The Chap Issue 111

ISSUE 111

SPRING 2022

EXPAND YOUR MIND, REFINE YOUR WARDROBE

VALERIE LEON

LA BOWTIQUE BOW TIES

ABSINTHE COCKTAILS

VINTAGE-STYLE LINGERIE

THE FUTURE OF SAVILE ROW

ISSUE 111

9 771749 966087

11>

£6.99

ANNA FRIEL

“I NEVER WANT PEOPLE TO FORGET THAT I COME FROM ROCHDALE, BUT I’D LIKE THEM TO FORGET I DID BROOKSIDE”

JUST LIKE

! e g a t n Vi

The best of 1940s and 1950s reproduction clothing, making the world a more glamorous place! Made in London.

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RAFFISH EAU DE COLOGNE FROM THE CHAP

AVAILABLE FROM WWW.THECHAP.CO.UK

John Hepburn commences leather tanning in Bermondsey

Samuel Barrow & Brother is formed

Hepburn & Gale merges with Ross & Co

Make and supply saddles, belts and cases to officers and soldiers during the Great War

Hepburn & Gale merges with Samuel Barrow & Brother to become Barrow, Hepburn & Gale

Continue to make and supply official government Dispatch Boxes, notably for Churchill as Secretary of State

Major contribution to the war effort, notably “L” Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade

HRH Princess Elizabeth proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II and officially photographed with her Dispatch Boxes

1760

1848

1901

1914

1920

1921

1939

1953

Proper Chaps Carry Proper Bags.

Proper Bags From Barrow Hepburn & Gale.

‘Barrow, Hepburn & Gale have been making travel goods for generations, and although fashions are constantly on the change, their quality has always been superlative.

They are supplied not only to the home market, but the whole world, for the good reason that British craftsmanship in this class of goods has always been admired. At a time when a flourishing export trade is absolutely essential to the country’s survival, no manufacturer can do his country a better service than to produce goods so well made and designed that they may properly be called ambassadors of goodwill.’

Everything In Leather – The Story Of Barrow Hepburn & Gale, published in 1948.

thechap@barrowhepburngale.com | barrowhepburngale.com |

@barrowhepburngale

Editor: Gustav Temple Picture Editor: Theo Salter Circulation Manager: Andy Perry

Art Director: Rachel Barker Sub-Editor: Romilly Clark Subscriptions Manager: Jen Rainnie

Contributing Editors: Chris Sullivan, Liam Jefferies, Ed Needham

GUSTAV TEMPLE

LIAM JEFFERIES

CHRIS SULLIVAN

ED NEEDHAM

DAVID EVANS

The editor of The Chap for the last 20 years is also the author of The Chap Manifesto, The Chap Almanac, Around the World in 80 Martinis (Fourth Estate), Cooking For Chaps and Drinking For Chaps (Kyle Books) and How To Be Chap (Gestalten). He is currently working on a book without ‘Chap’ in the title.

Liam Jefferies is The Chap’s Sartorial Editor, in charge of exploring new brands, trends and rediscoveries of forgotten gentlemanly fashions. Liam’s expert knowledge covers the dark heart of Savile Row to the preppy eccentricities of Ivy Leaguers. You can follow him on Instagram @sartorialchap

Chris Sullivan is The Chap’s Contributing Editor. He founded and ran Soho’s Wag Club for two decades and is a former GQ style editor who has written for Italian Vogue, The Times, Independent and The FT. He is now Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins School of Art on ‘youth’ style cults. @cjp_sullivan

Ed Needham is the editor and publisher of Strong Words magazine, launched in 2018 to give book enthusiasts a fighting chance of keeping up with the blizzard of new titles, with reviews that don’t feel like homework. He was previously editor of FHM in its million-selling nineties heyday and managing editor of Rolling Stone in New York.

