FQR13

Issue 13: Autumn 2011

£10

Finch’s Ecce, mundus est Camilla Rutherford in a space suit

Alannah Weston on saving the seas

uarterly Review sordidus et olidus, sed etiam habet multas res smashingae

Introducing FQR’s chief fashion correspondent Heather Kerzner on the lure of the Pink Birkin

Marisa Berenson on crying while writing poetry and listening to Mahler

Finch at Fifty

New improved tra vel sized Jetstreamer collector’s edition - now even less inside.

Bob Carlos Clarke Tommy Hilfiger - a widow’s moving on American tribute Hunting Chic

Where Has All The Future Gone?

“Now don’t you think it’s a miracle that we’re the generation that’s going to one day populate the moon and that’s going to be fun.” elivered so wonderfully by The Three Degrees, these lyrics are among the finest ever written by Jimmy Webb. The year was 1971, and the song Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon was a high point of the multiple-Oscarwinning movie The French Connection. It is one of the best nightclub scenes ever filmed: Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are standing outside a club in early-Seventies New York, a time when the city was already on the slide and bore about as much resemblance to the slick conurbation of Mad Men as my native Shepherd’s Bush does to Annabel’s. And then they push open the door, whereupon through the magic of low lighting and loud music they are transported to a land of infinite possibility. With the sound of Motown’s favourite girl band belting out the refrain “Everybody’s going to the moon, everybody’s going, it’ll be quite soon…”

That was 40 years ago.

Whatever happened to the future? Where did it go..?

The Seventies may have had drawbacks, but back then the future was present, it was part of everyday life. Men went to the moon with an almost tedious regularity – so frequently, in fact, that the laureate of the oppressed, the recently departed Gil Scott-Heron, composed a protest poem called Whitey on The Moon.

I am old enough to remember it as a time when the microwave oven was described as cooking food by radar, and robots on TV advertised a dried potato product called Smash. Concorde was connecting the world’s cities, flying from Europe to the Gulf, to South America to New York. Pierre Cardin was designing the clothes. We were all ready for blast-off.

Nor was it just the Sixties and Seventies when the future seemed so close we could touch it. The opening of this year’s Cannes Film Festival featured a restored colour film from around the turn of the 20th century featuring a bunch of old codgers in

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Autumn 2011

Revelling in nostalgia, Nick Foulkes appreciates the passing of the future.

After all, what was to come is really worth getting excited about… velvet knee breeches (at least, I think some of them were wearing velvet knee breeches, but it was period clothes in general) heading off to the moon, where they landed, had a nap, got involved in a scrap with some unpleasant locals and came back to earth. Now, granted, it did not have The Three Degrees, but it was a statement of intent. And that was during the Belle Epoque, for God’s sake: Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcel Proust, Helleu, Huysmans and all that – a time when you couldn’t even step out for a hamburger without having to put on a top hat and a white tie.

Now, with the omniscience of hindsight, we can sneer at their naïveté but at least they were prepared to give it a go. Today our ambitions and our vision of the future are so limited and pusillanimous – another gigayacht that is bigger than the last one, another apartment with a few square metres more than the last one, a private plane that flies further and faster on a single tank of petrol than the last one. Wonderful things, of course, but hardly the stuff The Three Degrees were singing about 40 years ago.

The prospect of populating the moon has been replaced by Richard Branson taking deposits for joyrides on some sort of orbital aircraft; Concorde, of course, went almost 10 years ago and we now have the twin pleasures of budget airlines and intrusive security screening. As for the clothes: well, let us just say that I won’t be swapping my tweeds for a spaceage jumpsuit quite yet.

Now, I love the past. At least, I love my idea of the past: great clothes, people to iron one’s shoelaces, Disraeli running the Empire, some bons mots and belles lettres by Matthew Arnold, Victoria on the throne and all that, but with the medical care, ease of communication and travel opportunities of today.

Romantic and nostalgic I may be, but I am not utterly stupid (well, not all the time) and I realise that although the present has its drawbacks, this is probably as good a time as any to be a middle-class European person who has to work for a living. Any professional nostalgic knows that you have to have

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a future to be able to enjoy wallowing in the warm bath that is the past, knowing that the possibility of returning there is remote, to say the least.

Even Balzac takes time off anatomising the baser instincts of humanity for a moment or two in Le Cousin Pons to speculate on human progress: “The steam-engine was condemned as absurd, aerial navigation is still said to be absurd, so in their time were the inventions of gunpowder, printing, spectacles, engraving, and that latest discovery of all – the daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the Bicêtre for announcing his immense triumph, the idea of navigation by steam. Yet Daguerre’s discovery amounts to nothing more nor less than this.” In 1848, when Le Cousin Pons was published, aerial navigation must have seemed a fantasy, and yet some people then in their 20s would have lived long enough to see it become fact.

And yet somehow, somewhere along the line, we have taken the future for granted. We expect that Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ives will come up with some new gadget that we did not want, do not need but have to have, that will enable us to listen to live music underwater while simultaneously downloading movies from the iTunes cloud. We have taken Skype and Twitter in our stride and with our bulimic appetites we crave ever more gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. We are blasé about cooking with liquid nitrogen. We expect everything online, right now (and available as an app for download later). We have, in short, lost our sense of wonder. The future has come and gone and it has left us with the same old problems: social and economic inequality, ineradicable disease, war,

man’s inhumanity to man and so forth. Watching this summer’s orgy of violence and looting on the streets of London I was reminded of the Gordon Riots of 1780; when, as in 2011, a complacent government failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation until it was too late.

The future was, in fact, a very brief period, relatively speaking: it started in the 1830s when the first railways were built. For millennia, mankind had only gone as fast as their legs or a horse could carry them, and there was much debate as to whether the human frame could withstand being propelled at the speeds of the new railroads.

Greville, who took a train to Liverpool races in 1837, captures the excitement of being pulled along in a “sort of chariot” by a puffing steam engine. “The first sensation is a slight degree of nervousness and a feeling of being run away with, but a sense of security soon supervenes and the velocity is delightful. Town after town, one park and chateau after another are left behind with the rapid variety of a moving panorama, and the continual bustle and animation of the changes and stoppages make the journey very entertaining.”

His verdict was simple: “It certainly renders all other travelling irksome and tedious by comparison.” There then followed a frenzied period of innovation during which everything, including living on the moon, seemed possible. The future then stopped at 4.05 on the afternoon of Friday 24 October 2003, when the final Concorde touched down at Heathrow.

As a nostalgic, of course I only appreciate the future now that it is part of the past. And in years to come I will be able to tell my children’s children that I once experienced the future and did indeed take the Concorde to Barbados, arriving - if I recall correctly - about half an hour before I had left Britain. During that lost 30 minutes I experienced the future and it was glorious, a feeling that Jimmy Webb articulated so well in Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon.

“And it’s got to make you glad to be alive Yes, it’s got to make you proud to be alive.”

Nick Foulkes is the editorial director of the FQR Group of Publications and Editor in Chief of Finch’s Quarterly Review

www.finchsquarterly.com

A Trip to the Moon (1902) by Georges Méliès, in its color version, was restored in 2011 by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage

plus: Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Keith Richards, Francis Bacon, HRH Prince Harry of Wales, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, Andrea Riva, Christian the Lion, Christian Berard, Stephen Woolley, Count Dracula

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A Mountain Kingdom On The Ascent As co-founder – with Prince Harry – of Sentebale, Prince Seeiso of Lesotho is passionate about supporting young orphans and vulnerable children

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hen Prince Harry first visited Lesotho during his gap year the outset, we saw wisdom in working in partnership with local people in 2004 I was honoured to have him as my guest, and on the ground to ensure our efforts are sustainable. We also decided that equally proud to show him the beautiful country that is Lesotho. I was also keen to show him the challenges that my people and country face.

Poverty, drought and the HIV/Aids epidemic have rendered more than half of Lesotho dependent on food assistance.

Our beautiful Mountain Kingdom has the third-highest rate of HIV infection in the world – one in three young people are infected – and life expectancy from birth is just 45 years. As a result, the number of orphans grows daily. It is estimated that one in six children is now left without one or both parents. Their turmoil begins before the death of their parents; it starts while caring for their sick mother or father, nursing them through the debilitating stages of the Aids process. In addition, children who are HIV positive are stigmatised and ostracised by our society.

I could not sit by while the country I love so deeply lost any hope of a future. So, following the visit, which made a profound impression on Prince Harry, we decided to set up a charity to help the weakest Prince Seeiso and Prince Harry in Lesotho taken by Arthur Edwards and most vulnerable children of Lesotho.

We called the charity Sentebale – “forget me not” in the language of we had to try to reach children in remote areas that few other NGOs Lesotho – in memory of both our mothers, who both died tragically ventured to because of the extremely poor infrastructure and because, prematurely and who both had a particular compassion for victims of frankly, it was just too hard. We also focused on the transfer of skills, HIV/Aids and the vulnerable. We were very clear from the start that building capacity and ensuring transparency and accountability. Ours is this was a partnership – both in the sense of Prince Harry and me, but an investment in people. also, and critically, between Sentebale and the people of Lesotho. From The challenges in Lesotho are obviously manifold and no one

organisation could hope to cover the myriad of needs. However, I am encouraged to witness the spirit of determination within Lesotho to make child-centric policies a priority.

The Education Act of 2010, making free primary education compulsory, will hopefully reduce the 18 per cent of children who are still out of school – it would be wonderful if we could attain that millennium goal.

But the Government’s professional and financial resources are also insufficient to meet the growing needs of orphaned and vulnerable children, and the work of non-governmental organisations such as Sentebale remains critical.

The problems of the depressed world economy have made raising the necessary funds harder than ever.

However, I’m encouraged by the enthusiasm shown by so many people in distant countries to lend a hand to support the children of Lesotho. I am proud of what Sentebale has achieved and look forward to the next few years with optimism. I don’t doubt that there will always be challenges ahead, but overcoming these challenges is our mission, for the sake of all children who deserve a better childhood.

Prince Seeiso Bereng Seeiso of Lesotho is the younger brother of Lesotho’s King Letsie III and son of the late King Moshoeshoe II and the late Queen Mamohato Bereng Seeiso. He is also Lesotho High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. In April 2006, he and Prince Harry formed Sentebale www.sentebale.org to support organisations working with Lesotho’s disadvantaged children

Proprietor’s Spouse: Sydney Ingle-Finch

Proprietor: Charles Finch

Editor in Chief: Nick Foulkes Art Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Contributing editors: Vicki Reeve, Simon de Pury, Tom Stubbs, Kevin Spacey, Emma Thompson, Saffron Aldridge, L’Wren Scott Features Editor: Emilia Hungerford Managing Editor: Tom Chamberlin Editor at Large: Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis

Chief Fashion Correspondent: Heather Kerzner

Highland Editor (19th Century): Charlie Gladstone

Literary Editor: John Malkovich

Liberal at Large: Matthew Modine

Entrepreneur at Large: James Caan

Aviation editor: Annette Mason

Film Editor: Adam Dawtrey

Hunting Editor: Reza Rashidian

Photography Editor: Patrick Fetherstonhaugh

Fine Arts Editor: Charles Saumarez Smith

Racing Editor: The Hon. Harry Herbert

Polo Editor: James McBride

Cookery Editor: Maya Even

Travel Editor: Kate Lenahan

Magic in the Mountains...

PA to the Proprietor: Tiffany Grayson The FQR Group of Publications including: FQR Art; FQR Style; FQR Living Well, FQR Big Game Hunter, Game Shot and Conservation; FQR Equestrian Life; FQR Ocean Wave incorporating Nautical Style; FQR Home and Hearth; FQR Paranormal; FQR Faith (Formerly FQR Monotheism in the Modern Age); www.finchsquarterly.com Chief Executive: Charles Finch Editorial Director: Nick Foulkes Creative Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Commercial Director: Jonathan Sanders, Chief Financial Officer: Adam Bent Designed and produced by Fetherstonhaugh Associates www.fetherstonhaugh.com The views expressed in Finch’s Quarterly Review are not necessarily those of the editorial team. The editorial team is not responsible or liable

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for text, pictures or illustrations, which remain the responsibility of the authors. Finch’s Quarterly Review is fully protected by copyright and nothing may be printed, translated or reproduced wholly or in part without written permission. Next issue: December 2011. All advertising and subscription enquiries should be sent for the attention of Tom Chamberlin: tom@finchsquarterly.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7851 7140.

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Poetry in Motion

From top: Halston, Liza Minnelli, Marisa Berenson at Maxim’s in Paris, 1973; Marisa Berenson in 1972; Dirk Bogarde and Luchino Visconti during the filming of Death in Venice, 1971; Dirk Bogarde and Marisa Berenson in Death in Venice. All images Everett Collection/Rex Features

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hinking back on my incredible destiny – my blessing – my hopes and dreams came to life.

Luchino Visconti was sent from heaven to change the course of my existence. Although I had deep aspirations to be an actress, not in my wildest imagination could I have hoped for so much. At the time I was living in New York and travelling the world as a successful model, working with great photographers such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Burt Stern, David Bailey and many more.

One day, I met Helmut Berger in New York at the opening of his film The Damned, directed by Luchino Visconti. We became great friends.

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ecently, I went to the BFI to see The Arts University at Bournemouth’s graduate showcase of short films. I like shorts and have done a few, some really good ones such as John Malkovich’s Hideous Man and the Baftanominated Je t’Aime John Wayne. Like long films, there is an infinite variety, but they are less of an investment of time and money. The shorter film is a great place to start but also to flex and experiment.

The other day I saw myself in Departure, which was written and directed by graduate Duncan Christie. James Lance and I play astronauts on a doomed trip home from Mars. We rehearsed extensively with Duncan before filming. We were both struck by Duncan’s certainty and leadership. He told us when we had not hit the right note – in a straightforward way. Duncan wrote a moving script in which the characters go through emotional twists in a

That summer I went to Ischia, a small Italian island near Capri. My mother had a house there, and so did Luchino – a beautiful house high up on the rocks overlooking the sea. It looked like an enchanted little white castle. I would spend many a lunch and dinner up on its big white terrace covered in huge pots of blue flowers.

Inside, meals were laid around a very large table at which sat many fascinating people. I listened and learned. On one of those special days I was sitting next to Luchino. He turned to me, studying my profile,

One night after dinner in Luchino’s living room, I was sitting in a big armchair writing poetry to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, with tears pouring down my cheeks taking in every detail of my face, and said, “I think you would be perfect for my next film. I need a real actress with great depth and emotion. I will do a screen test on you to see if you can act.” I was overwhelmed with joy, but a little doubtful, as many people talk and promise and nothing comes of it. In the film business then, being a model was not an advantage; one had to prove one’s self even more as an actress.

One night after dinner in Luchino’s living room, I was sitting in a big armchair writing poetry to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, with tears pouring down my cheeks… I had no idea then that I would be playing Frau von Aschenbach, wife of the composer pratagonist played by Dirk Bogarde.

The summer over, I returned to New York. Luchino sent me letters for months – always underlining many times that he needed a very

Meet My Shorts

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dire situation. The succeed. spaceship, starry sky Age did not come and characters weave Camilla Rutherford salutes short-films – and into my decision to the young graduates shooting them the beginning, middle do Departure, but and end of the story it turned out to be together. Even short films can be too long, and this a bonus. Working with students was energising wasn’t. The standard of the films at the showcase because the team was unselfconsciously confident, was high. They were ambitious and which is so appealing. It reminded me to keep up mostly unpretentious. Perhaps my youthful buoyancy and enthusiasm. It is not one or two could have done with that I was 18 300 years ago, but curiosity, energy a joke. and idealism are qualities that should be kept totally People say youth is wasted intact – not only to succeed but also to avoid on the young. You have time to becoming bored or boring. I think I forgot become successful, you have time some of my sense of that. A lot has to fail. With all of youth’s advantages happened in the years since I was 18. it barely matters. When I started out I Bournemouth is a good start; it’s was told that most actors are resting most of maybe one of the best for filmthe time. But that didn’t put me off. I was young industry courses. Another guy, and it wouldn’t happen to me. The youthful spirit is Alexander Woodward, won lots good that way. If you knew how hard – worse, how of prizes at the BFI event. He boring – things could become you might not be so was tall, broad-shouldered and gung ho. So spending time with younger people a generally sexy guy (he had is refreshing. They believe, and we need that to a ponytail, but he will surely

, s tall red a w He houlde lly d-s broa a genera and xy guy se

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emotional actress and would screen test me in Rome. The film was delayed, I was busy working… One day I got a telegram telling me I must be in Rome in a week for costume fittings.

On my arrival, Helmut was waiting for me. I moved into Luchino’s house on Via Salaria, a most beautiful town house straight out of one of his movies. My bedroom overlooked a poetic and romantic garden.

I was in heaven. Luchino was already filming in Venice. I was put into the hands of the most wonderful, gentle, sensitive, refined man, the master of all costume designers: Piero Tosi. Within a week, I slipped into the skin of Mrs von Aschenbach – with no screen test!

Luchino returned from Venice, and the day came. It was to be one of the most memorable days of my life.

The very first scene was in a huge concert hall. Five hundred extras were told to boo and scream at my husband’s (Gustav Mahler’s) music. Luchino came to me, mentioning a few key words. “You must be crying, fainting, extremely upset by the reaction of the public towards your husband’s music.”

There was silence, then the word “Action”. The crowd went mad.

This was my moment… s I stepped into the scene, trailing my way through the turbulence, a sense of complete abandonment came over me... a moment in space. I felt free. This was my destiny, this was where I belonged, where I wanted to be. And the warmest, most magical feeling overwhelmed me. I was in my element.

That night, Luchino came into my room. “You made an entrance like Sarah Bernhardt,” he said. “You are not afraid of the camera. You have my blessing if you want to continue in this career.”

That was his blessing. From that moment, the doors swung open. I was on my way.

Marisa Berenson is an American actress and model who recently played the part of Allegra Recchi in the award-winning film I am Love with Tilda Swinton

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grow out of that). When he was given his prizes, Alexander charismatically deployed Margaret Tyzack’s 3 Gs: he was grateful, gracious and got off.

He just said, “Thank you” – smoulderingly (though that may be a matter of opinion). The prize-givers said that they had decided to make Alexander a winner before his degree results came through. So his success had nothing to do with his shining first.

I was inspired by my experience of shooting Departure and going to the showcase, not just because the people were young but because they were good. The film industry should be happy to have you, Duncan and Alexander, along with your talented friends!

Camilla Rutherford is an actress and model who has just completed filming Dimensions, directed by Sloane U’Ren, which is about a young boy whose encounter with a professor results in a fascination with the theory of bending time.

