Benny Green
My own belief is that if only somebodY were to discover a pair of Shakespeare's underpants, or a photograph of his bedroom the morning after the night before, the Baconian theory could be discarded once and for all and everybodY could get some sleep. Environment is one of the surest guides to the workings of a man's mind, which is why we should always think twice before wilfully destroying any room within whose walls enduring creative work has been done. EspeciallY should we have had the sense, while there was still time, to preserve at least one small enclave of Victorian social life, not so that we could be sentimental about the good old days, but because then we might be able to understand them better.
Ideally we should have uprooted whole squares from Bloomsbury and deposited them inside the V and A, instead of which an establishment like London UniversitY divides its energies between teaching history and destroying much of the evidence by ' redeveloping ' it. I am convinced that once we are able to see for ourselves the scale of man-to-building, the touch and smell of the domestic interior, the strength of the draught down the cOrridor, the weight of the fire-irons, we would instantly find it easier to corn' prebend George Eliot, the Albert Memorial' the voyage of 'The Beagle,' antimacassars, Jack the Ripper and the current behaviour of the MCC. And if anyone thinks all this is frivolous, let him relate the old servants' quarters at Up Park, on the Sussex Downs, where H. G. Wells's mother once reigned as housekeeper, with the opening chapters of Tono Bungay. Or, easier still, take a look at the dining room of the 'Sherlock Holmes' pub off Northumberland Avenue, where he will find as much as he needs to know about the temperament of Conan Doyle.
With these thoughts in mind I took a trip last week on that estimable Victorian contraption, the Time Machine. In distance I went no more than twelve miles from Piccadilly, but in time I suppose I must have drifted back at least eighty years. Technically I was in the suburbs, Harrow to be exact, but in those days it was open country and known as the Weald, a likely Place for a banker to commission a fashionable architect to build an extravagant country house. The architect happened to be Norman Shaw, 'old Corporal Bullfoot,' which means that if we had any sense in these matters, which we have not, we would have been treating the house with kid gloves ever since, instead of grossly neglecting it for at least the last thirty years.
However, much as I respect Shaw, and much as I approve, at least architecturally speaking, of his New Scotland Yard, it was With the house's last real occupant that I was concerned. Originally the house had been christened Graeme's Dyke, but in 1891 its new 'owner, one W. S. Gilbert, thought it might be more descriptive of his own professional persona if he called it Grim's Dyke, which he did, and which it remains to this day. It is too depressing to catalogue the misfortunes of the house since the death of Lady Gilbert in 1936, but the vital statistics are that for the last eight years it has been left to rot, and that a few months ago a husband and wife began turning it into a restaurant and Country hotel.
As it happens, it is a very good restaurant, and has every chance of ending Up a very good country hotel. More to the Point, the husband and wife seem intent au preserving as much of the Gilbert aura as is practicable in these difficult times. Gilbert's study, where once he sat writing While the beasts of his menagerie, the monkeys and fawns and squirrels, would Wander in through the french windows to sit at his feet, has been converted into a bar, and the colossal drawing room, dominated by a minstrels' gallery and a really overwhelming fireplace of Cornish alabaster, is now the main dining room. but the proportions are being saved Wherever possible, and there were at least two instances of this which I found instructive in the sociological sense.
During his twenty years at Grim's Dyke Gilbert built on a billiard room, and here I began to adjust to the scale of his domestic living. The architects of Shaw's day, to say nothing of their customers, went about their business on the assumption that the world, and particular1Y the the British Empire, would last for at least forever. The whole conception of the billiard room is heroic. I am not sure I would ever want to play billiards in it, but that is because I am not large enough. Gilbert was. He was one of the largest men of his epoch, and probably needed the stabilising effect of the stone and marble fireplace, with its blue and red tiles, the ornamental pilasters with their motifs of squirrels and monkeys, the sybaritic placing of the windows on either side of the fireplace.
More significant still for Gilbertians is a derelict bedroom now being restored. The builders have not yet removed a small hatch low in one wall, which was cut in on Gilbert's instructions. For this was where he would sit up in his nightshirt, writing away. The hatch was for the housemaid to deliver hot drinks without being able to see the master indecently dressed. And the thought of the ageing Gilbert, scribbling away surrounded by the darkness of the Weald, perhaps explains, at least a little, the passionate comic intensity of the brilliant song of the insomniac in lolanthe. Gilbert died at Grim's Dyke, drowned in the lake trying to save a young lady who had got out of her depth. Today the lake is still there, overgrown now and hardly recognisable as the beauty spot it once was. The present occupants intend restoring it if they can. I hope they manage it.
Previous page
