LEGAL ANECDOTES AND MISCELL ANEA

By D. Michael Bain, K.C.*

The Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp1

Let it roll across the floor, Through the hall and out the door

To the fountain of perpetual mirth, Let it roll for all it’s worth. Find me where ye echo lays; Lose ye bodies in the maze, See the Lord and all the mouths he feeds, Let it roll among the weeds, let it roll. Let it roll down through the caves, Ye long walks of Coole and Shades Through ye woode, here may ye rest awhile, Handkerchiefs to match your tie Let it roll.

—George Harrison, “The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)”, All Things Must Pass (1970, Apple Records)

John Shalders Crisp was from Norwich. He became a printer in the noted printing business of Childs, of Bungay, Suffolk, which not only brought him an income, but also a wife in the form of Harriet Childs, the only daughter of his boss, John Childs (who was a sturdy opponent of church rates and the monopoly of Bible printing then enjoyed by universities and the King’s printers). John and Harriet Crisp relocated to London (where John continued as a printer for Ward & Co.) and in October 1843 they were living in Nelson Square, a quiet secluded spot on the east side of Blackfriars Bridge when Harriet gave birth to their only son, Frank.

Frank Crisp was educated at private schools including Central Hill and then at University College School in Gower Street. While initially he was intent on becoming an engineer, a few months before leaving school he became fascinated by the law and spent his spare time attending hearings at the law courts. At the age of 16 he was articled to the firm of Ashurst & Morris at No. 6 Old Jewry. He engaged in private study and obtained a B.A. and LL.B. from London University.

In 1867, at the age of 24, Frank married Catherine Howes. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1869, with honours, and his legal reputation grew until he was admitted into the partnership of Ashurst, Morris, Crisp & Co. Crisp’s legal career developed together with the limited liability principle and he became highly regarded as corporate solicitor and was “generally looked upon in the City as the Lord High Accoucheur of Joint Stock companies”.2

One of Frank’s enthusiasms, however, was the newly invented microscope, of which he was both an enthusiast and eventually an authority. It was with this instrument that he was depicted on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1890. He procured a complete library of books on the topic and in 1870 became a fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, serving on its council from 1874 and becoming its secretary in 1878 and its treasurer in 1881, a position he held for 24 years. Under his direction and guidance (and with the help of his sizable purse) the society benefitted from a highly regarded (and illustrated) journal published and read internationally, as well as the introduction of electric lighting to the society’s facilities.

Frank was also a legal advisor to the Liberal Party and he was knighted in 1907 and received a baronetcy in 1913. In addition to his interests in law and microscopy, he held an enormous enthusiasm for medieval England, which he combined with his interest in gardening to write a book entitled Mediaeval Gardens, which was published posthumously in 1924. Crisp was also the treasurer of the Linnean Society (still going since 1788), which is devoted to gardening, and he was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1919. There is a certain irony here since the RHS banned garden gnomes from being displayed in its recognized gardens on the basis that they were crass and common; Sir Frank Crisp, though, was a devoted gnomophile.

In 1889, Crisp bought two villas on the edge of Henley-on-Thames: Friar Park and Friar’s Field. He paid a total of £18,000 and merged their grounds into a 62-acre estate. He then commissioned a little-known architect, Robert Clarke Edwards, to build what the Victoria County History described as “a colourful and eccentric melange of French Flamboyant Gothic in brick, stone and terracotta, incorporating towers, pinnacles, and large traceried windows”. It was the size of a palace.

Sir Frank added an alpine/mountain garden to complement the palace and populated it with his beloved garden gnomes. He called upon a garden designer named Ernest Milner to help him lay out extraordinarily extravagant gardens and grounds—which, as he continued to buy surrounding land, eventually extended to 90 acres. Crisp was so proud of the result that over the course of the next 20 years, he opened the garden to the public and provided them with a 276-page guidebook full of images of the medieval and Elizabethan gardens that had inspired him. The guidebook included a long section of plant anatomy and plant families as well as information on the house itself. He also commissioned a Manchester-based calligrapher and book illustrator to produce a fold-up map of the estate to serve as a simple visual guide.