Autumn 2011

Camilla Rutherford in the film Departure directed by Duncan Christie

A supermodel before the term was invented, Marisa Berenson reminisces about her friend Luchino Visconti, who famously cast her in Death In Venice, changing her life for good

FQR at the movies

From Left: The Company of Wolves Poster, ITV/Rex Features; La Belle et la Bete poster, Everett Collection/Rex Features; Dracula poster, Everett Collection/Rex Features; Christopher Lee and Melissa Stribling Dracula, Everett Collection/Rex Features

Legendary producer Stephen Woolley adores horror films so much they’re in his blood – and, with Byzantium, he finally has another up his sleeve

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ver since I produced The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan, I’ve been desperate to find a horror film to make. I released The Evil Dead, which I bought right after I saw it in LA – against everyone’s best advice – and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, which I bought after I saw the screenplay for the first one. And at the Scala Cinema I’ve programmed many horror nights and double bills, so I love the genre. But as a producer, I feel like I’ve sort of let it down. I’ve only really made two: The Company of Wolves and then Interview with the Vampire, which was really the Gone with the Wind of vampire films.

And then I found this piece, A Vampire Story, which Moira Buffini had written for the stage as a teenagers’ play that I happened to see about three years ago. My daughter asked me to drive her to Bristol to see this play, and what I loved about it was the idea of a motherdaughter relationship over 200 years. The mother becomes a vampire at 22, the child grows up in an orphanage thinking her mother is dead, and at the point when her life becomes tough, the mother turns her into a vampire too. So you have this amazing relationship, where the mother has been brought up in a whorehouse and hates men, and the 16-year-old has been brought up in the orphanage and is really sweet and genteel and in touch with the ethereal side of the world. I just thought that it would be such a nightmare to be locked into that sort of poisonous relationship for two centuries.

I met with Moira, and we talked about it a lot. We went through various scripts and finally we got something we were happy with. We had to find

a director, and I hadn’t worked with Neil for a long time but I knew he would like it and when I sent him the script he chucked everything else he was doing and said, “Great, let’s do this!” It’s good, because it’s not anything like Twilight or any of that TV stuff you typically see.

It’s closer to a Cocteau version of a vampire film, hopefully, than a Hollywood studio version of a vampire film. I think the genre has always been, and always will be, neglected. It’s a genre that is always shunned and pushed to the back, and it’s only really the French and Spanish who recognise it.

That is why I am a huge admirer of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête with Christian Bérard’s extraordinary mise en scène. Bérard was a genius who really captured the essence of the fantasy and it’s the fantasy aspect of the genre that I love, not really the buckets-of-blood aspect.

It was that element of fantasy that drew me to A Nightmare on Elm Street. It seems rather clichéd now, but that first script, where you fall asleep and fall into this other world, was actually really great and clever.

Moira’s script is just as interesting and inventive: much more the female take on the vampire legend. It is not so much the Bram Stoker version; instead, she looks back before that to Byron, Shelley and Sheridan Le Fanu, whose vampires were very different and very unlike the garlic/cross vampires that came out of Bram Stoker’s fantastic book. We’re going for something elegiac, but

also something that is more animalistic than the clean, homogenised vampires you have in the Twilight films. They’re great and beautifully made but I can’t help thinking of Beverly Hills 90210. All the boys take off their shirts and the girls scream. It gives the kids what they want and is brilliant Pop. But our vampires are both earthier and more spiritual, that’s why I relate them to Cocteau; he took poetic licence with something that already existed.

About a year ago I got worried as there were just vampires everywhere – in the cinema and every time I turned on the TV – but the desire to see them doesn’t seem to be stopping. They’re all working. The shows are being recommissioned. We’re not going to be shunned because of the newfound popularity of the genre.

It’s reinvented itself and is its own genre. It’s not just horror: the eternal-life aspect is quite attractive, and there has been a shift in what people can portray on screen in moralistic terms – the vampire doesn’t have to die at the end.

Of course, I saw all the Hammer movies. As a teenager, I was nuts about them. I love the colours on the original Dracula; I think it had the best combination of colours and music to belie the nonexistent budget. I think it was very, very clever that they were able to do that.

The relationship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee felt like they were quite close to each other. Cushing gave that quiet yet mesmerising performance as Van Helsing. Film snobs hate them and think only of the sad, tawdry end of Hammer, but I always thought they were great.

What Neil and I are trying to do is something a bit more extraordinary and a bit more unusual, but not in a gory kind of way…

But don’t worry: there will be enough blood – the genre fans won’t be disappointed.

Stephen Woolley is a renowned film producer and director

The Movie Meze Adam Dawtrey, our man with the insatiable appetite for movies, reviews some of the delights that were on offer at Venice and the fall film festivals

After a summer of popcorn, the festival trifecta of Venice, Telluride and Toronto always brings a return to more refined cuisine, and serves as the appetiser for the Oscar banquet.

This year’s gourmet fare on the Venice Lido included the world premiere of Roman Polanski’s Carnage, with its mouthwatering cast of Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C Reilly. Two couples meet for a conciliatory confab after their sons get into a playground fight, but end up behaving worse than their kids. Based on Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage, it’s pure Oscar bait.

A Dangerous Method dished up another meaty cast, and another director who probes the dark recesses of the human heart. David Cronenberg explores the dawn of psychoanalysis in early20th-century Vienna, with Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, plus Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassel. The producer is FQR favourite Jeremy Thomas.

George Clooney’s The Ides of March, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Whit Stillman’s Damsels In Distress, Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome, William Friedkin’s Killer Joe and Dark Horse from oddball auteur Todd Solondz provided Venice with a feast of intelligent Americana.

A British buffet included Working Title’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is shaping up as a lively Oscar contender, with Gary Oldman worth a long-odds early autumn punt for Best Actor. If anyone can don the shabby mantle of Alec Guinness playing owlish spycatcher George Smiley, it’s him. Tomas Alfredson’s

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adaptation of John le Carré’s classic Cold War thriller also stars Colin Firth, Tom Hardy and Kathy Burke.

In Wuthering Heights, Bafta darling Andrea Arnold takes on one of the greatest yet most awkward novels in the English language, Emily Brontë’s gnarly, Gothic tale of obsessive passion on the Yorkshire Moors. With a cast of teenage unknowns, including a black Heathcliff, and Arnold’s uncompromisingly authentic style, it’s not the chocolate-box version.

Arnold won the Bafta for best newcomer with her first film, Red Road, and so did Steve McQueen with Hunger. McQueen, who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009, described as “the Olympics of the art world”, also spiced up the Lido this year with his second movie, Shame, about a New York sex addict played by Michael Fassbender (again).

Moving on to Toronto, there were more British delicacies, including the return of Liverpudlian arthouse auteur Terence Davies. It took a tiny, personal documentary, Of Time and the City, to make Davies financeable again. Eleven years after his last fiction feature, Davies is finally back with The Deep Blue Sea, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a married woman (Rachel Weisz) recovering from a suicide bid triggered by a disastrous love affair.

Also watch out for Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna, an Indian version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Adam Dawtrey is FQR’s film critic

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Autumn 2011

FQR Africa Wildlife Special Focus

John Rendall, Ace Bourke & Christian the lion, walking down Kings Road Chelsea. London, 1970, by Derek Cattani

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arrived in England in 1969, literally following the flight path of my generation of Australians, who saw London as the centre of the world. We all wanted to come and be part of the excitement and energy of “swinging London”, following friends like Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and artist Martin Sharp, who had published Oz magazine with Felix Dennis (leading to the much publicised obscenity trial). My English lecturer at Sydney University, Germaine Greer, had published The Female Eunuch, Barry Humphries was “creating” Barry McKenzie and Dame Edna Everage, and a whole raft of artists, led by Brett Whiteley, who were enjoying the freedom and success of life in London.

With no experience of selling, I got a job at Sophistocat in World’s End on the King’s Road, where they sold recycled pine furniture. The King’s Road and Carnaby Street were then the fashion centres of the world, so a fascinating diversity of people strolled up and down the King’s Road and came into the shop. Mary Quant was just up the road, Ossie Clarke too.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren had opened their shop SEX opposite, and Nigel Weymouth had a shop called Granny Takes a Trip, where David Bowie and The Rolling Stones bought their stage outfits.

The Stones used to rehearse opposite Sophistocat, and it really wasn’t such a surprise to have a lion living in Chelsea. It was such a wonderfully liberated time; no “health and safety” bureaucrats looking over your shoulder, no parking meters, no Congestion Charge, and certainly no intrusive EU-imposed rights issues.

And it was legally possible to buy exotic animals in Harrods, where we bought Christian for 250 guineas (about £3,500 in today’s money).

For us, it was a huge commitment to look after him, but there were actually eight people looking after that magnificent little lion: Ace and I; Jennifer-Mary, my girlfriend at the time, who still runs Sophistocat; a girl called Unity Jones, who once had a lioness in Rome called Lola; John Barnardiston and Joe Harding, the owners of Sophistocat; Kay Drew, our unflappable daily, who Christian absolutely adored; and Derek Cattani, the photographer who started taking photographs of Christian as soon as he arrived at Sophistocat. We were his human pride.

Every morning we would take him for his exercise to the Moravian Close, hidden by a high wall on the King’s Road and then back to the shop for his breakfast and sleep. In the wild, lions sleep for 16 hours a day, so we often had to wake him in the mornings. Christian slept in the basement, which became his own territory, with toys and a large kitty litter tray, which he used just like a domestic cat. In the afternoon, Unity would come to play with him, then maybe more exercise before he’d come and sit in the shop until we’d go out to dinner. The local children would come around to see him and he became a World’s End personality. I still live in World’s End, and there are people living here who remember him and think of him as “their” lion. I saw Mick Jagger the other day and he says he remembered meeting Christian. The actress Mia Farrow came and met him, but her husband André Previn wouldn’t come into the shop. Nor would George Lazenby. James Bond afraid of a lion! All kinds of glamorous people such as Pattie Boyd wandered in and out. It was a fantastic time to be in London.

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A domesticated lion became a celebrity in Swinging Sixties London. Now Christian is known the world over as he is held up as an ambassador for conservation. John Rendall, who bought the big cat from Harrods in 1969, tells his story One day, the actors Bill Travers and his wife, Virginia McKenna, came into the shop. We recognised them from the roles they had played as George and Joy Adamson in the film of Joy’s book, Born Free, the story of their lioness Elsa and her rehabilitation into the wild. Bill and Ginny instantly acknowledged that Christian was indeed an exceptional lion and contacted George Adamson to ask him if he would be prepared to rehabilitate Christian back into the wild in Kenya.

This was an opportunity we had not foreseen, but it was the answer for Christian’s future. George was intrigued by the challenge of trying to rehabilitate a fifth-generation zoo-bred lion, and warned us of the dangers, but we recognised that this was a unique opportunity and were confident we made the right decision to take Christian to Africa.

To finance Christian’s rehabilitation, Travers would make a television documentary, Lion at World’s End. So Christian became a television star!

Christian had never attacked anything in London but on our first night in the bush a lost n’gombe (a domestic African cow), wandered towards the camp. Christian saw it and immediately starting stalking it, correctly, down wind, using small bushes to conceal himself. George was mightily impressed: “He’s going to be OK in the wild.” But he did say, “Don’t let him attack. He could be injured on the horns.” So we drove a Land Rover between Christian and the cow, stopping the attack. Christian snarled.

He knew he should have been allowed to have the animal.

Over the next few weeks we saw Christian adjust to his new life, watching in awe as George introduced Christian to his other lions – and not without a twinge of jealousy as we saw that Christian was fascinated

by George. But we recognised that we had to leave if George was to succeed.

A year after we had left Christian with George, Ace and I flew back to Kora National Park where Christian was living in the wild. When we

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arrived we were in a state of high anticipation. When he came over the brow of the hill George told us to call him, and that’s when he started to run and hurled himself into the air at us. The only thing was that a 250lb lion at 30mph is quite a wollop! We had to brace ourselves so he didn’t knock us over in his enthusiasm. That wonderful moment was filmed by Simon Trevor, one of the greatest wildlife cameramen in Africa, and it is this footage that became the YouTube sensation, now viewed by over 100m people.

We went back a year later, and this time it took him three days to turn up. He still remembered us, but was now three years old and much more mature. He had “lion” things to do, but was still affectionate and, at over 450lb, he was magnificent. Again it was sad to leave him, but the greatest emotion was an overriding sense of pride. A fifth-generation domesticated lion, who had been sold in Harrods, was raised by Australians on the King’s Road and rehabilitated in Kenya by an Englishman born in India, was now living successfully in the wild. Late in 1973 he disappeared, heading towards Meru National Park where there was more game and a better chance for him to establish his own pride.

When we took Christian to Kenya, there were over 250,000 lions in Africa. Today there are less than 20,000. The world is aware of the precarious numbers of snow leopards and tigers, but the idea that lions are becoming a threatened species is shocking. Therefore, George Adamson’s research into lion behaviour is invaluable. George’s assistant, Tony Fitzjohn, has inherited George’s mantle as a lion guru and is now the Field Director of the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust.

Tony Fitzjohn is now working on the restoration of Kora National Park, having moved to Mkomazi National Park in Tanzania when George was murdered by Somali poachers in 1989. At Mkomazi the George Adamson Trust runs a successful black rhino breeding project, a wild dog breeding programme, and has built or helped build 11 schools in the area. The Trust is generously supported by a diverse group of people and institutions from all over the world: Suzuki Holland; Tusk Trust, of which Prince William is patron (he is a fan of Christian); Sir Anthony Bamford; The Elsa Conservation Trust; the Born Free Foundation; Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and many generous individuals.

Chester Zoo gave us a bus, which the local children helped paint and which visits the schools and villages showing slides and films stressing the value of their wild-animal inheritance.

Christian’s story has brought so much pleasure to people all over the world, and he become this amazing ambassador for conservation, flagging up threats to lions and all the wildlife in Africa.

In George’s autobiography, My Pride and Joy, George wrote that Kora National Park is a monument to “a brave and mischievous little lion from London… Christian”. A magnificent achievement for a fifth-generation zoo-bred lion.

A Lion Called Christian by John Rendall and Anthony Bourke is available to purchase from Amazon and all good book stores (www. alioncalledchristian.com). For more information on the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust, go to www.georgeadamson.org

Autumn 2011

FQR Africa Wildlife Special

Beast In Show

Buffalo Soldier

They might be dumb, but some movie-star animals really communicate with Adam Dawtrey

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blame Doctor Dolittle. He told us we could talk with the animals, and now they won’t shut up. If it isn’t Alvin and his squeaky friends, it’s some Chihuahua who won’t stop yapping, or a lion with a god complex. Talking animals, once confined to cartoons, are everywhere these days.

The imminent arrival of Steven Spielberg’s non-talking War Horse is a moment to celebrate the alternative tradition of animal movies, one that’s rather gone out of fashion, where creatures don’t crack wise in the accent of some Hollywood star. Sincere and often sentimental, but in a good way, these films don’t shy away from the perils and cruelties of nature and man. The best of them brought a lump to your throat as a child, and live in your memory as an adult.

War Horse (2011) After the extraordinary hit rate of his first quarter-century as a filmmaker, from Duel to Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s genius has sparked less often of late. But animals, war and children’s stories have often brought out his best, so hopes are high that War Horse will mark a return to his peak of populist brilliance after the nadir of the last Indiana Jones. This tale of a cavalry steed fighting through the horrors of World War I certainly has a thoroughbred pedigree, out of novelist Michael Morpurgo by screenwriter Richard Curtis. If it lives up to the book and stage play on which it is based, War Horse will become an instant classic.

The Bear (1988) Jean-Jacques Annaud’s eco-fable about an orphaned bear cub who gets adopted by a ferocious Grizzly is claimed by some fans as the greatest animal movie ever.

Certainly, the Canadian wilderness has never been more gorgeously shot, and Annaud achieves a remarkable emotional intensity with only minimal dialogue from the human hunters who pursue our heroes. Annaud followed up with Two Brothers, about sibling tigers, which also deserves a mention.

Born Free (1966) A double-Oscar winner (for music and song), Born Free is the story of Elsa the orphaned lion cub, raised by a colonial couple (married stars Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers) and then returned to the wild. With its yearning to get back in touch with nature, it defines the spirit of the Sixties as much as any miniskirted movie about Swinging London.

Ring of Bright Water (1969) Travers and McKenna, the Brangelina of wildlife movies, reteamed for another true story, based on Gavin Maxwell’s autobiographical yarn about a Londoner who moves to Scotland to raise his pet otter in a more suitable environment. Mij the otter is adorable, which makes his untimely death at the sharp end of a ditch-digger’s spade a shocker for younger (and older) viewers alike.

Tarka the Otter (1979) Another tear-jerker. Adapted by the great zookeeper Gerald Durrell from Henry Williamson’s 1927 novel about the life and death of a wild otter, the film is narrated by Peter Ustinov.

The human characters are ay/ 1978, James Gr incidental to a story told es Tarka the Otter ur at papers/Rex Fe from the viewpoint of Tarka, Associated News constantly hounded by hunters until his climactic death match with the fearsome dog Deadlock.

The Incredible Journey (1963) The most enduring example of Walt Disney’s live-action wildlife adventures, with distinctive folksy narration by Rex Allen. A cat and two dogs find their way home across 200 miles of Canadian wilderness, surviving bears, porcupines and other perils through loyalty and teamwork.

Sentimental and shamelessly anthropomorphic, of course, but who can resist the star quality of Tao the Siamese, Bodger the Bull Terrier and Luath the Labrador?

Eight Below (2006) Eight huskies get left behind in Antarctica when a polar expedition runs into trouble. There’s nothing very original about this drama of doggie derring-do, but it’s a superior example of the Disney formula, with spectacular snowscapes, great canine performances and a genuinely stirring climax. All of which made it the highest-grossing non-talking animal movie of the past 30 years.

Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron (2002) As an animated film, Spirit is the black sheep, or maybe the dark horse, of this list. But this forgotten DreamWorks flop is included because, in a bid for something more naturalistic than the ubiquitous Disney cartoon style, the horse doesn’t talk, though he narrates in voiceover. As a 2-D Western with songs by Bryan Adams, Spirit suffered from being triply unfashionable, but its sincerity has weathered well, and its computer animation is superb.

Adam Dawtrey is FQR’s film critic

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Renato Luca recounts what he has learned – for there is little he remembers – about his lifethreatening encounter with a buffalo in Zambia

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y buffalo-hunting adventure in Africa wasn’t my first gamehunting expedition. In fact, I have been presented with important international titles, which only a lucky few receive for completing the Grand Slam, Ovis World Slam, Capra World Slam and Triple Slam. I’d also taken part in several hunts in Africa, but never had I experienced such a perilous adventure as when I was in Zambia in 2007.

Having fired and hit a buffalo with four shots of 416 Remington calibre, it suddenly came back to life and charged for 10 metres towards the very person who had pierced its heart, yet left it with the strength to kill.

After that, I don’t remember anything.

I had plenty of time to think over the hunt during my convalescence at home in Bassano. I still had some stitches to be removed, ones that a skilled doctor in Lusaka had given me in different parts of my body to close the wounds inflicted by the buffalo’s horns. Those injuries are healing now, but my bones are still giving me terrible pain, especially during the night or when I’m sitting or lying down and, still dazed, try to change position.