David Evans is a former lawyer and teacher who founded popular sartorial blog Grey Fox Blog nine years ago. The blog has become very widely read by chaps all over the world, who seek advice on dressing properly and retaining an eye for style when entering the autumn of their lives. @greyfoxblog

ALF ALDERSON

ACTUARIUS Actuarius is an artist, essayist, photographer and journalist. A selfconfessed petrolhead, he mainly produces works based around his twin passions of Art Deco and mechanised transport, making the shortlist for the highly prestigious Guild of Motoring Writers Feature Writer of the Year in 2021.

JEAN-EMMANUEL DELUXE

JOHN MINNS

Alf Alderson is an awardwinning adventure travel writer whose work appears regularly in the world’s leading newspapers, magazines and websites.

He has also written and contributed to a wide variety of guidebooks on adventure travel, skiing, surfing, cycling, hiking, mountain biking and camping.

Office address The Chap Ltd 69 Winterbourne Close Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1JZ

John Minns has been a collector, buyer and seller Jean-Emmanuel is a French writer, music impresario and DJ. of antiques and collectables from the age of nine, when Born in Rouen, he studied in he first immersed himself Sheffield, where an association in the antique world by with Pulp led to him setting up foraging London antique his own record label in France. markets in the morning He brought the music of April March to the attention of French before school, then selling his finds to his eager school audiences and then to Quentin pals. His passion is still as Tarantino. He is the author of strong today.

Ye-Ye Girls of French Pop.

Advertising Paul Williams paul@thechap.co.uk +353(0)83 1956 999

Subscriptions 01442 820 580 contact@webscribe.co.uk

NICOLE DRYSDALE Nicole is a self-taught home cook who has been working as a freelance recipe developer and food stylist for the past 10 years.

She will be sharing recipes culled from her grandmother’s recipe notebooks. She is also a member of a ladies’ cricket team and is learning to play the double bass.

One day she hopes to have a pet ferret which she will call Mrs Washington. @nicolethechap

Email chap@thechap.co.uk Website www.thechap.co.uk Twitter @TheChapMag Instagram @TheChapMag Facebook/TheChapMagazine

Printing: Micropress, Fountain Way, Reydon Business Park, Reydon, Suffolk, IP18 6SZ T: 01502 725800 www.micropress.co.uk Distribution: Warners Group Publications, West Street, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9PH T: 01778 391194

THE CHAP MANIFESTO 1 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WEAR TWEED. No other fabric says so defiantly: I am a man of panache, savoir-faire and devil-may-care, and I will not be served Continental lager beer under any circumstances.

2 THOU SHALT NEVER NOT SMOKE. Health and Safety “executives” and jobsworth medical practitioners keep trying to convince us that smoking is bad for the lungs/heart/skin/eyebrows, but we all know that smoking a bent apple billiard full of rich Cavendish tobacco raises one’s general sense of well-being to levels unimaginable by the aforementioned spoilsports.

3 THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE COURTEOUS TO THE LADIES. A gentleman is never truly seated on an omnibus or railway carriage: he is merely keeping the seat warm for when a lady might need it.

Those who take offence at being offered a seat are not really Ladies.

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4 THOU SHALT NEVER, EVER, WEAR PANTALOONS DE NIMES. When you have progressed beyond fondling girls in the back seats of cinemas, you can stop wearing jeans.

5 THOU SHALT ALWAYS DOFF ONE’S HAT. Alright, so you own a couple of trilbies. Good for you - but it’s hardly going to change the world. Once you start actually lifting them off your head when greeting passers-by, then the revolution will really begin.

6 THOU SHALT NEVER FASTEN THE LOWEST BUTTON ON THY WAISTCOAT. Look, we don’t make the rules, we simply try to keep them going. This one dates back to Edward VII, sufficient reason in itself to observe it.

7 THOU SHALT ALWAYS SPEAK PROPERLY. It’s really quite simple: instead of saying “Yo, wassup?”, say “How do you do?”

8 THOU SHALT NEVER WEAR PLIMSOLLS WHEN NOT DOING SPORT. Nor even when doing sport. Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway. Except cricket.

9 THOU SHALT ALWAYS WORSHIP AT THE TROUSER PRESS. At the end of each day, your trousers should be placed in one of Mr. Corby’s magical contraptions, and by the next morning your creases will be so sharp that they will start a riot on the high street.

