gate Memorial arch and along the Menin Road. Gordon describes the scene in July 1917: “Most of the traffic supplying the line in front of Ypres must pass through here, and the Boche takes heavy toll of it – day and night. The bridge, whether originally arched or not, is now a solid mass of stonework, supplemented, indeed cemented, by the remains of smashed vehicles and the fragmented bodies of horses and men.”

His vivid descriptions of winter conditions for the gunners includes the following account of transporting and setting up the battery from December 1917: "... when darkness fell it began to freeze hard. We did our best to keep warm by huddling together in our doorless carriages, but were stiff and cold when at 2 am we reached the deserted station of Boisleux-au-Mont and were told to off-load ... unloading the horses was a maddeningly slow process, in flurries of snow and a searing wind ... all the ropes were like bars of iron from the intense frost ... somehow or other the job was done at last, and the chill rising sun found us marching through featureless snowy wastes towards our destination ... here the camp site allotted to us was on the exposed top of a ridge, where there was nothing but a few tents to give shelter from the wind. The water troughs had three inches of ice on them, but a pick-axe overcame that difficulty ... the poor horses droop patiently at their ropes, their blankets just keeping them alive ..."
 
He writes later of being re-united with his war-horse, Fly, after the start of the big German push on 21 March 1918: "Suddenly a horse whinnied. I turned, and there was my beloved mount, Fly, asking for her sugar. She had been pressed into service as lead-horse of a gun-team in another battery. They told me they had found her running loose; and pretty worn out she looked, reduced to a shadow through lack of food and water. But after some forceful discussion with the office in charge, I got her back; and she carried me stout-heartedly for the remaining days of my service."
 
The men who fought this terrible war often wrote of their ambivalent feelings about the enemy - Gordon writes "What a Mad-Hatter's War this is! Like everyone else I see Germany as an evil enemy, who ruthlessly broke her guarantee to Belgium, and loosed war on her unready neighbours to secure the domination of Europe. Against that we are rightly fighting - for our freedom. But all that is background. The sorry fact remains that I do not hate the Germans personally." And in a period of respite from the fighting, he reflects "For out there, it is not just the Valley of the Shadow, but the very home of Death itself, where neither trees, nor plants, nor birds, nor even soldiers can hope to keep alive for very long."  Later on in the book, he "raises my tin-hat" to a German machine-gunner, who forebore to fire on the stretcher-bearers carrying a seriously wounded Gordon away from the spot where he had been hit by an explosive shell fall-out, and without whom "this book could never have been written."
 
What were soldiers reading in the trenches? Gordon found the Psalms "a very present help in trouble", and also had a copy of Dickens' Pickwick Papers with him. Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoons were, of course, always worth a chuckle from all ranks.

We all have family stories of our grandfathers, great-uncles, etc coming home from the war and having very little to say about their experiences - for what kind of frame of reference could they give them? As Gordon writes of his leave"... there came a seemingly endless succession of friends and relations, who all inanely asked, "How are you getting on out there?" to which I invariably replied, 'Fine, thanks, just fine.' What else could one say? How could they begin to understand? We were now simply in different worlds."
 
All these years later, this book, writing as it does not only of the humanity and purposefulness of men working together, their stoicism and fortitude, but also the times when their feelings ran out of control, pictures for us many of the things of which they could not speak.
 
I cannot recommend it too highly.

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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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