I was well looked after in the hospital in Lusaka, but what tormented me was the fact that I couldn’t remember anything about what happened after the attack by the injured buffalo. The professional hunter stayed close by my side in hospital and often told me the entire tragedy.

We had decided to follow the lethally wounded animal on foot through the thick vegetation, even though I had suggested we do it by car, to be safe, but no one took any heed. Once I had identified the bulk of the buffalo in the middle of the extremely dense vegetation, I shot from 30 or so metres, but the animal on the ground showed no signs of life. I was thus absolutely certain that the four shots had been fatal, but then it suddenly got up and charged towards me. I managed to fire a shot without taking aim and then I dived left to the ground. I don’t remember anything after that.

The PH told me that diving to the ground saved me from certain death. The buffalo had to turn its head to gore me, tossing me two metres up into the air with one horn and inflicting enormous injuries. Then it

diving to the ground saved me from certain death stopped and tried to gore me again. At that point, my saviour fired two shots and the animal fell down on top of me. He had to fire again to stop its fury.

In the meantime, all the locals had fled, convinced I was dead. With the help of a loyal tracker, they managed to free me from under the buffalo that had fallen dead on top of me. I had lost consciousness, covered in my own and the buffalo’s blood.

It took us an age to reach a hospital in Lusaka, and I consider it a miracle to have even got there alive, given all the blood I’d lost and the many injuries I’d sustained.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what happened after the attack, but I do have a vague memory of being woken up in hospital before the operation and hearing a voice say to me in English: “No serious bone fractures have shown up on

the X-rays, but it is a miracle that no arteries were ruptured by the horns of the buffalo, which sliced open your calf, thigh, scrotum and lower abdomen right up to the right armpit, where it tore through the muscle.” I had been unconscious for six hours, during which time air rescue was called and I was put into a car and taken to the landing strip.

Once we got to a hospital in the capital city of Lusaka, things started looking up.

As I began to come round, the surgeon told me that I had been saved by a miracle, since the arteries in four deep wounds on my body had been missed by a hair’s breadth, the rupture of just one being enough to kill me. And how come I had no serious bone fractures? The same opinion was held by the doctors in my own town and I, as a believer, put it down to a miracle by my protector Saint Anthony of Padua.

That is why I have always worn that saint’s medal around my neck, and now more than ever before, I am proud that my first name is Anthony, even if everyone has always called me Renato.

Renato Luca is a hunter, who has a world-class collection of trophy mounts in his castle, Villa Cà Erizzo, in northern Italy www.

Luca Renato villacaerizzoluca.it

The Beast Of Friends The illustrious photographer Nick Brandt has stepped in to save the African animals that famously form the subject matter of his awe-inspiring images

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ake a look at the elephant in the photo below. His name is Igor (as named at birth by Cynthia Moss of Amboseli Elephant Research Project). For 45 years, he wandered the plains and woodlands in East Africa, so relaxed that in 2007, he allowed me to get this close to take his portrait. Two years later, in October 2009, he was killed by poachers for his ivory. In the Amboseli region of East Africa – an extraordinary 2 million-acre ecosystem in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, straddling Kenya and Tanzania – Igor was just one of many elephants killed in the past few years by poachers.

In fact, most of the large-tusked elephants that are featured in my books are now dead, killed by poachers for their ivory. This includes : Marianna, a beautiful matriarch, and Winston, photographed last year just six weeks before he was shot, his tusks sawn off with a power saw by the poachers.

Since 2008, there has been a massively increased demand for ivory from China and the Far East. Ivory prices have soared from $200 a kilo in 2004 to more than $5,000 today. Some experts estimate that as many as 35,000 elephants a year are being slaughtered; that’s 10 per cent of Africa’s elephant population each year alone.

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And the killing isn’t limited to just elephants. An ounce of powdered rhino horn is now more expensive than an ounce of gold.

There are now just 20,000 lions left in Africa – a staggering 90 per cent drop in the past 20 years – to the point that now there are no lions left outside protected areas, and even those that are within such areas are being poisoned when they roam outside their borders. This isn’t just due to population pressure – they are also being killed for body parts for China now that there are so few tigers left.

The plains animals are getting slaughtered as well: giraffes here in the region are being killed at a faster rate for bush meat. There are even contracts out on zebras, as their skins are the latest fad in Asia.

The Amboseli ecosystem, which, in my opinion, has the greatest population of elephants left in East Africa, has until now been incredibly vulnerable, suffering badly from insufficient funding for government and (the very few) non-profit organisations alike.

With all this in mind, I realised that I could no longer watch the destruction of this extraordinary ecosystem and its animals. So in September 2010, I established Big Life Foundation. Igor became our unfortunate poster child, and his home – the Amboseli ecosystem –

Autumn 2011

FQR Africa Wildlife Special

Patrick Mavros relates the story of two very different legends: the Zambezi River god Nyaminyami – and the real-life, animal-rescuing hero Rupert Fothergill

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y grandfather sat in his canvas camp chair in the shadow of a great baobab tree. The heat in the Zambezi Valley had risen to 40°C and the shimmering haze hid the mountains across the great river. Five paces in front of him were about 50 Batonka tribesmen and three tribeswomen. Some squatted, and some – including Chief Binga and Chief Siambolomba – sat on carved stools.

The women smoked a mixture of tobacco and dagga from their large calabash pipes. These people were fishermen and hunter-gatherers and the Sir Patrick Fletcher, ancient inhabitants of the Zambezi River. They had courtesy of Patrick Mavros walked tens of miles from their villages of huts on stilts, through herds of buffalo and around families of elephants to listen to the news of the white man before them. His name was Sir Patrick Fletcher and he was the Minister of Native Affairs of Southern Rhodesia.

Before he started to speak, a lone elephant tusker trumpeted alarmingly close to the river about half a mile away. The minister hesitated, then greeted the elders first in Sindebele and then through his interpreter. He told the men and women that the government was going to dam the mighty river at a gorge called Kariba.

Immediately, there were murmurings of deep disappointment amongst the people and they began to speak out, telling Sir Patrick that he had no right to talk about their river like that, that the river god Nyaminyami would destroy any obstacle to the river.

The minister tried to placate them, saying that a huge evacuation would take their families to new homes before the rising waters covered their stilted huts. The oldest of the three women became hysterical, throwing herself from side to side, then went off screaming through the thorny bush towards the river. Her tracks were followed through the dust to a bank high over the Zambezi and there they disappeared forever.

became our pilot initiative project. Multiple, fully equipped teams of rangers are being placed in newly built outposts in the critical areas throughout the region. So far, within just a year of inception, Big Life has hired 120-plus rangers, built or expanded 14 outposts, and purchased 14 vehicles, with the latest-technology night-vision equipment, aerial monitoring and a critically important large network of informers.

As of June 2011, this new level of co-ordinated protection for the ecosystem has already brought about a major reduction in poaching of all animals in the region. Amongst other achievements, a number of significant arrests of some of the worst, most prolific, long-term poachers in the region have at long last been engineered by Big Life’s teams. As a result of these successes, we have been able to quickly send out a strong message to poachers that killing wildlife now carries a far greater risk of being arrested. However, the poaching continues unabated in the areas where Big Life still has no presence. Whilst we have made substantial progress, we still need to double the number of rangers, camps and vehicles in the Amboseli ecosystem.

When we have achieved our goal of stable and sustainable operations long term in the region, we then want to start allocating funds to other areas in East Africa urgently in need of dealing with this growing poaching crisis. Because as the

Within months, convoys of Bedford trucks relocated thousands of villagers and their possessions to higher ground inland. The first coffer dams choked the Zambezi in 1957 and, as the bed of the great river lay bare, Nyaminyami’s wrath sent storms and floods to sweep away the physics of the learned world. The engineers and labourers worked hard to replace the foundations and sat back to enjoy the Christmas celebrations.

It took 100 days for Nyaminyami to express his displeasure again, and floods 17ft higher than normal poured over the Victoria Falls. This bore of water travelled 300 miles to smash the settlers’ dam and the Batonka people once again praised the serpent river god that had always looked after them.

The flood plains along the great river are flat, low-lying

the largest animal rescue since Noah filled his Ark and interspersed with jesse thorn bush, mopane trees and ancient baobabs. In the dry season the parched and cracked earth clutches at the footprints of buffalo and elephant. Most years – when there are good rains – the river swells and overflows its banks, carrying fertile soil, seeds and humus to create an instant alluvial Garden of Eden across the plains. Within months the water is absorbed, allowing animals to move into the flatlands and feast. Most of the animals and insects have grown used to these short seasonal swampings.

Kariba Gorge was finally plugged and in December 1959 it threw the water of the Zambezi back upon itself.

And so began the flood that never ended. Millions of crickets, centipedes, mice and snakes were forced from the fractured earth, grass and trees. Their cacophonous shrill filled the air for 200 miles.

The creatures of the valley had to swim for their lives.

Buffalo, zebra, warthogs and rhinos lost their natural compasses to exhaustion and the kudu and sable antelope with large horns were the first survivors to have their

illegal demand for ivory, rhino horn and other wildlife parts continues to grow, there will be many who cannot resist the easy profits to be made out of killing these irreplaceable creatures.

For the first time ever I have agreed to license my photographs for promotion of a product, despite ongoing, multiple requests over the years. I agreed in this instance not just because JeanRichard’s watches are truly quality products, but because the company has shown genuine

an ounce of powdered rhino horn is now more expensive than an ounce of gold commitment and interest in Big Life Foundation’s mission to preserve and protect the wildlife and wilderness of East Africa. It has been a generous partner in all senses.

I personally love the style of the Highlands watch.

Fittingly, it’s actually a much better-designed (and more expensive!) version of the watch I’ve been wearing for the past 10 years. Even more aptly, when I was having a

muzzles submerged by the weight of their trophies.

The canopies of submerged trees became false islands where stragglers fought for survival. Monkeys ate exhausted rodents, black mambas struck at anything in reach and the larger animals, treading water, drowned creatures smaller than themselves. The lone tusker that had trumpeted at the time of the big indaba could not outswim the rising waters of 1959. Exhausted, he collapsed on a hilltop that became an island and drowned when he could not lift his trunk out of the water.

A handful of game rangers and their scouts from the Game Department of Southern Rhodesia drove their boat up to the old elephant’s body. This small group of men, led by 43-year-old Rupert Fothergill, was the team that would work 12 hours a day for five years to rescue over 6,000 animals and reptiles.

This was the era that became known as Operation Noah, the largest animal rescue since Noah filled his Ark. It was a time before immobilising drugs, when men caught animals in nets and with their bare hands. These brave men were bitten by snakes, speared by porcupines, slashed by warthog tusks and Rupert Fothergill was disembowelled by a rhino.

The world media – journalists, television and movie crews – swarmed onto the shores of Lake Kariba, with naturalists, politicians, the Governor General, Lord Dalhousie and Mountbatten of Burma. They all came to witness the extraordinary courage of this small group of men in their quest to save the animals in one of the wildest rivers in the world.

Within three years, the great translocations had taken place and today the great water looks like it has always been there, with fishermen and their nets, and herds of buffalo and elephant grazing along the shores.

Occasionally, Nyaminyami stirs and his tremors in the earth can be felt as far afield as 200 miles.

Patrick Mavros, fourth-generation Zimbabwean and bon vivant is also a master sculptor and jewellery designer. www.patrickmavros.com

meeting in the bush a few weeks ago, I noticed that Richard Bonham, Big Life’s Director of Operations, and Damian Bell, Big Life’s Operations Manager in Tanzania, were also wearing watches very similar (but again inferior) to the Highlands watch. So clearly, JeanRichard’s designers have captured the essence of what guys like us out in the African wilderness like in a timepiece.

Nick Brandt is a renowned photographer whose pictures of animals document a vanishing world. He founded Big Life Foundation in 2010 as an urgent response to the recent escalation in poaching across much of Africa. www.biglifeafrica.org www. nickbrandt.com

Elephants on a Bleached Lake Bed © Nick Brandt 2011 Drawings Courtesy of Stefano Macaluso and Girard-Perregaux

Autumn 2011

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GIRARD-PERREGAUX 1966 Small Second

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Pink gold case, sapphire case back, Hour, minute and small second.

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FQR Africa Culture Focus

Putting Africa In The Picture Jean Pigozzi explains his 22-year love affair with collecting contemporary African art

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I have never travelled to Africa

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Autumn 2011

ed, 2009, Pathy Tshindele, Untitl llection, Geneva CAAC, The Pigozzi Co © Pathy Tshindele

Caroline Cushing Graham talks to the inspirational Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith whose archive of breath-taking images, video and diaries covers 50 African countries and records many of the cultural traditions of that great continent

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ngela Fisher, a blonde Australian with Bardot good looks, and Carol Beckwith, a dark-eyed American beauty, met in Kenya in the Seventies – two gorgeous, intrepid young women who, with great effort and courage, tumbled upon their careers in the African bush.

“Early on we decided to work together, each with a camera and video, to record the cultural traditions of Africa. Colourful, rare scenes of groups in each country of the African continent became our lifelong passion and the subject of 14 books. In our archives we have half a million images, 400 hours of video film, 200 illustrated field diaries and three museum exhibitions” is the charming way they describe this monumental achievement. And it has brought them fame, awards and recognition for their photography and unique exploration. Jane Pisano, president and director of the LA Natural History Museum, says, “African Ceremonies Volumes 1 and 2 [Harry Abrams] are within reach behind my desk. This is a serious achievement by two women.”

I met these famous women 10 years ago. The African Ceremonies books were being snapped up and signed at Ken Lipper’s party in Santa Monica. Carol and Angela were wearing their jewellery, made from treasures found on their journeys. Dressed in long African printed coats, they stood side by side, describing perilous adventures through Africa. The audience gasped at the photographs of two women travelling happily for months at a time. Carrying camera equipment, riding on donkeys and laughing as they headed into the jungle with local escorts. Unlike other famous photographers in Africa – Peter Beard and his sensational photographs of the rotten flesh of elephants and crocodiles in Kenya, or Mirella Riciardi, the author of Vanishing Africa, or Leni Riefenstahl’s searing, dark portraits of the Nuba and Dinka tribes – Carol and Angela have photographed colourful and diverse ceremonies in 50 African countries.

Their African Ceremonies limited-edition prints and books are handmade in Chile.

Recently, I asked them about their latest expeditions.

We talked on their return from Africa to their pink Belsize Park house and studio. They explained in one voice: “In December we went to the ancient Igue Festival in the Royal Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria. It took us three years to get permission from the King to photograph the Benin royal ceremony. The King’s brother and his family took care of us in every way with great attention to our safety from morning to night. We worked with Nikon 35mm cameras and zoom lenses, no tripods, running behind the processions, photographing from two angles. We were the only Europeans at this two-week-long Benin Festival.

For the past 800 years, the Royal Kingdom celebrates annually the Igue- a series of rituals in the King’s Palace to cleanse the land of corruption and renew the

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divine power of the King. The Royal Palace with its 300 courtiers is surrounded by ancient traditions and elaborate costumes. It is the original home of the famous Benin bronzes. Our Benin photographs will be a part of our African Twilight book, to be published by Rizzoli in 2014. In January we were lucky enough to go to northern Kenya to film 203 Pokot males being initiated into manhood. This rare ceremony occurs once every 10 years during which the intitiates emerge from 6 weeks of isolation and training in the sacred forest to be celebrated by the community as men.”

The Dinka book – out now in Limited and Rizzoli editions – was worked on for 30 years. “Our last visit to southern Sudan took place in 2007. We were looking for the dry-season cattle camps after the civil war,” the photographers say. “It was extremely dangerous. We were held up at gunpoint one evening. The area had changed – no more beaded bodices – it was hard to find the 2,000 grazing cattle with their young herders. Dinka men are the tallest race in Africa, referred to by the early explorers as ‘the gentle giants’.”

Evidently, these women are never afraid. Their photographs prove how much the African groups have trusted them and their cameras over the years. “We would love to go back to Sudan in the future to cover other groups such as the Lotuko and Toposa,” they say. ast autumn I met up with Carol and Angela on their American tour with the Dinka book. Several of The Lost Boys of Sudan, who have been brought to the States from refugee camps, came to meet them at an art gallery. “Our villages were like that 20 years ago,” they said, looking at the photographs in the book. The Dinka men were grinning with pleasure, recognising with pride their old life in the cattle camp, rubbing ash on the cattle and grooming their lyre-shaped horns.

One said “They have done what nearly seven million Dinka people could never do themselves, preserving our heritage and culture is priceless.”. Oliver Stone, now preparing a film on Sudan, treasures his copy of Dinka, as does George Clooney, a supporter of independence for the South.

The Painted Bodies book, featuring the art of the painted body across Africa, will be published by Rizzoli in 2012. “These ceremonies focus on the beauty and creativity of the ancient art of body decoration in 30 countries across the continent.” is the way Carol and Angela describe these photographs. “The original concept of early men and women painting their bodies still in practice today, reveals the power of age-old designs, colours and abstract forms.”

Caroline Cushing Graham is the founder and CEO of C4 Global Communications

Oliver Stone treasures his copy of Dinka, as does George Clooney

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Dinka Boy with Long Horned Bull, Southern Sudan by Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith

t was back in the Seventies while I was at Harvard that I started collecting American art – but only very modestly. I had a collection like a bad dentist. I met Charles Saatchi, who said I was wasting my time unless I put in more hours and became serious.

Then in 1989, I went to an art show in Paris called The Magicians of the Earth, featuring contemporary art from all around the world including Africa, Papua New Guinea, India and Australia.

What excited me the most was the African art. For me, African art was what you saw at the British Museum or being sold by street vendors in Paris. I had no idea that there were such amazing artists working in the continent. I called the organiser of the show the next day and said I wanted to buy the entire African collection.

But it belonged to a sponsor so instead he introduced me to one of the curators of the show, André Magnin. I called and asked him if he wanted to work for me and since then, over 22 years, we have assembled the largest collection of contemporary African art in the world. We now have over 10,000 pieces.

With age, I have become a very fussy traveller: I don’t like being stuck at disorganised airports; I also don’t like giant traffic jams or bizarre food. So I have never travelled to Africa. Instead, André and his partner have been very courageous going up and down Africa sourcing pictures. Even though I have never been to Africa, there’s not one piece in the collection that I haven’t chosen with him. The African art market was undiscovered, very little research had been done; there were no books, no experts. So we had to do our own research on the ground in Africa.

This is a very personal collection and very much my vision of Africa, which I hope to share. I’m not a library; a library would have books from A to Z, but I have A, C, D, F, M and Z… Furthermore, as mine is a privately funded collection I don’t have any problems buying pictures that I want. I believe the best art collections are never done by a committee but are done by an obsessive collector, which I am.

