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History in the raw

Henry VIII may have lived some way from Rome and Florence, but he was no hick. Any idea that his kingdom was an impoverished estate on the edge of the world may be corrected by reflection on the sort of show Henry could put on. At Hampton Court (not quite the largest of his 40 houses) 230 people prepared food, and up to 1,000 people had the right to eat it, twice a day. The 230, divided into ten departments (butchery, bakery, boiling house, chaundlery, confectionery, pastry, spicery, larder, scullery and kitchen), were managed by the Board of Green Cloth, whose president was the Lord Steward. Even to a courtier who had lost his appetite the Lord Steward was not a shad- owy figure, for he was also the King's brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, one of only two dukes at large, vanquisher of rebellious Lines and Yorks and husband of a lady who was not just a princess of Eng- land but a retired Queen of France. Dress- ing the King's people's meat was a job reserved for a big shot.

Until the present exhibition drew these facts to public attention, Henry VIII's kitchens were not the most conspicuous feature of Hampton Court. They are now. Statistics are eloquent on this point also. The king's meat was dressed in more than 50 rooms, amounting to 36,000 square feet of floor space. Jerome K. Jerome could have lost the wretched Harris there as well as in the Maze. He did not, however, because since the 1760s most of these 50 rooms have been Grace and Favour apart- ments, Georgianised beyond notice. Only in 1978 was the late Lady Baden-Powell's apartment liberated of its recent attire and exposed as really a bit more kitchen. That prompted a paper reconstruction of the entire complex by Simon Thurley, who has staged the show under review.

Dismembering ancient buildings of their later accretions is no longer well thought of. Georgian and Victorian are pleasant too, so most people think, and Grace and Favour apartments as quaint as kitchens. Displaying Hem-ician gourmandise without putting all this on the skip has posed Thur- ley a difficult problem and achieved fasci- nating results. For instance, the circuit begins with the Butchery. Here lie deer slaughtered from among the descendants of those the king chased in Bushy Park, slung on the floor in studied but vivid dis- array. The red gunk (spattered on the walls

The main kitchen at Hampton Court, where the fire has been lit for the first time in 250 years with distressing vigour by delicate young ladies with degrees from the Courtauld Institute) is the blood these beastly stiffs have yielded. The exhibition thus begins with a tremendous impact, at once stimu- lating and funny. Yet the Butchery is approached from the outside; the brick cladding it and the windows lighting it are recognisably 19th-century; it has to be viewed through gaps formed in the wain- scot of a passage which is evidently 18th- century. Removing this stuff is not kosher any more. Indeed the room housing the undainty morsels was decorated for Grace and Favour purposes with Georgian wain- scot. To recreate its Tudor appearance without removing this later decoration, Dr Thurley was obliged to construct a parti- tion clear of the Georgian wainscot and finish it with plaster of Tudor appearance. Even in the relatively simple field of art history, modern life can be wonderfully complicated.

It is thus not quite possible to imagine yourself in the King's Butchery, nor in his Great Boiling House next door, where a rather too crisply masoned floor has been laid down. But it is easier in the Kitchen itself, or in the Dressers where the dishes had their noses powdered before being car- ried in procession into the hall. In the Kitchen real fires smoulder in the grates, real food is piled profusely on to tables. Nor is the nose the only beneficiary of this sensory assault. The mounds of herbs and vegetables, the great elm tables and the casually abandoned kitchen implements do not merely instruct; they pamper the eye.

So few Tudor kitchen implements have survived, that Dr Thurley's enormous pur- chase has transformed the tiny market in these things (in fact there is no market for the time being, as Thurley has bought the lot). Liberated from the glass case, some of them are going to get nicked. To make up numbers they are supplemented by similar objects of 17th-century date. Conscien- tiously, these are identified. Identification (and interpretation) is not by means of labels. Labels look conspicuous; they break the visual spell; and they break the specta- tor's passage as well. You have to stop and read, to change your mood from that of landscape indulgence to library use, to get out the pen and pocket book. So violent is this mood change that even the simplest labels sometimes need to be read twice or more. So in this exhibition information is imparted electronically by headphones.

What is this kind of presentation, there- fore? It is obviously different from the tra- ditional museological respect for individual objects, each one isolated, identified and explained. Nor is it the National Trust's favoured lived-in look', whereby the impression is given that the present occu- pants have momentarily left the room. The occupants of the Great Kitchen left some time ago, on an irreversible basis. Yet the intention is to tell you about them and what they did, on the presumption that this is more interesting than the surviving physi- cal remains of their existence — both the artefacts which they handled and the fabric in which they did it. These last are merely part of the evidence, though inevitably a very useful part. It also presumes that the story is more interesting than the physical remains are beautiful. Thus, two classes of customer are offended. The first includes those who believe in the importance of objects, who are affronted by the lack of respect with which a Tudor knife is left casually on a table, or with which a rare 16th-century crock is shown as well as indistinguishable modern reproductions, and affronted also by the oversight or con- cealment of real Georgian or Victorian fabric and the importance given to fake Tudor. These people believe the public is being lied to: they are not seeing the real thing. The second includes those who think that a place of haunting beauty and sensory delight is being used for a banal history les- son, that nobody cares what the polyga- mous butcher ate (the least important thing about him) and that anyway, at bottom, instruction is close to brainwashing. •

The latter type of critic will be disarmed by the sheer sensory delight of this exhibi- tion, but the former will prove more intractable. The exhibition is not the first in recent years to affront this class of cus- tomer. The pioneer was Peter Thornton's rearrangement of Ham House in the 1970s. Thornton regarded the functioning of a Baroque courtier's house as more impor- tant than its surviving individual physical components. He therefore rearranged the furniture to show how the house would have worked, interposing modern substi- tutes where original artefacts were missing. Criticism was muted because the survival rate was high and Thornton had little ne.ed to invent. He was followed by the English Heritage Inspector Glyn Coppack who, on a scale both smaller and more drastic, refurnished a Carthusian cell at Mount Grace Priory and an entire mediaeval mer- chant's house at Southampton with floors and fake mediaeval furniture.