The map showed “Ye Gate of Entrance for ye visitors with ye seeing eye, ye hearing ear and ye understanding wit” and displayed curious names for various aspects of the garden and buildings including: “Ye Lower Lodge. Low but not Base”, “Ye Upper Lodge. High but not haughty”, “Ye Fountain of Perpetual Mirth” and a warning sign “Don’t keep off the grass”. When Crisp had difficulties with birds stealing some of the fish out of his artificial lake, he put up another sign: “Herons will be prosecuted.”

In addition to the artificial lake, the gardens included a medieval herb garden, a Japanese garden, a topiary garden, a rhododendron garden and a series of underground caves populated by more gnomes, accessible only by boat, and lit at night by lights designed to look like grape vines. By far the garden’s crowning achievement, however, was an alpine garden replete with a 40 foot scale model of the Matterhorn.

A few weeks after Sir Frank Crisp died, his wife sold Friar Park and its gardens for £46,500 in 1919. The purchaser was Percival David (whose father Sir Sassoon David founded the Bank of India), and he remained at Friar Park until 1953 when he and his wife divorced. The estate was then acquired by a teaching order of nuns, the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco, who used it as a training centre. Unfortunately, the nuns did not have the financial wherewithal to maintain the gardens, which fell into considerable disrepair. Worse still, in order to bring in some money, the sisters allowed local builders to use the grounds and even the lakes as a dump. At one point they wanted to demolish the main building and put in a block of flats with 221 units.

Fortunately, the Henley Council refused to approve the nuns’ proposal. Nevertheless, a dismal decline and eventual demolition seemed likely until, out of the blue, a saviour appeared and put up £140,000 to purchase Friar Park. It was January 1970 and the purchaser, George Harrison of Liverpool, was now a retired Beatle at the age of 27. Most of the house was unusable and the grounds contained abandoned vehicles and other rubbish completely overgrown with brambles. Still, George Harrison felt the estate held some promise.

As he wrote in his autobiography, I Me Mine: Friar Park … is really incredible. It was all rotting and nobody was interested. They were trying to pull it down and destroy it. Now it’s a listed building. They even sent me certificates of historical value for the railings and restorations which I installed! All the historic societies want to come and look at it now, but nobody was interested when I got it, it was just unloved.

Harrison decided to rebuild the palace room by room on an as-needed basis. He started by installing a 16-track recording studio3 and a slow but steady restoration effort of the building and the gardens took place; for a period he allowed the Hare Krishna movement to occupy one entire wing of the mansion. Over the next few decades, Harrison completely restored the gardens and liberated many of the gnomes along the way, including those in the underground caves he discovered in the 1980s. While he kept the name “Friar Park”, he also christened the house “Crackerbox Palace” and became a lifelong fan of Sir Frank Crisp, whose quirky sense of humour had been left in the form of inscriptions of strange expressions dotted around the property; Harrison sometimes used these as inspiration for song lyrics. Harrison also described Sir Frank Crisp as “a combination of Walt Disney and Lewis Carroll”, and he developed an almost comedic obsession with the quirky 19th-century London solicitor.

In 1979, Harrison put up Friar Park as collateral to bankroll the production of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a stunt that could well have resulted in him losing the property altogether. Harrison, who survived an intruder’s knife attack on the property in 1999,4 passed away from cancer in 2001 at the age of 58. Today, the 30-room house is lived in by his widow, Olivia, and their son, Dhani. The renovated palace and completely restored gardens have been valued at about £40 million.

Endnotes

1. This article can be read as a prequel to “Legal Anecdotes and Miscellanea: Denis O’Brien – A Very Naughty Boy” (2023) Advocate 297.

2. “Men of the Day. No 470. Mr. Frank Crisp”, Vanity Fair (31 May 1890).

3. Friar Park Studios, Henley-on-Thames, or “FPSHOT” as it became known.

4. Harrison suffered multiple stab wounds in the attack, and when his friend Eric Idle came to visit him in hospital, Harrison asked: “Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to The Rolling Stones?”