I would say that 90 per cent of the artists in Africa are self-taught – they don’t go to the museum and look at Turners, Renoirs or Warhols – and therefore I find that their art is much freer and much less influenced by dealers telling them what buyers would collect. ver the years, the artists have got much better. The equipment they use has improved and the art has in general improved.

One of my favourites is the photographer Seydou Keïta.

He was incredible. I think his work is on the same level as the great portrait photographers of the 20th century. It is absolutely magical how he managed to portray these non-professional subjects in such an incredible way, especially when you realise that he only took one picture every time. I represent the estate, and will be working over the next few years to raise awareness and help his work become more and more important.

I meet some of the artists now because they come to America and Europe and visit the shows. It is fascinating because these people are so sophisticated and creative. I have been enormously impressed by the artists I deal with. They are highly intelligent, well-read and know a lot about life. It’s hard to be an artist in Africa; it’s very hard to survive in Africa. So these are very strong men and women who believe in what they are doing, and I am happy to work with them.

They have studios the size of a woman’s shoe closet, with chickens and children running around, and they manage to produce fantastic art.

Ojeikere, a photographer from Nigeria, once stood up at an arts conference at the opening of the 2005 show in Houston and said that each time I bought a painting from an African artist hundreds of people benefited as the money was redistributed in the community. I cannot tell you how proud that made me feel, that by buying art and collecting beautiful pictures I am in some way contributing to the lives of these artists, their families and communities. This is something that makes me incredibly happy.

Jean (Johnny) Pigozzi is a venture capitalist, philanthropist, photographer. For information on his next African Art exhibition go to www.caacart.com

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FQR Fashion Focus

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Heather Kerzner has a rosy future ahead – in fact, it’s in every shade of pink that you can imagine

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Head of Levi’s XX division, Maurizio Donadi finds the vintage world meaningful and motivating

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unting for vintage was not at the top of my career- or life-list of things to do. The first was to be a musician. It was the Seventies, after all. Another was to be a full-time institution resistor. I suppose I still stand by the latter. I ended up working in a steel factory in a small town in Italy while I decided what I wanted to, or could, be. I was there for three and a half long years.

I blame Benetton for my path in fashion. I escaped Italy for Paris, where my first job with the company was warehousing and delivering stock to its stores in the city. I learned the clean, orderly side of the clothing business. But the musician and constant need for bumping up against the corporation remained, which is probably why I have such an affinity and connection with secondhand clothes, decrepit furniture, random reading material and anything vintage today.

I see all vintage as a footprint of one’s past. For us to carve out a clear future, we must each respect and acknowledge where we come from, no matter the size, proportion or impact of the mark made.

Mine was small, but it still resonates for me today.

It’s personal and at times motivating. I have also found that this motivation often generates innovation.

Specifically with vintage clothing, discovering or reading someone else’s past that represents the purity of a humble beginning is fascinating to me. I don’t know anything other than hard work and if I don’t sweat, I don’t think I’m working. I’m still trying to come to terms with this, as I haven’t worked in a factory for over 35 years. So, when I see someone else’s mark on life in a pair of jeans, I feel the honesty of that man’s work. I recently heard a recording of my band’s concert in the Seventies. My voice was different, but not much had changed in terms of principles and truths. I see this as vintage, just as I do a pair of jeans. This was my mark and, thankfully, I didn’t veer too far from it.

I was in Miami in the early Nineties when I decided to open a vintage store called Outlander.

I was in between working for others, so I set forth and sought out old Levi’s, Brooks Brothers’ white Oxford shirts, Chicago Police leather jackets and other forgotten, American brands. What may be fashionable and on trend today was certainly not for American customers. Europeans and Japanese came to shop at Outlander and were more au fait with American vintage than the locals were.

At that time, the best places to find secondhand goods were the rag houses all over North Miami – good-quality woven shirts, Sixties tees, chinos and plenty of beautiful Cuban guayaberas. I am talking about pretty filthy warehouses, enormous cockroaches and 130 per cent humidity. I would buy five bales of 500lb each for $100 per bale, and work full days to grade the findings. On a lucky day, I would find a couple of Levi’s Type 2 jackets, a pair of Levi’s XX jeans, some great Wrangler denim shirts, plenty of Storm Riders 101J and Lee denim jackets.

There were also tons of Pierre Cardin formal shirts (at no value whatsoever). Tons. There I was, sifting

through people’s lives, touching the places they went to, dining at the restaurants they frequented – all at $5 a pound.

My best (true vintage and collector quality) Levi’s jeans came from Maine and Utah, and my XXs from somewhere in Nevada and North California.

Army & Navy surplus came from Atlanta. Philippe, a Frenchman, use to drive his truck full of selvedge Levi’s all the way from Colorado. It was Christmas every time he called for a delivery. But I needed serious preparation, as it was a cash-only business.

Oscar from Argentina provided all the repairs needed, recycled buttons, elbow patching and homemade cleaning. This period was my first indepth experience in working in vintage, albeit for commercial purposes in running my own business.

Today, I come across vintage in different ways. I am no longer in the commerce of it, but an armchair observer instead. We can still find reputable vintage at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, at Mister Freedom in Los Angeles, at J’Antiques in Tokyo, Ragtop in London and other seasonal markets around the world.

But commerce has changed the landscape of vintage buying and selling. Before, people were discovering the essence of history in a pair of denim jeans with passion and almost fanaticism – now, fashion brands are inflating prices for collecting an aesthetic for which the original message of what the item was, and stands for, is often overlooked or overemphasised to resell it. recently worked with a dealer in London who was kind enough to advance me a pair of late-Twenties Levi’s 501 cinch-back jeans from a mine in Nevada. They are breathtaking.

What is fascinating to me about this pair is that there remains a clasp of a pocket watch chain still attached to the front pocket; it’s iodised green and rusted, but there it was. History. His story. Was the watch stolen when the miner was taking a nap? Or stolen after the jeans were taken off? We’ll never know. There is also rust on part of the front leg of the jeans that could have come from the rusting buttons that were folded over the leg for many years. I handle them with care, and brought them on tour last season. I sent my wife to London to settle my account – there aren’t many gentlemen dealers like him out there any more.

Levi’s Vintage Clothing is inspired by and based on the archival pieces of the company’s history in supplying workwear to miners and successive industries’ workers. However, beyond these, there is also recent vintage that tells stories worth retelling. I believe that vintage, no matter the age, often finds you, as it has me my whole life. We are faced with that magic moment when the object independently decides to like, attract, smile at and inspire you.

Maurizio Donadi is the Global Senior Vice President of Levi’s Brand Presentation and Levi’s XX

when I see someone else’s mark on life in a pair of jeans, I feel the honesty of that man’s work

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was recently at a birthday party where one of my closest girlfriends arrived sporting a bubblegum pink Hermès bag. I’m not one to be jealous of my friends or covet their belongings but I wanted that bag. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

I’m blessed to be intimately acquainted with the craftsmanship and elegance of the Hermès Kelly and, indeed, the Birkin, but it was the vibrant pink of the Barbie Birkin that made my heart palpitate, my palms sweat and my cheeks flush pink with excitement.

What is it about the colour pink?

Pink is associated with love, health, spring, beauty, innocence and glamour. The colour, in any shade, makes us happy and lifts our spirits. Pink brings us back to the carefree days of childhood, peonies in the garden and cherry blossoms in the park. When I think of pink I think of Courrèges and cotton candy and conjure images of Christo’s Surrounded Islands and the 6.5 million sq ft of floating fuchsia fabric he used to encircle the islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. I was surprised to learn that pink is the official colour of Westminster School. My son’s housemaster explained to me that until the

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Forties the colour pink was associated with boys, while blue was considered more appropriate for girls. To this day, the male rowing teams at Westminster wear a fondant-fancy-coloured kit.

Legend has it that in 1837 they even had to defeat their archrivals Eton in a race for the honour of wearing the fashionable colour!

Certainly, the gender association between blue and pink divided opinion – the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1918 researched the colour conflict and stated: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is pertier for the girl.” Why this was inverted, I don’t know… perhaps it has to do with the association between pink and the sensual colour of a woman’s lips and cheeks. Whatever it is, since the Forties pink has come to represent the fairer sex.

In fashion, to my mind, pink is certainly the most evocative and alluring colour. When a woman wears pink she is sexy yet unsullied and stands out from the crowd. Think of

Nick Silver on the quintessential skull ring

he ringing abruptly crystallised from my dreams to a rather groggy reality as I fumbled around the floor by my bed for my BlackBerry. Who was calling me so early on a Saturday morning – and, indeed, what time was it?

9.15am. Harrumph.

“Hello, Mr Silver, it’s Tiffany here – from Cartier.”

No, I must be dreaming, did she really say that?

“Just to let you know that your watch strap is now on order and it will take four to six weeks. The price will be £250, is that OK?” “Uh, yes, marvellous. Great.”

“Oh, sorry, did I wake you? I’ll call later next time.”

Next time, I thought! What would possess me to agree to spend £250 on a watch strap? Catch me with my eyes open next time! They must have a deliberate policy of calling up customers when they are barely awake and can’t make rational decisions. I jest, but as I walk up and down Bond Street as the summer draws to an end, it seems that those who still have any money – or credit – are walking in and out of the big-brand retailers carrying bags full of things that they wouldn’t have bought if some marketing genie hadn’t sprinkled pixie dust over them.

I feel vaguely ashamed to admit to spending £250 on a watch strap. After all, for around £360 one can really buy something. A real icon of 20thcentury jewellery: a skull ring by Courts and Hackett. Exactly the same as the one that they gave Keith Richards as a birthday present, the one he never takes off and that you can see in every photo that’s ever been taken of him.

Despite having work in the permanent collections of the Goldsmiths’ Hall and the Victoria & Albert Museum and having made jewels for Keith Richards and a plethora of other luminaries, David Courts and Bill Hackett have never promoted their work off the back of their clientele. Indeed, they only started to make facsimiles of that ring when they discovered that other people were trying to market skull rings the same as Keith’s. I have asked them repeatedly how they can sell them for so little money and told them that given the quality and their stature as jewellers they should sell them for far more.

Their answer is simple, at £360 they

make a good profit and they sell loads of them to precisely the sort of people who really appreciate them, ie, bikers and rockers. It seems like K the bargain of the coeith Richards wearing Court s and Hackett urtesy of 21st Century Jewel je century, as they are s exactly the same as Keith’s original, based on a particularly beautiful skull belonging to the Pop artist Clive Barker.

I persuaded Courts and Hackett to produce some special limited-edition pieces in gold for Masterpiece, the show that promotes the best in antiques and design, in June and early July this year in the grounds of The Royal Hospital in Chelsea. I produced press releases and spent quite bit of time on promoting their work before the show. When the show opened their pieces took pride of place on my stand and included were jewels that they had kept aside for years that they felt were almost too good to sell. Well, even though I say so myself, the display looked great and both David and Bill were there to help, but despite this there was very little interest and no sales. I felt as though I had let them both down but the truth is that the public seems to need constant reassurance through PR and advertising before they part with their money; even when offered a masterpiece at what seems to me to be a reasonable price. avid and Bill are the real thing, a bit hippie and a larger part rock’n’roll. They still share the same obsessive commitment to detail that brought them to work together in 1974, while still at the Royal College of Art, as well as the technical know-how that enables them to produce pieces that fall into the same category as the great jewellers they idolise: René Lalique and Fabergé.

They work at their own pace and, although willing to take on commissions, will only make things that they find interesting.

Perhaps they are dinosaurs, but if you are really interested in beauty and quality and don’t mind waiting, they will produce something unique that will take your breath away.

Keith Richards’ skull ring is available through the Courts and Hackett website: courtsandhackett.com.

Special commissions through Nick Silver at 21st Century Jewels, 1st Floor, 55 Conduit Street, London W1; 020-7287 5117; nick@21stcenturyjewels.com

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Autumn 2011

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A Skin-Win Situation

it was the vibrant pink of the Barbie Birkin that made my heart palpitate, my palms sweat and my cheeks flush pink with excitement

’ve never known a time when I haven’t been fascinated by the alluring, lasting beauty of exotic skins. My father CT Koh’s first tannery was situated at the back of the home where I grew up in Singapore. I have vivid memories of being a toddler, sitting on his shoulders and walking around the workshop, captivated by the sights and smells, intrigued by the amazingly fast, skilled work of his team as they created magical, exquisite materials by hand. To me, exotic skins are like precious jewels.

Today, my father owns the world’s largest independent tannery, Heng Long International, and supplies the finest crocodile, alligator, python,

may-care attitude – very much in the mode of David Niven, Rex Harrison and FQR’s very own Nick Foulkes.

On a practical level, pink complements almost every skin tone and can co-ordinate beautifully with a multitude of other hues: greys, tans, blues and blacks all work well – so what’s not to love? onsidering what a great pickme-up colour pink is, I was not surprised to learn that Honeysuckle has been named the colour of 2011 by the Pantone Colour Institute.

According to its executive director, “The intensity of this festive reddish pink allures and engages… Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating colour that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues.”

I fully concur, knowing the smiles and second glances I receive every time I don my fuchsia Nike trainers, my rose-coloured Matthew Williamson sunglasses, or my new pink Birkin!

Heather Kerzner is founder and co-chair of the Fashion Trust, a philanthropist and FQR’s Chief Fashion Correspondent.

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Having grown up with a tannery in his back garden, bag designer Ethan Koh knows his way around an exotic skin or two lizard and ostrich to France’s leading luxury houses and Prada, as well as to Ethan K, my range of handmade bags and briefcases for men and women.

My father’s skins are as soft and silky as butter.

My brother, Albert, oversees the amazingly skilled, technical side of the tannery where finishes and colours are created and perfected. I realise now

how privileged I am to have been part of this mystical world, where ancient arts and state-ofthe-art science play together. And it’s this world, working in the tannery myself, and visiting the ateliers of France and Italy that have inspired me in my creations today.

I decided to venture into design when I was a teenager and started creating bags – firstly for my mother and then her friends in Singapore.

They were a hit. It gave me impetus, and I set about layering my knowledge of materials with a personal design sensibility, explored at the ateliers of Hermès and Louis Vuitton.

My immersion in the finest luxury items was married to a more formal design and business education at Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion. he exotic skins industry is shrouded in mystique. My father, for example, has many secret ingredients and techniques that have been handed down and finessed to bring out the very best in these natural materials. Some customers aren’t sure what to look for, how to spot the good, indifferent and sometimes plain dreadful.

It offends me when I see overpriced, substandard exotic-skin products – the materials are so rare and precious, and products made from them should last forever, improve with age if they are looked after and treasured. If you know what you’re doing, no gimmicks are required with the leathers – no injections, for example.

A deep understanding of working with and enhancing skins naturally is the key – good old-fashioned know-how and patience!

I am also very aware of the need to find skins that adhere to the standards of The Crocodile Specialist Group (CSG) and Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which are examples of two groups that monitor the commercial use of exotic skins.

The farmers I buy my skins from source eggs and, after incubation, will raise the animal for at least one year, before it is suitable for business. Twelve per cent of these animals are then released back into the wild and the rest

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www.harryfane.com

Autumn 2011

Tel +44 207 930 8606

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are used for production. Of the eggs that are not harvested, ie, the ones left to survive in the wild, only five per cent of these thrive so farmers are helping conserve the species, and without the demand for exotic skins, there would be no farms. In fact, there are several species that now face potential overpopulation.

Ethan Koh is proprietor of Ethan K www.ethan-k.com

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Ethan Koh

engagement as the Duchess of Cambridge she opted to wear a more toneddown pink hue in the form of a gorgeous beaded Jenny Packham dress to the Ark ball this past June.

Happily, today the gender separating of colours of clothing is well and truly over. Pink on a man exudes confidence yet alludes towards a more thoughtful feminine, side. A pink shirt or tie is very sexy indeed. When I see a “real man” in pink, I think of Elvis and his illustrious pink Cadillac.

In the City, pink shirts are seen as normal workwear. Hedgefunders sport robustly macho pink handkerchiefs, socks and accessories in order to convey a devil-

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953, SNAP/Rex Features

Marilyn Monroe in the pink satin gown she wore when she sang Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Princess Diana had a fascination for pink dresses and exemplified the power of pink when she wore them.

Whether these dresses were designed by Catherine Walker, Victor Edelstein or Zandra Rhodes, she knew the magical impact of the colour. Catherine Middleton followed suit very effectively.

She put the Brazilian designer Daniella Helayel on the map when, as Princess-in-waiting, she wore a stunning fuchsia-pink satin Issa dress to the Boxing Ball in 2008. And at her first official

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Courtesy of

ewellery,

FQR Fashion Focus

Run It Out hor

metap Baseball is a ys sa for life ine Matthew Mod

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all is baseball weather in America.

It’s a sport that blossoms with spring training that spills into a pre-season then, after 162 games over the dog days of summer, reaches a dramatic conclusion in the fall with the World Series. Which doesn’t actually involve the rest of the world, by the way. It’s the world that Americans envision their world to be.

Elements of baseball are found in English rounders and cricket. But America’s favourite pastime is uniquely American.

To call it a “World Series” is to peek through America’s patriotic curtains. Baseball is a game in which, if you fail seven out of 10 times, you can still be a success! America is a country of immigrants and the game is mostly played by immigrants; people who grew up hungry, and who must stay hungry to prosper. Simply put, I don’t believe there is another sport that better magnifies my country or its people.

Baseball is played in a park – not in a ring or an arena – which just sounds nicer: “Hey, let’s go to the ballpark!” Baseball is a game filled with metaphor and sexual euphemism. Consider the expression “getting to first base”. It means getting from home

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n 15 August 2011 I was 49 years old and began 12 months of self-analysis as I prepare for my half-century. I will try my damnedest not to be too brutal with my scorecard to date. After all, time is a fickle friend.

The questions will out, though… there is nothing to be done on that front. Lying in bed at night, or running slowly in the park, my thoughts will drift though the half-century past…

Why no hit movies? Not more movies? Why not more offices or business accolades? And, of course, why not more money, power or fame? Why not more, more, more..? Why did I not do this or that? Buy gold at $300 or a ranch in Utah or a beach in Harbour Island? This is, after all, the world we inhabit. One in which, more and more, life is measured in financial success.

Our children want instant riches – instant recognition from photocopier to pop-culture celebrity, all in a dog’s breath. From art-school graduate, to fashion designer, to billionaire. Our business achievements quantified not on their value and productivity, nor even on annual profits, but on their sale price – on the exit. My exit is that there is no exit. In a year it will be “the end of the beginning”, as Churchill said.

These are, of course, mostly the fickle questions a man secretly (or, in this case, not so secretly) asks himself as he faces middle age. The more profound questions rarely get asked at all, for they require answers not available on a business spreadsheet, but revealed on the balance sheet of life. Have I loved enough? Have I loved well? Was I loved enough?

Have I given enough? What can I give now? When my mother died in my arms, was I a good son? Have I given the mother of my child enough of my time?