These exercises avoided trouble by being far away and little known. But critical bile was unbottled in 1990 when the National Maritime Museum re-displayed the Queen's House at GreenWich. The Queen's 'I'll have ten. I was born yesterday.' House had last been restored in the 1930s with the advice of George Chettle, Princi- pal Architect of Ancient Monuments in the Ministry of Works. Chettle's approach had been the reductive one which characterised that body's ideology. He displayed nothing which was not original. He removed every- thing later than the primary period of the building's construction. He put no furni- ture in. He painted it all white. The assumption of those days was that the building was important as a work of art alone. What occurred within this Platonic conception was a compromising distrac- tion. What occurred to it later was a disfig- uring corruption. It was specifically important as a work of Inigo Jones, and Jones's architecture was interpreted as compositions of solid geometry regulated by abstract numerical theory. Not unlike Constructivism, in fact. But there was no place here for furniture, for colour, or indeed for human life.

The 1990 display aimed instead at illus- trating court life of the 1660s. It required the replacement in facsimile of lost fabric, chiefly chimneypieces, and the ceiling painting in the hall. It required furniture and fabrics, most of which had to be made. It required repainting in the colours which it might originally have had. In Chettle's presentation the visitor was given to under- stand that in each room he was merely in a space, of numerically ideal dimensions, which to its designer might have had a cos- mic significance. In the new presentation the visitor is given to understand that he is in a room which once had a use, involving people passing through, standing or sitting, according to a carefully organised ceremo- nial. This takes a lot more saying, let alone imagining, and to understand it the visitor needs the headphones.

For years the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments was criticised for the lifeless- ness of its presentations and for an over- meticulous concentration on the veracity of the artefact. A warm welcome might there- fore have been expected for a scheme which emphasised the building as a social organism rather than as a work of art. But this welcome did not materialise. Instead it was almost uniformly criticised. There arc certainly historical errors, but they are all in the details, like the mouldings of the chimneypieces. The computerised repro- duction of the hall ceiling painting looks more like a photograph than anything hand-crafted. Most of the furniture, most of the chimneypieces, a few whole wails are modern fakes. None of these (except the errors) militate against the organising team's objectives. But their offence was principally aesthetic. The relentless didacti- cism of the electronically provided infor- mation in the ear inhibits dreamy sensory indulgence. The textiles are not mellow and welcoming, but strident and meaning- ful. The paint is too glossy.

The abuse these offences drew was unparalleled. 'Little House of Horrors'

trilled Cohn Amery's headline in the Financial Times. In Apollo the drawings connoisseur John Harris concentrated on the more serious issue of why someone called 'the present writer' had not been consulted (he had been, but not enough). Instead he searched for the culprit and 'named' him, with Sun-style courage, as Geoffrey Parnell, an English Heritage Inspector whose principal contribution had actually been to recommend the 1660s as the period to focus on: as the building was begun in 1616, this was actually the tertiary period, and rather an interesting choice, which Mr Parnell was happy to explain. Much sneering was also devoted to the expertise of the historic furnishing adviser, Erica Davies, whose subsequent posting was to the Freud Museum. Miss Davies may find her study of the great shrink of use in pondering why she and Mr Parnell attracted so much effervescent choler.

Why was the new presentation so badly received? In fact, its intellectual interest is so overwhelming as to render its shortcom- ings of detail insignificant. The prevailing, although much weakened cultural tradition in this country is intellectual. Visual educa- tion, although it exists, is regarded as a treat, not a staple, and tends to be reserved for people who have first demonstrated their competence in purely cerebral activi- ties. This is the characteristic attitude of the government establishment, many of whose staff, when pushed, will confess a bit of contempt for 'taste', while believing that they have been denied it, as if it were a gift. It is also, in part, an attitude of the educa- tional establishment and explains the cur- rent passion for theoretical interpretations of aesthetic phenomena, the previous, more mechanical interpretations appearing shamingly easy. In Italy, by contrast, visual education is the basic diet.

However, there is also a well-rooted tra- dition of aestheticism, which carries among its baggage a belief that it is a minority cul- ture. There is some justification for this, both historical and contemporary, but it is a justification which is continuously weak- ened. Many aesthetes seem not to have noticed how absolutely they have converted the upper and some of the middle class, what influential positions they hold, and what a damn good living they make from them. So, when they protest, they do so not with the delicacy expected of the powerful but with the brutal rage of the dispos- sessed. In this case they tried the Queen's House advisers for the crime of obscurity and punished them with irresponsible cru- elty and unbecoming injustice. The Great Kitchen display is in the same tradition as the Queen's House. It will probably be spared the latter's reception, for the rea- sons I have indicated. I hope so. Both are major contributions to public understand- ing of the past.

Richard Hewlings is an Inspector of Ancient Monuments at English Heritage.