Do I know more than I did running through the early years, barely stopping to collect my thoughts, or to catch fragments of the failures or successes I

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plate to first base. You do this by either hitting the ball where your opponent is not, or by the pitcher throwing four balls, or bad pitches, outside the “strike zone”, another term borrowed from baseball and retooled for use in American military operations. In terms of sexual practice, getting to first base would be kissing. Failing to get to first base is to get the cold shoulder or be spurned by your potential sexual partner. If you do get to first base, you may be on your journey towards “second base” – let’s say, the fondling of your partner’s breasts.

“Third base” would be fondling south of the breasts and a hopeful sign that you might get a “home run” and “score”. If you got to third base but didn’t score, you of course “struck out”.

To be fair and PC, these sexually exciting terms borrowed from baseball are not limited to, or by, heterosexual sex. There is a lexicon of homosexual baseball terms as well.

“Batting for the other team” is a sociable way to point out that a person plays for the same-sex team.

Sometimes there are those who are bisexual or “bat both ways”. In baseball that means having the ability to bat both left- and right-handed, also referred to as “switch hitting”. In baseball there is a “pitcher” and a “catcher”. In sex there are also pitchers and catchers. You can use your imagination to conjure up erotic images of positions for both terms. But enough of that…

In life, and in baseball, we are thrown many “curveballs”. In our lives, we have to adjust ourselves and our stances to deal with each of them.

In baseball, pitchers are valued and rewarded for intentionally throwing “curveballs” to outsmart the batters. When a batter hits a curveball, he has to be ready to run the bases.

And then there is “stealing”. In baseball, stealing isn’t really “stealing”. Players are expected to “steal” whenever possible. Theirs is honest stealing – stealing bases in front of a crowd of people. Unlike corporate leaders and bankers robbing from their shareholders or clients for self-gain. That kind is the criminal kind. Stealing bases involves risk and daring. You can’t steal second base if you keep your foot on first base. Baseball, as opposed to whitecollar crimes, is a game in which if you get three strikes against you, you are out. Period. Not even the best lawyer can save you.

Baseball is a game where a sacrifice is really appreciated.

A batter who hits a “sacrifice fly” can advance a teammate on the bases, or drive in a run by “taking one for the team”. The batter sacrifices his personal statistics for the betterment of the team. Unlike other games measured by time, in baseball you can’t sit on a lead and let the clock run out. There is no clock. There are nine innings, but a game cannot end in a tie. You’ve got to throw the ball over the plate and you have to continually outplay your opponent until there is no tie on the scoreboard and the final out is made.

Baseball is a game in which it’s acceptable to spit as much and wherever you want. Trying to understand aspects of the game is like looking

at a girl in a bikini: you enjoy watching, and the best part is the stuff you can’t see. Like most wonderful things in life, it is mystery that beguiles and intrigues. I love baseball for all of the above.

I love the feeling of hitting a round ball with a round bat, squarely. Even with all the rearranging of a player’s “package”, “junk” or “man-package”, all the spitting, gum, sunflower seeds and chewing tobacco, baseball is, at its core, a highly stylised, humane and sophisticated form of combat – an elegant ballet of metaphor, physical skill and symbolism. A chess match played in human flesh.

It is the mixture of heroism and greed and pride and team effort. he sports writer Paul Gallico wrote, “No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.” The quintessential American actor Humphrey Bogart put it this way, “That’s baseball, and it’s my game. Y’know, you take your worries to the game, and you leave ’em there.

You yell like crazy for your guys. It’s good for your lungs, gives you a lift, and nobody calls the cops.”

So go to a game and get some fresh air. Eat some Cracker Jacks and enjoy watching the guys trying to get to first base. And while you’re there, know this about the game, as in life: if you don’t get up to bat, you can’t get to first base, let alone a home run. And when you get a hit, you gotta run! Even if it looks like you don’t have a chance, because, as in life, you never know what’s gonna happen! So run!

Matthew Modine is FQR’s liberal-at-large

left in my wake? What a champ I can be? What a To not know that film was a series of cuts, to be so fool I have been? blindly ignorant – ah… youth! Happy fool you can I remember stepping on the set of the first be. movie I directed and wrote at 23 years old, Priceless It was on that film that Michael Cimino said to Beauty. We were in Sardinia on a beach in mid- Christopher that I was young enough not to notice April. All around me was a crew of old Italian the daggers sticking out of my back. pros. My cameraman, Luciano Tovoli, And so to easier questions I can had worked with De Sica and De ask now. Have I seen the planet?

Seta. Pointing to the far end of Have I travelled enough? Well, the beach, I instructed my star, that’s a more interesting Christopher Lambert, to head question than it seems. up there and start walking Indeed, I have travelled back this way. often enough to have grown “Look sad,” I remember weary of the airports and was the profound pearl of the planes. To regard The directorial wisdom I offered Carlyle, The Ritz in Paris, up to Europe’s hottest star. “Up and the Beverly Hills there” was at least a mile from Hotel as second homes. But where we set up the camera. Off travelled enough to really say Christopher marched with hair I have seen the world? Not and make-up in train. really. I have made movies in “Action!” I shouted, like Cecil plenty of places and fished B DeMille, and Christopher the great bonefish in flats all started his very, very long over the West Indies, and Charles Finch contemplates yet I still have to visit India, walk. The camera turned over (started filming) and the whir approaching his half-century sip coffee on the Bund in of film spinning through the Shanghai, or visit Cambodia cartridge mingled with the quiet lapping of the or Laos, or walk the Amazon.

Mediterranean on the sand. On and on Christopher My journeys have taken me again and again to walked as I beamed in youthful incompetence. Like the places I knew as a child and have found work a well-trained Labrador, Luciano stood at my side in as an adult and thus found some peace with. The as the film – 400ft or 800ft of it – ran out of the great cities of London, Paris, Rome and Venice magazine. have become trusted friends. London at Christmas, “Another one,” said I. And another one there was.

Paris in spring, Rome in June or July as the summer Two days later the entire crew sat in stony silence begins and the Hassler opens its terrace suites to watching my first day’s directorial oeuvre projected the Spanish Steps. And Venice, good old Venice – on a sheet in our makeshift cinema. Two hours of of Hemingway. film following the small figure of Christopher walking It’s Venice in September for work, when the Film toward camera. Bergman turned in his grave.

Festival takes a grip of the Lido, and the Cipriani is

filled with New York dowagers with grandchildren visiting Europe for the first time. I remember the Venice Bronze Lion my mother and father won for their film The Day sitting in our drawing room at home and carrying it to my bedroom where for many years it sat, the only memory of my father and mother in happier times.

The Venice Film Festival is the gentle film festival to me. The movies are a little more art house than at Cannes or even Sundance. The swarming Italian journalists and the filmmakers trying to catch their breath between press conferences mingle with the tourists and fashion world. There are fewer billionaires and playboys. The interest in cinema seems more real than at Cannes. I will announce my new film and television company there this year. ut Venice for me is a city for November.

One of the great memories of my childhood is visiting with my mother and sister. We drove from the South of France, stopping at Rome and Padova on the way. We stayed at the Danieli, the three of us, and ate copious amounts of pasta.

In the afternoons we went on long walks, always getting lost and giggling together, scattering the pigeons…

We visited the Abyssinian monastery through the mists. The glassworks of Murano. The tiny jewellers of St Mark’s. We talked of ancient secret palaces, and the city entered my blood. The damp smell of history forever in my nostrils.

Years later, I took a girl I met in Rome to Venice in November. She complained about the damp – youthful foolery again. To be old is to be wiser and to know that not everyone understands the mists of time, or of Venice.

Charles Finch is FQR’s Proprietor. He is also a film producer, fashion mogul, PR king, and allrounder and will throw the best 50th-birthday party in a long time

In sex there are also pitchers and catchers

I was young enough not to notice the daggers sticking out of my back

nifty@fifty

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Autumn 2011

Photographs © The Estate of Bob Carlos Clarke / The Little Black Gallery

FQR Cannes FQR Photography Special

The Naked Truth Lindsey Carlos Clarke on her late husband, photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, his legendary work and what drove him

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always felt that Bob was like a wild animal that I had caught in a net, and, with a lot of love and attention, I tried to help him enjoy his life. Born into an aristocratic background, brought up in Ireland in the Fifties and sent to a dark Victorian boarding school when he was eight, he was very rebellious. All sexual contact was secret, furtive and therefore extremely exciting to Bob in his formative years.

He resented his mother for sending him away, and decided that no woman would ever control his life again. Getting a camera in his hand gave him control of beautiful women – and gave him the power to see them naked. We were once looking at some photographs he had just shot of a very beautiful young girl and he smiled and said, “This is just one split second in time; she will lose her youth and grow old, but I have her in my camera forever.”

Bob was not only a workaholic but also a perfectionist. He would spend days in the darkroom printing one picture until he got it right.

When Philippe Garner (head of photography at Christie’s) valued his archive, I opened the first print drawer and the aura from a real silver gelatin print was tangible. We just stood and stared at these amazing prints. I remember Bob saying, “It’s not what you do here on earth, it’s

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what you leave behind.” I am so aware that I am the keeper of the key, and I know he has left his mark historically. It is therefore vital that the main core of the archive is left to the nation and his work can live on and inspire people.

His work has been collected worldwide and he would have sold a lot more prints in his lifetime if only he could have borne to part with them. Collectors would offer him quite large amounts of money, and often he would give an excuse, saying the print was damaged or he

All sexual contact was secret, furtive and therefore extremely exciting would like to reprint the picture again, but he just hated to say goodbye to his work. Many of his beautiful original prints are unsigned because he thought it strange to sign your pictures unless they were sold.

As a photographer, he was unique. He was fascinated by all photographers, living or dead. He was always in search of the iconic image. He thought fashion photographs were “the silliest thing to do with a camera”, and always tried to keep away from clothes and props that dated.

He found his own photographic exhibitions stressful and traumatic. At one of his shows at Hamiltons many years ago,

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I found him banging hooks into the wall and rehanging the pictures – the room was full of people, and he was oblivious! He mistrusted galleries, agents and anyone who offered to sell his work, thought it was safer to keep his pictures in a drawer at home. He was a true eccentric.

After he died, the photographic world clamoured for his prints.

Nobody will ever be able to re-create his prints; he even said jokingly that it would be easier for Constable to recreate his Hay Wain than for him to reprint one of his own pictures. bviously, the prices of his photographs have gone on climbing and – through The Little Black Gallery – we decided to print some estate prints in small editions. These too are rising in value.

The most exciting thing for me is when a collector buys a valuable print to hang in their home and is truly passionate about the image. I love to think of his work being looked at all over the world on a daily basis. I think he would be pleased that he has become the legend he always wanted to be.

Lindsey Carlos Clarke was married to Bob Carlos Clarke until his untimely death in 2006. They have a daughter, Scarlett. Lindsey now coowns The Little Black Gallery, 13A Park Walk, London SW10, which has a room dedicated to her late husband’s work. www.thelittleblackgallery.com, www.bobcarlosclarke.com

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Autumn 2011

BET

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You Better, You Bet L ong

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FAR Manly Pursuits

The Aga: Still Hot News

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Balthazar Fabricius on the charm of betting, its legends and its fascinating terminology

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t is said that the three trades that ride any recession, and have been around since the dawn of time, are sex, drugs and gambling. So I guess I’m lucky I gravitated to the latter. Tempting though it is to relocate our office to Amsterdam so as to indulge in all three, we shall not. In fact, we can’t. The Dutch, open to most things, don’t like foreign bookmakers.

Betting’s charm is in its tradition. Sepia memories of trips to the races, the dogs or “the big game” on the weekend litter our childhood and formative years. But whilst aspects of the betting ring are disappearing with depressing speed, thankfully much of racing’s romance lingers impishly, just like young Burlington Bertie used to – the inspiration for the odds 100-30. Bertie was an aristocratic idler pursuing a life of leisure in the West End, frequenting amongst other places Kempton Park.

My namesake, JP Donleavy’s Balthazar B, loved a trip to the races, invariably at Leopardstown outside Dublin. There he wooed Elizabeth Fitzdare, the inspiration for the company that Ben Goldsmith and I established five years ago. Ben’s father, Jimmy, was a fearless gambler – and a lucky one. In 1950 he went to Lewes races and backed three horses in an accumulator. An accumulator is where the winnings from the first horse go onto the ODDS Fa vo ur ite . second and then onto the third. He staked £10 on Bartisan, Your Jo lly Ev en s . Le ve ls , Yo ur s to Fancy and Merry Dance.

All three won, pocketing Jimmy £8,000 – M in e 11 /1 0 . Bi ts a vast sum at the time – and he headed straight up to Oxford to play 5/ 4 . Wris t 11 /8 . Up Th e Ar m in his brother Teddy’s poker game… where he met John Aspinall.

6/ 4 .

7/ 4 . Sh ou ld Ea r Ho le “Aspers” believed that there was something genetically wrong er, Ne vi s to

“Aspers” believed that there was something genetically wrong with you if you didn’t bet. with you if you didn’t bet. It’s hard not to agree with him. How can you believe someone who, despite being so highly opinionated about something, is not willing, when challenged, to put at least some of his money where his mouth is? A score (£20), at least. Or a pony (£25), bullseye (£50), a ton (£100), a monkey (£500) or, better still, a bag of sand (£1,000)? 4-1 can be known as rouf – four spelt backwards but perhaps the most commonly asked question is why 3-1 is referred to as Carpet. Folklore has it that a gentleman by the name of Oliver Corn, racing at Cheltenham in 1876, had the first ever winner at 3-1 and was betting so that he could afford a carpet to furnish his home. He had, however, been misquoted by a mischievous carpet salesman and had to return the following day as they only had half the carpet – the remainder costing him considerably more, 33 times more, in fact. Therefore, 33-1 is affectionately known as Double Carpet. There are many more of these idiosyncratic betting terms; a longer list is just up to the left.

Happy punting.

Balthazar Fabricius is the founder of Fitzdares, the bespoke bookmaker created for the discerning gambler www.fitzdares.com; www.twitter.com/fitzdares eS ride and th James McB of y es rt Cou

olo Club ingapore P

Ro uf 2/ 1 . Bo 9/ 4 . To p of tt le th e He ad 5/ 2 . Bo tt le an d Ha lf, 3/ 1 . Ca rp et Fa ce 10 0/ 30 . Bu rli ng to n Be rt ie 7/ 2 . Ca rp 4/ 1 . Ro uf (p et an d Ha lf ro no un ce d Ro fe ) 5/ 1 . Ch in g 6/ 1 . Xi s 7/ 1 . Ne vi s 8/ 1 . HT 10 /1 . Ne t, Co ck 20 /1 . Sc or le e 25 /1 . Po 33 /1 . Do ub ny le Ca rp et 50 /1 . Bu lls ey e

James McBride celebrates the 125th anniversary of the Singapore Polo Club

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he Singapore Polo Club was founded by the officers of the 1st Battalion, the King’s Own Regiment in 1886. Polo was played in the centre of the old Singapore Race Course, as was golf - not an ideal site! In 1914 it moved to its first home at Balestier Road and then to its present site on Mount Pleasant Road, which opened for play in 1941. During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army converted the grounds into a gun emplacement area and later, it became a squatter camp. After the war, Lord Mountbatten, a dedicated polo player, reestablished the Polo Club. I started playing at the club in 1995 when they were improving the polo field, which is today one of the best and most used fields in the world.

The old wooden clubhouse, with its open veranda, which sits amongst lush, tropical grounds, still has that wonderful old rustic charm of Singapore in the Fifties and Sixties. It has amazing views and yet is only minutes from the city centre. That’s Singapore for you! Each year the club puts on a number of tournaments. These tend to be very popular and are still very traditional, with people dressing up for the occasion even when temperatures can soar to 40°. The Singaporean players are quite diverse,

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Harry Herbert celebrates the Aga Khan’s 50th year in the racing world

wiss author Philip Jodidio’s territory is the production of lavish books on art and architecture. And for his latest work, Jodidio combines elements of both, portraying an altogether different edifice. This is a celebration of the 50 years of the racing empire of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, 49th Imam (spiritual ruler) of 15m Ismaili Muslims.

A hagiography is defined as a worshipful biography, and this work has no pretensions to be other than an homage to a man – the fourth Aga Khan – who succeeded to his grandfather’s title in 1957 and his father’s racing empire when he died in 1960. The Aga’s input is seen on most pages that are not dominated by choice photos of some of the most significant horses, events and buildings in racing history.

By his own admission, at the age of 20 the Aga, a Harvard graduate, was in a dilemma: “It was an enormously difficult decision for me whether to attempt to continue the family tradition. I knew nothing whatsoever about thoroughbred racing and breeding… In the second place, I was unconvinced that it was compatible with the responsibilities for the expectations of the Ismaili Imamat.”

In these 50 years the Aga – through touch, vision and business acumen – has established a thoroughbred empire as cherished as any in the world.

Leading bloodstock writer Tony Morris says, “I would be prepared to bet a substantial sum that there is no notable thoroughbred in the world without some example of the Aga Khan’s breeding in its background.”

The rationale behind the succession being passed by the third Aga Khan to his grandson, rather than to his twice-divorced son Prince Aly Khan, was that it was in the best interest of the Ismaili community; the new Aga was dubbed the Imam for the Atomic Age. The bloodstock succession is assured through his daughter Zahra, also a Harvard graduate and who, unlike her father, was born into the racing world of Chantilly. She shares his racing aims and responsibility for charitable enterprises. She was the first woman to be a member of the executive committee of France Galop, France’s ruling racing body.

Aga Khan III was enticed into British racing by the blandishments of English Classic-winning trainer George Lambton, through whom he bought Mumtaz Mahal in 1922 at Doncaster for 9,100gns (about £400,000 in modern money). She was the foundation mare from whom seemingly endless champions emerged. In the ninth generation came Zarkava who in 2009 became the first three-year-old filly to take Europe’s middle-distance championship, the Prix de

Singapore Polo Club Calendar Autumn 2011

14-18 September 2011 • Singapore International Polo Tournament 17 September • Polo Forum 17 & 18 September • Club Tournament - Runme Shaw Cup 5 - 9 October • Ladies International Polo Tournament 2011 22 October • Corporate Polo League 29 & 30 October • Club Tournament - Beaujolais Cup 12 November • Corporate Polo League 13 November • Polo Test 19 November • British Polo Day 19 & 20 November • British Polo Day Match 26 & 27 November • Novice Tournament 3 December • Corporate Polo League 10 & 11 December • Club Tournament - North Junior Cup 11 December • End of season

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l’Arc de Triomphe, for 30 years. The one previous was Akiyda – owned and bred by the Aga Khan.

Though Ismaili Muslims have a large presence in Pakistan and India, the family’s racing interests there have all but disappeared; saying which, two of the Aga’s former stars, Vendavar, who beat Goldikova in the 2009 Prix Forêt, and Arazan, whom trainer John Oxx still mentions in the same breath as 2009 Derby winner Sea The Stars, are now at stud on the subcontinent.

The Aga Khan’s grandfather sold much of his finest bloodstock – Derby winners Blenheim, Mahmoud and Bahram in the Thirties and, in 1940, the most influential of sires, Nasrullah – to America. When he died the Sporting Life called him “the last emperor of English racing”. The current Aga bought his brother and half-sister out of the “firm”; and then cemented the structure of his legacy by acquisition of the bloodstock empires of the Dupré, Boussac and Lagardère families.

Princess Zahra puts it thus: “We are not driven by commercial forces but purely on the basis of breeding for racing and racing for breeding.” The results speak for themselves: leading owner 12 times in France and leading breeder there thrice; five-times leading breeder in Britain and twice leading owner. he endorsement of the Aga’s methods was manifest at the Arc meeting of 2009 when his green and red colours – those of the Ismaili flag – were carried to victory in five races at the highest Group One level and two at Group Two. The like may never be seen again.

The Aga’s empire is conducted in five studs in Ireland and his French base is at Aiglemont, just outside the French Newmarket, Chantilly. He has over 200 horses in training. His interests spread into major shareholderships in Goffs and Arqana, sales companies; restoration of Chantilly and The Curragh racecourses; and sponsorship, notably for the Arc weekend, which made it a rival to the Breeders’ Cup and out of whose shadow the proposed Champions Day at Ascot in October must emerge.

The telling of the Aga’s story here only burnishes a glowing career – without ever rubbing too firmly in case an unanticipated genie pops out. But the summit the Aga reached in Paris in 2009 is only there to be scaled again – and he and his daughter remain the most likely to make the ascent.

Harry Herbert is FQR’s Racing Correspondent. Philip Jodidio’s A Racing and Breeding Tradition: The Horses of the Aga Khan is published by Prestel

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with an average handicap of 0. The club also brings in professional players, for example, Sattar Khan from Pakistan, who has been the club’s pro for about 15 years. He used to be handicap 6, but is now a 4. Watta, his son, is a 2 and really up and coming. A lot of the youngsters are also of a good standard, with handicaps of 2 and 3. They are the sons and daughters of people I played against when I was young.

This year is the 125th anniversary of the club. A number of tournaments have been organised to celebrate and I played in the first of these “Pro/Am” tournaments, where we fly in professionals from all over the world to play with amateurs from the club. We obviously had the best professional, since we won. His name is Pablo Dorignac and he’s from a big Argentinian polo family. The teams were Stella Artois, Veuve Clicquot, Singapore Polo Club and Escue Polo. I was in Stella Artois, and we played three matches, all of which we won, triumphing in the final against Veuve Clicquot, 11-6.

I was very pleased with how I played, but even more pleased with how Pablo played. Without him, we wouldn’t have won. One great player really can make all the difference.

James McBride is President of YTL Hotels, based in Singapore www.ytlhotels.com and FQR’s Polo Editor

Autumn 2011

The Cool Hunter

Tommy Hilfiger has made American country clothes cool – even for those who enjoy the wildlife in the city

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lassic American hunting clothes are a blend of workwear and the clothes that farmers have worn for years, and, on the whole, they tend to be far less grand than the garb one would wear to a shoot in England. I tend to have my shooting clothes made at Anderson & Sheppard, but I like to mix it up a little bit and since being involved in the purchase of Belstaff I like to wear one of its jackets over my tweed! Nevertheless, there are some items of American hunting apparel that are just as classic in their own way as a pair of knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket.

Take the duck hunting boot developed by LL Bean, which is a classic from 100 years ago that’s still being made in Maine today. Then there is the duck hunting jacket. Made of heavyweight cotton canvas with a corduroy collar, it usually has a gun patch or patches, it has bellows pockets and usually a large pocket in the back that goes from one end to the other to put small game in.

Under the duck hunting jacket it is traditional to wear a buffalo plaid shirt. The name comes from the old buffalo ranches out in the Midwest, where they made shirts out of blankets that were usually hand-woven, either by the Native Americans or the Canadians (the Canadians are known for the famous Hudson blanket).

These heavyweight wool blankets were cut up in the harsh winters and made into duffel coats or shirts. The latter usually have two chest pockets with button flaps, normally big buttons, and it is a convention that the cloth used for the pocket is at an angle to the check on the

body of the shirt. It is very difficult to line up the plaids, which causes wastage. Therefore, they used to cut them on the diagonal so they could fall anywhere. That was done for convenient manufacturing over the years and it has now become a hallmark of the look.

The real wool ones are lined either with nylon or a contrast fabric in the collar so it’s more comfortable in the neck. And over the years, with the creeping urbanisation of the buffalo plaid, they’ve come in flannel, twills, Oxford cloth and this double-brushed fabric known as “shammy” cloth – a very densely woven cotton heavily brushed on one side so it’s almost flannel-like. Farmers wore them many years

as far as I know, no one has yet managed to find a way of commercialising the smell of deer urine ago, and continue to do so – but these days you are just as likely to see them in the Meatpacking District.

However, when it comes to trousers, American hunting gear is less to my taste. Sometimes, hunters wear a one-piece boiler suit for warmth and, of late, many hunters are wearing fluorescents over their clothes. There are so many hunters out in the woods that there have been accidents so being seen by other hunters is a primary objective.

So you will see bright orange and lime green in nylon with reflective tapes on them. Almost like highway construction wear. It’s not so attractive, and not what one would wear if shooting at Blenheim, but

it’s a necessity nowadays in America.

In England the tradition of shooting is much more formal, while in America we don’t talk about going on shoots as much as we talk about “hunting”: deer hunting, elk hunting and so on, where they really hunt game and use it for trophies or for food. The American hunter is mainly an outdoorsman who is stalking game – fox, wolves or bear. here is a lot of bear hunting in the Northeast, and a lot of these guys wear military-style camouflage clothing. They hide in the forest, sitting there waiting for bear and deer. There is something more primal about hunting American style: for instance, bowhunting is quite popular, and the archers sit in a tree in the early morning waiting for deer to track through, and then they attack.

Some real hardcore hunters even spray deer urine on themselves so they attract deer. I’m told that it works like a dream – but it sounds to me like a nightmare.

I have always developed a country look for our clients, and I’ve taken the best elements – whether it is the buffalo plaids or the traditional rugged canvas trousers – for people who want to spend weekends looking like outdoorsmen. That’s part of American-style heritage. Every American guy has outdoor gear whether he hunts or not, and designers have long been inspired by it, and over the years most items of hunting apparel have made the transition from the backwoods to the city. But as far as I know, no one has yet managed to find a way of commercialising the smell of deer urine.

Tommy Hilfiger is the American fashion designer and founder of the brand Tommy Hilfiger

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FQR’s Hot Shots’ on how to be a shooting star Daryl Greatrex – Holland & Holland

1. Always reply promptly to an invitation to shoot, and never be late.

2. Do only shoot at good “sporting” birds.

Your host will expect you to choose only the higher birds. Under no circumstances follow the example of the foreign visitor on his first formal shoot who, having shot several very low birds, started to track a bird on the ground with his barrels. “Sir, you’re not going to shoot it running?!” cried his neighbour. “No, sir,” replied the gun, “I will wait until it stops.”

3. Never be greedy. Just because a bird is in range of your gun, it does not necessarily make it yours; it may produce a more sporting shot for one of your companions. Do not shoot more than you can carry or really need, but take plenty of cartridges. You can always take home what you do not use but to run out is considered most impolite. A guest at a very formal shoot approached his host, a senior member of the Royal family, with a request to borrow some more cartridges only to be told that as he had most certainly fired the number of shots he was expecting to shoot during the day, he should now go home!

4. Don’t claim to have hit every bird you shot at.

Nothing irritates a host more than a gun who persistently sends the picker-up and his dog on a mile-long hike to find a “wounded” bird that everyone knows was missed.

5. Always check with your host that you can take

Autumn 2011

your dog with you when invited out shooting. And never take a bitch on heat into the company of other dogs in the field. The dogs are there to pick up the birds, not the bitches.

6. Don’t shoot a fox or other ground game unless you are specifically told to do so. Your host may also be master of the hunt.

7. And last but not least, thank your host for your day’s sport and, as an extra courtesy, write and thank him later. www.hollandandholland.com John Ward – Ray Ward 1. Make yourself familiar with the location of the shoot you have been invited to, to ensure prompt arrival on the day.

2. Make enquiries about the type of cartridges that are correct for the shoot (eg, felt wad only), the quality of the birds, and the correct load and shot size for the quarry.

3. Always check that your equipment is correct for the shoot and the conditions before setting off (waterproofs, boot type etc). The weight of the tweed and the fabric are both important – the new Bernard Weatherill lightweight jackets are made of 12oz tweed, as opposed to the regular 18oz. Made from Teflon-coated wool yarns, and incorporating a waterproof membrane, the jackets are hard wearing, as well as light and breathable – perfect for the warmer weather at the start of the season.

4. Be sure to make a point of acknowledging the hard work of all beaters and picker-uppers, as these people ensure that your day is successful.

5. Always remember your shooting etiquette, ie, only shooting your own birds, no low birds, and at all times ensuring your gun is kept in a safe position when not firing.

6. At the end of the shoot, it is common practice for each gun to tip 10 per cent of the total number of pheasants to the gamekeeper – so if 100 pheasants were shot, each gun tips the keeper £10. Gifts can also be given. (Some people might even choose to gift him/her a How To Be A Better Gamekeeper book if they know each other well already!) www.rayward.co.uk Richard Purdey – Purdey 1. Relax. It really doesn’t matter if you miss – everyone does – but if you’re wound up like a spring you’re far more likely to do so.

2. Take several really deep breaths just before the first birds come over you, steady yourself, wait until the time is right, then pick up the bird with the end of your barrels as you smoothly bring the gun up to your shoulder and settle your cheek on the stock, mounting the gun in one steady fluid movement.

3. Don’t rush. Like all hand-eye co-ordination sports, with shooting you actually have far more time than you think. Watch the crack shots: they have economy of movement.

4. Don’t lift your head off the stock, and don’t stop the gun. Fatal.

5. If the birds are high, make sure you already have your gun halfway up to meet them. You’ll never catch ’em up if you start off with your gun pointing at your boots.

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6. Don’t hang on a bird. Swing through it, keeping the gun moving as you pull the trigger.

7. It’s as easy to miss in front as it is behind. Don’t overlead on lower, slower birds, especially if you’re shooting partridge and pheasant together.

Partridges may look faster but, in fact, they are slower and need less lead. www.purdey.com William Asprey – William & Son 1. Always try and use a gun that has been fitted to you. It increases your accuracy.

2. Use the right cartridges. I used very powerful cartridges on partridges once, as they were all I had at home, and so could only shoot at birds miles away – otherwise, they would have disintegrated!

3. Try not to have a hangover.

4. Don’t rush; you always have more time than you think, unless your neighbour is a terrible poacher – and then you may need to hurry!

5. Only take safe shots.

6. Always have a good coat and a spare in case the weather is terrible. There is nothing worse than putting on a wet coat after lunch. And take a warm scarf or head cover to stop the rain dripping down your neck. Have well-fitting, warm boots suitable for the conditions. Have a gun sleeve that can be undone fully and opened up so it can dry properly – a damp gun sleeve can make your gun rust.

7. A gun-cleaning kit is a must-have, so you can clean and maintain your gun at all times. www.williamandson.com

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Two hunters with rifles pose in the snow by a car with three deer carcasses, 1931, C.WisHisSoc/Everett/Rex Features

FQR Cannes FAR Manly Pursuits Special

Isle Be Back I

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n island that has su ffered countless inv asions and pirate raids, an d that’s somehow ou t of kilter with the rest of Europe’s prized destinations – Corsi isl an d ca, Sardinia, Capri – Ischia has remained a small, los t jewel. At its heart the sulphur sources lure thousan ds of humans like gadflies to a flickering porch light .

The hordes push up from the beaches to the “waters of life”, but somehow all is well. Whereas in England this migration of the beachwear masses would evolve into a throng of beer-guzzling, pimply, pink lads and ladettes vomiting into the ancient gardens, yet here on Ischia mankind is strolling the gardens or “taking the waters” peacefully, as they have done for millennia. he atmosphere of the source we chose, next to Visconti’s old house, was of tranquil sensuality.

La Dolce Vita seemed to live on here and as we climbed higher through the park towards the source from the mountain spring, the view and gardens became more and more magical.

Earlier in the day, visiting by boat from our summer home in Positano, we stopped off in Sant’Angelo d’Ischia, a small hippie town. Still sleepy at 11am on a hot August morning we strolled the small streets and found a hidden antiques shop selling Forties and Fifties Americana, as unexpected as Ischia is beautiful.

Charles Finch is FQR’s Proprietor.

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ch Pictures by Charles Fin

The Magnificent Woman & Her Flying Machines

Isle Be Back II

Courtesy of the Shangri-La

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urely one of the most breathtaking views as one comes in to land at Malé International Airport in the Maldives is the hundreds of atolls, promising you a wonderful stay in their five-star resorts – of which there are, I am told, over 100.

I was always a little wary of the Maldives, for I had heard from friends that even in high season the weather could be continuously lousy. However, early May is to be recommended – the kids are still at school, and the sun, for me at least, shone every day with short showers welcome for their coolness.

On the southern edge of Addu Atoll – over an hour from Malé by plane – is Shangri-La’s Villingili Resort & Spa, with over 130 villas, three restaurants, great snorkelling and diving. The food is excellent, and plentiful, with a dîner à deux experience in the jungle on one night of the itinerary.

It was fun to watch the baby sharks, left by their mothers to mature in the shallow waters, swimming close and chasing the technicolour fish that are the fauna in the water garden of the resort.

Spinning dolphins accompanied one of our sunset boat excursions as the captain played some tunes

The Long Walk Home Charlie Gladstone embraces nature, as well as the wet and windy weather, as he walks in the Highlands

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t home in the Highlands. A Saturday by myself – alone except for the dogs – is a rare thing, with nothing to do until the football. And that only involves turning on the telly. Oh, and a bit of picture hanging, but that can wait. It’s windy, clouds are scudding across a very occasionally blue sky, tearing east.

One of things I love most is walking; it’s quite a big thing in our family and, as I head out with the dogs, I think to myself that I’ve never really been on a walk that I haven’t enjoyed. Well, we did have quite a few stressful walks when the children were young, having to coax and carry, and recover lost wellies from puddles. But what I mean is that I don’t really mind where I walk – in cities, round fields or through wilderness – in the snow, in the rain or under a blameless blue sky. Rainy walks might just be my favourite, in fact; perhaps because as a child the best bit of our summer holiday in Anglesey was the

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from an ancient Michael Jackson soundtrack, which apparently got the dolphins to twist up out of the sea. www.shangri-la.com n the furthest Northern Atolls of Haa Alif and Haa Dhal on the island of Dhonakulhi, just 45 minutes’ flight from Malé, is a true find: the boutique resort of Island Hideaway. For those seeking a more rustic and authentic Maldivian experience, this place is a must. With only 43 beautifully appointed villas, some of whose pools lead down to the white-

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annual rainy-day walk down a long, wide, near-empty beach, past the mesmerising shipwreck (I could never quite believe that it was real; that was just too exciting) and up to the lighthouse where we’d wolf down our picnic before heading back to the Land Rover.

Anyway, this Saturday it starts raining as we head out: great big lumpy rain. Undeterred, we’re off, past the office and the squadrons of swallows that nest there in the summer. They’re some of my favourite birds and today I remember why. Just a few feet above my head they ride the wind with near complete control and with no apparent effort, mesmerisingly perfect, untroubled by a gale that should, by rights, make it impossible for them to fly at all. In the summer they often get themselves into our office when the door is open. Each year we build a kind of barrier out of plastic sacking, a bit like those hanging things they use in hot countries to keep the flies at bay. But it’s never long enough and they dart under it and then evade capture until they’re exhausted.

By the time we’re out on the hill, the sky is blue but it’s still raining quite hard. This is one of nature’s great mysteries. It must be something

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sanded beach, and with fantastic butler service, it is a great escape for those with families but also for those, like me, wanting to escape them! It delivers an Indian Ocean “Robinson Crusoe à la carte” experience, so put it on your hit list next time you head that way because if you can island-hop, as we did, it makes the seven days feel longer and you leave with a sense of having seen a bit more of a part of the world that it will be hard to resist returning to. www.island-hideaway.com; Kate Lenahan is FQR’s Travel Editor

to do with strong wind. But the views are perfect: neon-green trees, horizontal rain, sun, wind. This might just be a good walk; a long walk.

My favourite kind of walk is the sort that is largely unplanned, that just unfolds. Today I’m not sure where we’re going, or for how long, but as we hit our stride I realise that we’re all in the mood for a long yomp.

Some of the dogs tear ahead but Tess refuses to leave my heel; her adoration for me means that she finds it hard to leave my side for more than a few seconds. It’s a mutual love – kind of.

Two miles into the walk and we encounter the first other people on the hill. A couple have managed to get their caravan and elaborate tent off the main road and have spent the night in a perfect spot by the river. They’re packing up as we pass, neatly folding everything up before loading it into their Jeep. They may be the first people we’ve come across, but we’ve already seen half a dozen cuckoos, including, unusually, three in the air at one time.

We pass high above the waterfall where, as a young teenager, I camped with two friends. Camping in those days was really just an excuse for getting away from our parents so that we could drink a lot

Autumn 2011

Photos courtesy of Annette Mason

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little postscript to my last article on why they don’t use seaplanes more in the Caribbean: the lose it… It sounded so petrifying that two people dropped probable reason is that they’re so worried about drug smuggling. It’s difficult to control the little out, though we managed to persuade them that it was all bastards when they can land anywhere. They use them everywhere all the time in the Maldives, hype, in order to big it up. As it turned out, it was even more though, and in Australia a friend went scuba diving off one, which seems really dangerous – it’s bad terrifying than stated, but they couldn’t get out by then! enough worrying about the bends after a normal dive, never mind taking off with your tank still on!

Being an enormous showoff, I mentioned I was On to my next flying adventures – and flying in South Africa. As the country is so vast and the weather a pilot and offered to fly (it’s a ploy that sometimes works so (mainly) so wonderful, people use flying as a form of bus service. Owners of the many vast estates have that you can sit in the front), but they were ex-military pilots, more used their own landing strips, which aren’t usually grass – due to water shortage – but are made of dry, baked to shooting escaped terrorists or whatever they do, rather than flying over the English earth. Ballooning is the other must-do flying adventure in South Africa, so on a safari with our two young countryside gaping in awe at the amount of outdoor riding schools there are. They raised their eyebrows boys, we rose at the crack of dawn and chased giraffe, hippo and assorted and exchange amused glances as they graciously declined my offer. We all wildlife across the Serengeti. It’s an experience not to be missed, though having climbed aboard, pretending not to notice that there are neither doors nor a fear of heights* (you are supposed to be our Aviation Editor - Ed.) I spent even apparent sides to the helicopter; the adrenaline levels rose instantly. most of the time sitting in the basket with just with my eyes peering over the Lifting from the waterfront helipad, it all felt relatively normal – if a little edge, the cause of much hilarity for my children, as witnessed by their happy breezy – and then the nose pitched down over the water and we were off… faces (pictured) – though it was the only thing that made them laugh, probably up, down, sideways, anyways, mock-shooting at the imaginary enemy whilst because of an inherited condition called “I can’t get up early”. screaming with excitement, the sound lost on the whirling wind gusting Recently, we were staying in Cape Town with some wonderful friends and around us. We pitched up suddenly as we headed towards land and left From ballooning across the Serengeti a couple of NBFs. Trying to outdo each other on being the best our stomachs behind, with more hysterical screaming (and that’s just the to terrifying helicopter rides, there’s no men!) then a low, low dive below the oncoming tree-lined horizon (oops, and most inventive guests keeping Annette Mason’s feet by entertaining our hosts, there go the sunglasses). By sheer combined force of will and tugging up on on the ground we booked an adventure the armrests, we managed to just skim over the treetops. A collective sigh helicopter ride from the of relief, and then it all started again. Afterwards, posing for the photo we harbour in a Bell 212, otherwise known as a Huey, hugged happily, bonding through survival. made famous for its use in Vietnam. (These trips may I can’t remember what the other couples organised, but I do have a vague memory of climbing Table no longer be available probably because they are so Mountain, my vertigo and a strong breeze causing me to sway perilously on reaching the top… The rest is exciting… another flying experience on a military jet a blank. Did we win the best guest competition? Well, we’ve been asked back! has sadly just ceased.) *A question for science boffins: why do I get vertigo when standing still looking down from a height Before takeoff, there are numerous forms to fill in and and when ballooning, but not when moving in a helicopter? safety briefings, which include instructions to tie your Annette Lynton-Mason, wife of Pink Floyd drummer Nick, is an actress, motor racer, biker (on a Suzuki Bandit), hair back and not to bring anything, as you’ll probably helicopter pilot, jockey, sculptor, mother, housewife and FQR’s Aviation Editor

Photos courtesy of the Barbier-Müeller Museum, Geneva

FQR Transport and Travel

Total Recall S

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller remains on a mission to open our eyes to the world’s forgotten cultures

ome 2,000 years ago, Terence, the Latin poet of Berber origins, said, “I am a man: nothing to do with man should leave me indifferent.” I was profoundly touched by this thought at a very young age.

In June 2011, 34 years will have gone by since the creation of the museum that bears my name in Geneva. My intention was to open the eyes of a public that was not very familiar with the arts world, to the strength, originality, brutality and sometimes inventiveness of creations made by sculptors from Africa, Oceania and Indonesia, who are not creating to please the aesthetic requirements of a given audience, but creating necessary, magical or religious objects, without which their communities could not survive.

Aside from a considerable African collection, Josef Mueller owned a couple of dozen extremely beautiful objects dating from Pre-Columbian America. They fascinated me, and I tried to obtain the best examples of each “style centre” from the USA to Brazil – culminating in a Museo BarbierMueller of Pre-Columbian Art in Barcelona, which has been run by the City of Barcelona since 1997.

Thus… an educational approach. In three decades, we have organised more than 80 international exhibitions, which have travelled to every continent, and most of which have been accompanied by voluminous catalogues, written by 10, 20 or 30 specialists on the regions in question.

Suddenly, three years ago, an Italian ethnologist

mentioned to me a small African ethnic group in which no interest had ever been shown, despite the fact that they produced amazing bronze ritual objects, some linked to the existence of two royal bloodlines who took turns at sharing power, others symbols of cults devoted to gods, sometimes forming groups, sometimes alone. It struck me that museums, like ethnologists, have an unconscious tendency to stick to the beaten track, studying very big ethnic groups – producers of an incredible quantity of sculptures, masks, chairs, or pole boxes in increasing detail, due to the geographical scattering of these groups, which sometimes consisted of several million individuals.

I often asked myself just how many minuscule communities consisting of 2,000 or 3,000 heads, lived unknown, in the shadow of these famous, large ethnic groups? How many of them orally transmitted a “creation myth”, resounding with wonderful stories, from generation to generation?

In partnership with the oldest Swiss watchmaking manufacturer, Vacheron Constantin, founded in 1755, we have just achieved a particularly satisfying experience. Juan-Carlos Torres, president of the manufacture, swiftly became a friend. I shared a certain remorse with him: the remorse of having hunted down, purchased and displayed everything that every collector of primitive art, every museum with an extra-European department dreams of, and not to have thought about those forgotten by history, destined to disappear, with their youths

and smoke. That night we had to carry David home at two in the morning because he’d drunk way too much. Two long miles carrying a dead weight in the dark.

It was in the same stretch of river that I caught the biggest sea trout I’ve ever caught. When the river was in spate we used to dig some worms and work our way up the bank, stopping to drop our hooks into the churning water whenever we thought things looked suitable. That day I looked at a spot of dark black water and thought to myself, “There’s a big one in there” – There was and I caught it straightaway.

The river was lethal then, but our parents didn’t seem to mind what we did with it. One day, when it was at its fiercest, I knotted a rope around my waist, tied the other end to a tree and jumped in. I’d love to say that it was fun, but it wasn’t. It was absolutely terrifying, and when I managed to get back to the bank I determined not to tell my

barely bothering to participate in long initiations, while their neighbouring village swiftly became a town, with the lure of cinemas, discos, a Chinese moped enabled them to get to with great ease.

Strangely, with Juan-Carlos, my thoughts were resoundingly echoed. His own concerns about the continuation of the watchmaking traditions that made Switzerland famous made him appreciate the urgency to do something. In just a few weeks, with the support of Vacheron Constantin, the Barbier-Mueller Museum Cultural Foundation was born. Following the advice of a Scientific Board consisting of heads of the most prestigious ethnology departments on the planet, chaired by Stéphane Martin, head of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (with which the Foundation works in close collaboration), the purpose of the Foundation is to enable PhD students – young ethnologists or specialists wishing to do post-doctoral work – to be awarded grants enabling them to spend time with the target ethnic groups, on condition that no previous studies have been conducted on them.

Currently, a young man is spending a year with the Garo in east India, and a qualified ethnologist will be returning to Anir Island, in Papua New Guinea, to concentrate on certain elements observed from a distance during an earlier trip.

As we do not have an unpublished manuscript for the first semester of 2011, with the unanimous acceptance of the Scientific Board (I did not take a place that rightfully belongs to a young researcher),

parents quite how stupid I’d been.

We didn’t live here then, but we used to come here on holiday, and I loved it more than anywhere else in the world. I can remember clearly how nature – and particularly this part of Scotland – used to feel then; it used to strip away my anxiety and fear and make me calm, fearless, enthusiastic, energised. It doesn’t quite do that today as life has taken over: work, money, travel, school, stuff. But I’m a country boy at heart, and there’s nothing like being outside, particularly walking. It’s odd that walking gets a bad rap; being called a “rambler” is an insult of sorts. But rambling doesn’t deserve its bad reputation because walking is, officially, a good thing, no matter how you choose to do it.

Anyway, on this particular Saturday we walk for over three hours; past curlews, black game, mountain bikers, even some partridges.

Nine or 10 miles, perhaps – up hills, down hills, across a thin burn,

she finds it hard to leave my side for more than a few seconds

Autumn 2011

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I got to work, and have put together a little booklet on the discovery made in 1995-1996 of an element of the Batak people, five clans founded around 600 years ago by the Toba Batak, exiled from their neighbouring country, who regrouped and decided to join the Pakpak Batak rather than the Toba Batak (whose language they speak!), and were convinced in around 1600 to incinerate the bones of their dead, instead of washing them and placing them in big stone sarcophagi or urns.

Each year, the books published are presented by their authors to the Musée du Quai Branly. The French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, has been very keen to be involved in this project, and on 18 October 2011, alongside Ms MarieChristine Labourdette, Director of French Museums, will be present at a conference at the Musée de Quai Branly, during which, aside from a preview of my book on the Kalasan Batak, the press will be informed of the various ongoing and future projects of the above Cultural Foundation.

I cannot hide the fact that my greatest hope is to discover an unknown people consisting of artisans, elevated to the rank of artists thanks to their talent as sculptors, or moulders of clay. In fact, nothing would please me more than a discovery and consequent preservation of an exceptional text of oral literature, such as another Epic of Gilgamesh.

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller is a world-renowned historian and President of the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva www.barbier-mueller.ch

past a solitary Scots Pine miles from its nearest neighbour. And as we come down the hill, back towards home, Massive Attack’s Hymn Of The Big Wheel comes into my head, and I remember a time when I was running down this very hill with a Walkman Sport in my hand (technology at its most advanced a mere 20 years ago, and now gloriously retro) listening to this fabulous hymn to nature: “The big wheel keeps on turning, on a simple line day by day. The earth spins on its axis, one man struggle while another relaxes…” Round and round in my head. I remember feeling as light as air that day and I feel the same today after a short, sharp, simple dose of nature, the best medicine we have.

Charlie Gladstone is FQR’s Highland Editor (19th Century) Everett C

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Rex Featu res

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FQR Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Bringing Home the Bacon W

There’s not much Pilar Ordovás doesn’t know about the best of 20th-century and contemporary art. Here she serves up the best of Bacon

hy would anyone want to bring home a Bacon? Well, apart from his brilliance, there’s the kudos. Anyone who knows anything in the art world now wants a work by Francis Bacon on their wall (with the result that lots of other people do too). After years of being regarded as – merely – a marvellous British painter, he has become the most sought-after international artist of the postwar period. Once his work was 977 is,1 Par in on Francis Bac tures Fea ex rd/R nda Sta considered difficult and disturbing, but now people have got the g enin John Minihan/Ev hang of him and it feels real, raw and laden with content.

His cred is helped by the esteem in which he is held by his peers – starting, of course, with his friend the late Lucian Freud. And from the newer crowd, Damien Hirst says, “Francis Bacon is the best… He has the guts to fuck in hell. He’s the last bastion of painting. When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was paint like Bacon. Before Bacon, painting seems dead… totally dead.”

But there are Bacons and Bacons. Assuming you have the cash to buy one at all (and this sort of kudos doesn’t come cheap: $5m-$10m for a small head or fragment to over $100m), you don’t want to show yourself up by buying a dud, one that will have the world’s most authoritative art collectors tittering behind their auction-house catalogues. So here is my 10-point guide to getting a good one: Go for quality, not quantity. It is a lot better to have one great work than several mediocre ones.

Which are the best? See below.

Train your eye. See as many of Bacon’s works as possible in person. Go to the Tate, for instance, if you are in London, MoMA in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museums in Madrid or the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Besides, you can’t swank about your own Bacon if you can’t be authoritatively condescending about the competition.

Feel with passion and empathy his innovative, occasionally haphazard technique. Bacon would fling paint at the surface, and often worked on the back of the canvas, which is rougher, and glazed his work with reflective glass so you would look at your reflection as you encountered the work.

Your Bacon needs to be fresh, without additives, as it were. The paint surface and its substance can be very important, so you need to be confident of the condition of any picture you’re thinking of buying (restoration-free, please!). Freshness also means not having knocked around the auction houses too much, not having had too many owners (or only great ones, just like secondhand cars). Basically, the

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more hidden and untouched and unseen a picture is, the more desirable. Being able to say, “I picked it up from so-and-so’s widow” makes it sound as if you are in the know, but also hints at your being someone willing to play the long game to satisfy your expert enthusiasm.

Get to know his periods and styles, and which you prefer. Do you like the violence of the 1950s Popes, the tenderness of his depictions of George Dyer (his suicidal lover – do keep up), the black Triptych from the 1970s, the intimate, haunting self-portraits, the Van Gogh Series, or even the carpets he made when he was an interior designer in the prewar years?

Be on insouciantly familiar terms with the subjects of his pictures (but never call them sitters – he usually painted from photographs commissioned from his friend John Deakin and others). You should instantly recognise, for example, Peter Lacy, a former fighter pilot and lover of Bacon, who died in Tangier in 1962 at the time of Bacon’s first retrospective. Or George Dyer, the subject of some of his best paintings, who took his life on the eve of his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971. Others include Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, John Edwards (a companion from the mid-1970s), Henrietta Moraes, a key figure in London’s artistic and bohemian life, and the loucher-than-louche Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room, who gave Bacon £10 a week and free drinks in return for bringing in new customers.

Build your own library. Books on Bacon – unlike those on many artists – are never dull. How could they be, so wild and drunken was his life. One of the great ones is the early catalogue raisonné published by Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein in 1964. You get extra points for knowing that Martin Harrison is currently collating the updated catalogue raisonné to include all the artist’s work. Or for a more biographical read, see Daniel Farson’s The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon or The Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiatt.

Take a tour of his studio (transported from London to Dublin at the Hugh Lane Gallery after the Tate turned it down – yes, really). This is a must for understanding his working methods, ie, barmily chaotic.

Having mastered some of the above, you can begin to hold your head up among his true fans. But those who succumb to advanced Bacophilia will also want to see some of the paintings he most admired. These include Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, his favourite Degas in the National Gallery, or the Aix-en-Provence Rembrandt self-portrait.

There is, of course, a short cut to all this. Come and see me…

Ordovas, 25 Savile Row, London W1; 020-7287 5013; www.ordovasart.com

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The Last Judgement Reading a book every two days for over seven months is just the start for the indefatigable Man Booker Prize judges, says Ion Trewin

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udging the Man Booker Prize is not a doddle. This is Britain’s premier fiction award, worth £50,000 to the winner - but cash is by no means all. A recent winner, Hilary Mantel’s Tudor extravaganza Wolf Hall, has already sold an extra half a million copies just in the UK, and then there are the foreign rights.

Thanks to the Man Booker imprimatur, 30 or so countries picked up Wolf Hall for translation. One wonders what an Icelandic audience, say, will make of a chapter in the life of Henry VIII’s henchman Thomas Cromwell? But to the writer it hardly matters. The number of translation editions adds up to a huge additional sum in royalties.

One needs reading stamina to be a Man Booker judge. This year’s quintet – chaired by Stella Rimington, former DirectorGeneral of MI5 – started reading some 130 entries just before Christmas. With reading completed by the end of July, that’s, roughly speaking, a book every two days. For many a prospective judge that’s simply too much. I’ve recounted here before how I once asked a well-known poet if he would join the panel and, when I mentioned the amount of reading he’d have to do he was incredulous. Next came the unmistakable noise of a phone receiver being slammed back into its cradle.

Judges read proofs that come in various sizes and bindings, although, with e-books all the rage, this year we introduced them to the delights of the Kindle, as many publishers were able to offer us their entries in a Word document at the time they were being despatched to printers for proofs. That gained us a fortnight.

Do judges really read everything? Yes of course, although on one occasion when understudying the previous administrator, Martyn Goff, I became convinced that one judge had not: his comment on nearly every book was a laconic “It’s all right” or “Didn’t do anything for me” and even an occasional “I hated it” – not much literary criticism there. But if a judge reads 50 pages of a novel, throws it across the room in disgust and discovers that the other judges feel the same, why read on? It obviously has as little chance of making the longlist as Colonel Gaddafi has of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The longlist is the first sign of the collective view of a jury. This is the top dozen (or 13, if they need an extra one, thus the phrase the “Booker Dozen”).

The longlist is seen by outsiders as the holy grail. Bookmakers immediately pronounce on the odds, which always makes me smile, as at this stage they are

unlikely to have read many, if any, of the titles. Everyone has a different reason to be interested. Literary commentators usually wish to berate the judges if they leave out their own personal favourites. Booksellers hope they can identify a potential bestseller. In the six years since becoming literary director I have witnessed the surprise on their faces when the longodds and previously unknown Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, was proclaimed the winner in 2008.

Even the known, but not necessarily commercial darling, Howard Jacobson, with The Finkler Question (2010), surprised the book trade. But this quickly gave way to joy as the Man Booker winner invariably produces muchneeded unbudgeted turnover in the run-up to Christmas. n the month after first revealing their hand, the judges need to reread their longlist titles so that in early September they can reduce these to six – the shortlist. Once again, the bookmakers deliver their verdict. But being the favourite isn’t necessarily a good thing. Unlike in horse racing, where genes, heredity and past form are a guide, Man Booker judges are repeatedly reminded that they are reading only the fiction they have before them. It is no good comparing something with an author’s earlier work and saying this is better – that is irrelevant here. What they are after, as the Man Booker Prize rules state quite clearly, is “the best novel of the year”. A subjective view, of course, but I am impressed by how often they make the right decision.

The shortlist titles get a third reading. This is tough on even the best book. A plot-driven novel is at a disadvantage with no surprises the third time round.

To win, it must now convince by the quality of the writing. I often wonder if Middlemarch, say, would stand up to such rigorous perusal. Imagine: George Eliot three times in a few months.

And the public relies increasingly on the judges’ recommendations. It isn’t just the winner that benefits. Sales of longlist and shortlist books shoot up. And not just in the UK. American editions of Man Booker favourites now invariably carry the legend “Man Booker Prizewinner” or even “Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize” on their front cover. I am told that the award now has a greater effect on American sales than their own National Book Awards, and even the Pulitzer Prize.

Ion Trewin is Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes.

The 2011 Man Booker Prize winner will be announced at the dinner at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday October 18.

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It obviously has as little chance of making the longlist as Colonel Gaddafi has of winning the Nobel Peace Prize

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Gene Genius

Chris Toumazou’s semiconductor microchip, which “reads” DNA, provides the possibility of truly personalised, tailor-made medicine to everyone

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nitially, medical science discovered how to use X-rays, and that gave doctors the first noninvasive look inside the human body. That discovery changed the way that doctors practised medicine by taking them from “still life” – knowing how the anatomy is supposed to work – to “real life” – how it’s working at that moment. This opened up a new field of diagnostics and, over 100 years later, we still benefit from the discovery. But since then, scientists have added CAT scans, ultrasound, MRI and PET to our diagnostic toolkit because what we have learned is that every time we are given the tools to view the human body in a different way, we discover something new about how it works – and this often translates to better healthcare.

So now that we have nearly mined the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves to understand the human body, what is next? Well, what I find myself looking at as the new paradigm shift in how we view ourselves is plainly the genomic revolution.

For the first time, we now have the means to interrogate the very foundation that makes our bodies unique, namely our DNA. DNA is the code of life, a rulebook from which every cell in our body reads. This rulebook, along with environmental factors, “nature + nurture”, influences nearly every facet of our life without us thinking about it: for example, how our bodies react to foreign substances such as food, drugs or environmental factors (e.g. pollen) and how our bodies work in general; for instance, whether we are predisposed to storing cholesterol in ways that could cause heart disease, or whether the way our pancreas is working is more likely to result in Type 2 diabetes. Our genes tell us a lot about ourselves and in great detail, but it is the monumental task of understanding it all that has

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Building Up British Art

VEEDON FLEECE

With a trio of fine new museum-galleries newly opened in England, Charles Saumarez Smith finds himself spoilt for choice

A custom weaving house specialising in hand knotted carpets

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Purely bespoke and exclusively to your specification Muga ~ Pashmina ~ Silk ~ Veedon ~ Wool www.veedonfleece.com veedon@veedonfleece.com Telephone: +44 (0)1483 575758 had scientists in a buzz since the Human Genome project over 10 years ago, and most would still consider it early days.

So what have we learned in that time? We’ve learned that in some ways we are shockingly dissimilar and, in others, surprisingly similar. As a result, we have learned that we cannot continue to practise medicine in the traditional one-sizefits all way, but we can use genetic information to prescribe drugs that fit best because there is enough similarity between us to target certain therapeutic pathways. So we are now beginning to be able to prescribe therapies in a targeted fashion and not by trial and error. The FDA (US regulatory body for drugs) and EMEA (EU equivalent) have in the past few years started adding clear genetic guidance on drugs. For example, the FDA just recently added drugdosage guidance to the label of Warfarin – a blood thinner that has been around for over 50 years – that takes into account three specific letters in our DNA code.

So just as in the case of medical imaging giving us sequentially better resolution to view the body, we have now reached an era when molecular biology has given us the resolution to understand it. But also just like medical imaging in the early days, we have a problem with data deluge, high cost and long sample-to-answer time. So in order to bring personalised medicine to the hospitals of today, I founded DNA Electronics to commercialise my invention of a semiconductor microchip – the same kinds of chips found in computers and mobile phones – that can “read” DNA. These chips can identify specific segments of DNA that are of interest to a doctor and give a result in about 30 minutes. Since it is electronic, the entire device can be plugged into a computer or smartphone and display results while the patient is with the doctor. So instead of prescribing a drug such as

Warfarin in a trial-and-error fashion as we do now – and potentially causing life-threatening bleeding in some patients – we can use this technology to first determine if Warfarin is the right drug for the patient and, if so, in what dosage. This change to personalised medicine will keep all of us safer and avoid millions of pounds lost on ineffective drugs. s someone with a long history in consumer electronics, you might think it somewhat surprising to find me working in the medical field. But it is my belief that if a fraction of the technology and innovation behind consumer electronics can be applied to healthcare, we would solve many of the cost and logistic problems plaguing the industry.

Taking DNA Electronics as an example, we have managed to take equipment traditionally used to read letters of the DNA code, and which use lasers and large heating blocks costing tens of thousands of pounds, and have reduced it to a disposable semiconductor chip about the size of a postage stamp that can do the same thing.

Furthermore, by leveraging the technology of semiconductors, which is scalable to vast volumes, we developed these DNA chips at a price point similar to consumer electronics with similar userfriendliness. This way, instead of waiting weeks for a test to come back from a lab – and incurring the costs of all the logistics and people involved – a doctor in his own office can perform the test and make the right therapeutic decision in real time.

Personalised medicine is not the only area of medicine that can benefit from our DNA chips, but the discussion on virus, bacterial, animal or plant DNA will have to wait for another time.

Professor Christofer Toumazou is the Director, Chief Scientist and Research Director at the Department of Bionics at Imperial College. He was made one of the youngest ever professors at Imperial College at the age of 33, in recognition of his outstanding research.

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we now have the means to interrogate the very foundation that makes our bodies unique

Autumn 2011

ne of the great pleasures of the spring of the café, so the structure floats in the garden. months was going to visit the new I thought it was brilliant, like a new species museums that have sprung up in different of plant, green and faintly Japanese, with long parts of England, thanks to Lottery largesse and the hanging fins, an exotic that has been allowed to belief on the part of funding agencies that a beacon invade the paradise of classicism. of culture can act as an agent of regeneration.

Inside, it is nearly equally adventurous, First up was Turner Contemporary in architecturally packed, with two floors of galleries Margate. Its ceremonial opening was held on a sandwiched between the café and the exhibition wonderfully sunny evening space and stuffed with objects in mid-April, so that the that are extremely crowded troops of art lovers were by the standards of modern able to walk from the railway exhibition display. Everything station along the esplanade about it is beautiful, including with the beginnings of the ash of the banisters and a Turner-esque sunset the very precise, sans-serif disguising the tat of a typeface of the labels. I was rundown seafront while the annoyed to have to leave for new building hovered like a my train and jumped on to mirage in the space between one that was going in the the shops and the 19thwrong direction, thereby Margate century customs house – a missing the party. grand factory for contemporary art. By the time The third of the triumphal openings was The I arrived, Tracey Emin had left, but she is as Hepworth in Wakefield. Long ago – so long ago that much the guiding spirit of the place as Turner, I had nearly forgotten – I was a member of the jury symbolising the possible transformation of the that appointed David Chipperfield to design the town from slut to princess. building. He arrived as the last of the architects we The building was designed by Sir David interviewed, following on from Kengo Kuma, David Chipperfield, who has in recent months changed Adjaye and Zaha Hadid, and was unexpectedly from a figure who was in the past slightly cold- low-key and casual in his presentation. His design shouldered by the architectural establishment – or, is correspondingly undemonstrative, consisting at least, he certainly believed of a series of interlocking, himself to be – coming asymmetric blocks, which second in the competition depend for their impact not for Tate Modern only on their external appearance, because in a slightly mad but on the quality of the moment over the Christmas spaces, their scale, their holiday he decided to chop fluidity and, most especially, off the tower, as he had been the way the natural daylight advised by Julian Harrap, flows in from windows his conservation architect, buried in the roof. that it was unsafe. Now, he So, it was a slightly odd suddenly looked the part sensation looking out of of the big man in British the window of the taxi architecture, with hair that and seeing the drawings Bath had been allowed to grow physically realised in long for the occasion. He talked knowledgeably built form. Inside, I found it much more solid and intelligently about the importance of daylight and serious than I had expected, with big, for the viewing of art and the pleasures of a building calm, open spaces and a very complex floor that would be battered by the waves. I liked and plan, filled with works of art from the middle admired what I was able to see of it. It feels spacious of last century – an art gallery that might more – big and generously proportioned and sensibly normally be found in a Swiss canton than beside undemonstrative, a warehouse for the display of the banks of the River Calder. art, shimmering in the distance on the seafront.

Upstairs, there were many Hepworths on display, Next to open was the transformed Holburne of course, because it was her home town, but also Museum in Bath, not a new-build, but a highly the evidence of a strong provincial collection, intelligent addition to the assembled in the early rear of a late-18th-century 20th century as a result of hotel that was converted municipal ambition and into a museum in the highly intelligent postwar early 20th century by Sir curators. There was one Reginald Blomfield. The particularly moving display idea for the extention case upstairs devoted to the goes back nearly a decade, exhibitions that were held when the Trustees of in the immediate postwar the Holburne Museum period, when Wakefield selected Eric Parry to was in the forefront of the design an addition that modern movement and would provide extra the then curator, Helen Wakefield space – more galleries, a Kapp, held exhibitions new café and exhibition space. He has designed with catalogues designed with Bauhaus graphics. a building that is brilliantly counterintuitive. In particular, I couldn’t help but notice a review of Instead of doing what the custodians of Bath’s an exhibition of the work of Alan Davie published heritage would have liked, which was to design in the Arts Review in February 1958. It extolled a polite neoclassical building in the style of the the fact that “Wakefield has had the courage of its existing museum, he has designed a building convictions… the small city poignantly reveals the that turns these expectations on their head. Its lack of enterprise of almost every other provincial vocabulary belongs not to the city, but to the centre throughout the country”. The same might be parkland in which it sits. It is built not of Bath said of Wakefield’s new museum. stone, but green, nearly slimy, iridescent ceramic Charles Saumarez Smith CBE is FQR’s Fine Arts tiles. It is, in classical terms, deliberately upside Editor and Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal down, with a base that consists of the open glass Academy of Arts

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FQR Food and Wine

Blend Of The Affair Racing man Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta had to jump quite a few hurdles before he created the Super Tuscan, says everyone’s favourite restaurateur and Super Tuscan fan, Andrea Riva. Cin cin!

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Alannah Weston has launched Project Ocean to raise awareness of the threat of over-fishing

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uper Tuscans… I suppose it is typically Italian that the name is only half right. As red wines they are super enough, but are they really Tuscan? Up to a point… They are made in Tuscany but most of the grapes are French, typical Bordelais varieties: Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and so on. What is more, the guy who started it all was an aristocrat from Piedmont in the north, next to Lombardy, where I’m from.

I suppose the Super Tuscan was born in 1944, when the Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, planted 1,000 shoots of Cabernet Sauvignon vines at his castle in the Maremma district of Tuscany. Of course, it took a few years for these infant vines to grow to maturity and the Marchese was not the sort of man to sit around and watch plants grow; his real passion was horses, and in the Maremma he bred and trained champion racehorses. As a child in Italy, I remember his horse Ribot, which won the Arc twice, once in 1955 and again the following year, when it won the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth stakes too, ridden to victory by Camici. Ribot was the greatest Italian racehorse ever, winning almost everything there was to be won at the time, and for Italy in the Fifties, Ribot was a national hero, a sort of Italian Seabiscuit.

At first, the Marchese’s wine was not as good as his horses. He asked his friend, the Baron de Rothschild, what he thought of it and he really wasn’t very complimentary – maybe he harboured a grudge about the Arc. The wine only really began to get better when his son Nicolò took over. When I started in the restaurant business in 1972 with Lloyd’s – which was named after a friend of mine Richard Lloyd, a racing driver who sadly died in a plane crash at Biggin Hill a couple of years ago – there were no Super Tuscans. As far as snobs were concerned, good wine was still French wine. Italian wine was something you bought in straw-covered bottles.

However, the wines at the Marchese’s castle had started to improve. I remember having my first bottle of what was still then a vino da tavola called Sassicaia at a wine tasting in my restaurant Pier 31, which I owned with Patrick Lichfield and Henry Smith. And what a table wine that was! It tasted like a mature Bordeaux, even though it was a young wine: a five-year-old Sassicaia tastes like 15- or 20-year-old Bordeaux. It was sensational, but even when I opened Riva in 1990, Sassicaia was still, officially at least, an outsider, a wine that did not adhere to any of Italy’s complex wine laws and that therefore had to be called a table wine. It was only with the 1994 vintage that Sassicaia acquired its own Denominazione di Origine Controllata.

Since then, the Super Tuscans have come into their own. Sassicaia may be the first and most famous, but the celebrated winemaking dynasty of the Antinoris, cousins of the Marchese della Rocchetta, were not slow off the mark. Having tasted the 1968 Sassicaia, Piero Antinori started spicing up his Chianti, mostly made from the Sangiovese, by adding around 20 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon. The result is Tignanello. Of all the Super Tuscans, this is my favourite. (When I used to go to Tramp, its house champagne was Krug: it is a little like that at Riva, where we serve Tignanello like other people serve house red.) If possible, I like to follow Tignanello with a bottle of what you could call its mirror, another Antinori wine, Solaia, which is almost the opposite in terms of the Sangiovese and Cabernet split.

In Italy, when something becomes a trend, as a nation we lock onto it; and as with Loden coats and vintage Rolex Daytonas, so it was with wine. Pretty soon everyone was at it. In 1981 another Antinori, Lodovico founded his own Super Tuscan, Ornellaia. This mainly Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc blend is like a Château Palmer. However, if you are a Merlot fan, there is the Masseto, which is about the rarest Super Tuscan. With an annual production of 2,000 bottles, you can only get it on allocation.

Those are the immortals, but in the past 20 years or so, plenty of others have dug up some of their Sangiovese and planted French grapes: Castello dei Rampolla, Le Macchiole, Soldera and Tua Rita. They all have different characteristics, but they all have one thing in common – the price. My customers can’t decide whether to curse me or to thank me: they love drinking these wines, but they hate paying for them. ver the years I have got through quite a few Super Tuscans and Riva is only a small restaurant, with about 45 seats. I keep it very casual and we are not that expensive: with the exception of Tignanello, I don’t even have Super Tuscans on the wine list – the regulars know what to ask for. It only really dawned on me how much of this wine we must get through when the oenologist from Ornellaia asked to be taken to one of the London restaurants that sold most of his wine.

I daresay that he had been expecting a West End restaurant with a Michelin star or two.

Instead, he had to cross the river and come to Barnes to a tiny restaurant where the waitresses wear jeans, the tablecloths are made of paper and the wine list is a single sheet of A4 paper. I still remember when he came in and walked up to me to ask where the main restaurant was. It took me about half an hour to convince him that this is all there is – and, in passing, I mentioned that if he could see his way to increasing our stock of the 1997 vintage I would be most grateful!

Andrea Riva has the best Italian restaurant in London, Riva in Barnes

t was Christmas 2009 and a childhood friend of mine, Jonathan Baillie, director of the Zoological Society of London, and my brother, Galen Weston, who runs the largest supermarket business in Canada, had just come back from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Jonathan was there representing conservation and Galen was representing business, and they were both very disappointed by the lack of progress. Jonathan talked about how difficult it was to communicate the issues surrounding climate change. But he said there was one issue that pretty much everyone agreed on, and that was the overfishing and coral-reef destruction that is affecting our oceans.

Jonathan educated me on these issues, which I wasn’t really aware of at the time. As a child, I had been fortunate enough to swim amongst coral reefs in the Bahamas and the

fashion and entertainment, including Charles Clover, who made the documentary The End of the Line, and Katharine Hamnett. Katharine is a great inspiration for me, as she is really the mother of fashion campaigning. With the help of this group, we created Project Ocean, a creative public call to action to defend the fish in our seas, a project that would celebrate the beauty of the ocean as well as raise awareness of the huge impact overfishing.

Over five weeks we turned Selfridges into a homage to the sea and sponsored the creation of a marine reserve on a double barrier reef in the Philippines, which I visited in February. I saw a seahorse for the first time while diving. It was one of the most beautiful and fragile creatures I have ever seen.

Another of the highlights of Project Ocean was when the Prince of Wales came to visit Selfridges.

He looked at everything that we had done, and met our staff working on the project, as well as some of our partners. That’s when I felt very emotional, because here’s a man who has given so much of his time to conservation, who knew about these issues far earlier than the mainstream and only now are people taking an interest and

Selfridges is the place to be on World Ocean Day beginning to listen to what he’s been saying. He took the time to speak to us, and to congratulate all those involved in the project. In fact, he spoke to every single staff member in that room. This, for me, was a real testament to the power of the project and also to the people involved. he purpose of Project Ocean was to raise awareness, empower people to vote with their fork and choose to eat sustainable fish, and then to raise money for the marine protected areas (MPAs). Looking ahead, I’ve thought hard about how we will continue to support the oceans.

Selfridges is the place to be on World Ocean Day. I want to make sure that our staff have a chance to go out to the Philippines and see the work that is being done on the MPA and help in some way. I want to campaign within the department-store industry to encourage them to follow suit and take a more active role in global issues that are affecting us. I think the fact that we have been able to convene not only the public but some of the biggest players in the marine sector to discuss the realities that threaten global marine life is quite something for a shop!

Alannah Weston is the Creative Director of Selfridges www.selfridges.com

British Virgin Islands, and I remember having a little plastic card that you could go underwater with and identify all the different species of fish. That was a big deal for me at that age and the idea that my children wouldn’t have the same experience came as a big shock. But what could I do about it and what could a retailer like Selfridges possibly do?

Galen suggested that we eliminate all endangered fish stocks in our restaurants and food halls at Selfridges. We did. Then we decided to partner with some of the top experts, such as the Zoological Society of London, Marine Conservation Society, Greenpeace, Fish2Fork and other NGOs and activists from the worlds of INGREDIENTS art, 2 woodcock – plucked, drawn, with liver and heart quite finely chopped 2 plump pork sausages, skin removed 2 tbsp pancetta matchsticks 2 tbsp vacuum-packed chestnuts, chopped roughly 2 tsp fresh thyme, finely chopped 300ml marsala 50ml orange, cranberry or apple juice 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped Olive oil, Salt and pepper METHOD In a medium bowl, combine the sausage meat, pancetta, thyme and chestnuts. Season lightly with salt and pepper. In a largish frying pan, heat 3 tbsp olive oil and, over a medium heat, fry the garlic for a minute, just to release the flavour. Add the stuffing ingredients, breaking up the sausage meat and frying gently for several minutes, till it starts to turn golden-edged. Add the chopped organs, turning the mix over to prevent burning. After about 10 minutes of cooking in all, add 100ml of the marsala, turning up the heat to evaporate the liquid and stirring Forget grouse, says Maya Even. There’s a much better bird to bag to coat the meat. This should take about 3 “The woodcock is a very distinguished bird, but few people know its charms.” Brillat-Savarin, 1824. What was true in a time minutes. Remove the pan from the heat of culinary debauchery (“stuff a fowl with sufficient truffles so that it has become a spheroid”) still holds today. and transfer the stuffing to another Woodcock, though considered by many gourmets to be the best winged game, rarely finds its way onto our plates. It bowl to let it cool to room is grouse that has always presided over the shooting season. The Englishman’s long obsession with grouse, like his adult temperature.

Refrigerate fixation with nursery stodge off the restaurant pudding trolley, is well documented. The impulse is primarily visceral rather if you are pressed for than gastronomic. Excepting its delicious and larger cousin, the capercaillie, grouse is a dull little dish – overrated, frequently time. overhung and undercooked out of a misplaced snobbery typifying a sort of parochial obtuseness that still can still cloud English food sensibilities. Even when it is successfully turned out, the flesh lacks character. Larousse offers one and only one recipe for grouse and 33 separate preparations for woodcock. Verbum sap.

The woodcock recipe I give you omits the traditional instruction to cook the bird ungutted. In place of this, I substitute a stuffing, which may offend the purists, but does produce a juicier woodcock.

Maya Even is FQR’s Cookery Editor

they all have one thing in common – the price

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Preheat oven to 230°C/450°F and raise a shelf two-thirds the way up in the oven. Wash and dry the woodcock. Stuff the birds, leaving some space at each end and pushing in a piece of aluminium foil to prevent the stuffing leaking out. In a cast-iron or sturdy ovenproof frying pan, heat 3 tbsp olive oil till smoking. Sear the birds quickly on all sides till golden – about 1 minute each side. Turn off the heat altogether and pour over another 100ml of marsala. Let it evaporate. Place the pan in the oven and roast the birds breast side up for about 12-18 minutes, depending on their size and your preferences, turning over the birds halfway through cooking. Remove from oven, checking the colour of the thigh juices by piercing gently to see if further cooking is needed.

Place birds on a carving board and leave to rest for 10 minutes. Deglaze the pan with the remainder of the marsala and a drop of apple or cranberry juice.

Remove the tin foil and serve with a parsnip purée and a corpulent red wine.

Autumn 2011