10 THOU SHALT CULTIVATE INTERESTING FACIAL HAIR. By interesting we mean moustaches, or beards with a moustache attached.

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82

CONTENTS 8 AM I CHAP?

Readers submit their photographs for the ultimate sartorial assessment

12 ISOLATION DIARY

Torquil Arbuthnot recalls his days on the chaise longue while afflicted by the plague

16 ASK THE CHAP

‘Wisbeach’ ponders queries from readers on matters sartorial

FEATURES 22 INTERVIEW: ANNA FRIEL

Chris Sullivan caught up with the actress to find out how her career has progressed since her soap opera days

32 T HE ROMANTIC LEPIDOPTERIST

he story of Margaret Fountaine, who travelled the world in search T of every species of butterfly, collecting a few male hearts along the way

•

SPRING 2022

22 SARTORIAL FEATURES

MOTORING

44 LA BOWTIQUE

114 M OTORING

We spent an evening in the Club Room at Huntsman with Mickael Korausch, who makes bespoke bow ties for a living

61 AM I SATCHEL? Gustav Temple advocates paying as much care and attention to the portmanteau in the hand as one does to the suit of clothes on the body

67 P RATT & PRASAD Gustav Temple bespeaks a suit from a tailor who was trained on Savile Row, and finds that having a suit made reveals a lot more about the man underneath it than merely his sartorial preferences

76 G REY FOX COLUMN David Evans celebrates the glory of bespoke suiting and looks at the future of Savile Row

CHAP LIFE 82 WHAT KATIE DID An encounter with vintage-style ladies lingerie pioneer Katie Thomas

92 HENRY MORTON STANLEY Everyone knows the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” line, but what else was there to the story of Stanley’s African adventure?

102 A BSINTHE COCKTAILS How to press into service that dusty old bottle of absinthe in the drinks cabinet

108 COOKING FOR CHAPS Nicole Drysdale marks the changing of the seasons with succulent slow-cooked lamb and pilaf rice, followed by chocolate and cherry hot cross buns

Actuarius recounts the extraordinary tale of the first woman ever to make the start line of a Formula 1 race

121 FORD MUSTANG

Alf Alderson on the origins of the first ‘muscle car’ and how it became an international icon

REVIEWS 128 B RITISH DANDIES

The Chap’s new literary editor Ed Needham meets Dominic Janes, author of British Dandies: Engendering a Scandal and Fashioning a Nation

132 BOOK REVIEWS

New books about horses, Germany’s aftermath to WWII, the inside story of Vogue and two new fiction titles

136 VALERIE LEON

An interview with the actress who starred in two James Bond films, The Persuaders!, The Avengers and Hammer Horror’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb

146 MARTHE DE FLORIAN

The recent discovery of a perfectly preserved apartment from the Belle Epoque period in Paris

154 ALBUM COVER HOMAGES

Readers’ (and editor’s) attempts to recreate legendary album covers with a Chappish twist

157 ANTIQUES

John Minns on the acquisition and collection of vintage vinyl

160 WILDE WIT

The results of a competition to match the wit of Oscar Wilde

162 CROSSWORD

Cover photo: Richard Young © Rex Features/Shutterstock

ISSUE 111

SEND PHOTOS OF YOURSELF AND OTHER BUDDING CHAPS AND CHAPETTES TO CHAP@THECHAP.CO.UK FOR INCLUSION IN THE NEXT ISSUE

“You will note,” writes Peter J Faye, “that my mode of transport is an electrically assisted vélocipède, as I demonstrate that one does not need to be some long haired, baggy jumper-wearing oik to do one’s bit towards preserving our plague ridden planet.”

Sir, we did not note the electrification of your ladies’ bicycle until you drew attention to it, for we were too distracted by the absence of bicycle clips to restrain your flared trousers from catching in the chain.

Though presumably there is, instead of a chain, some form of electrical chip that powers said velocipede. Also, sir, you have a puncture to the rear of the ‘vehicle’.

The man seated behind Ian Taylor expressed our own concerns about various matters, namely an uncertain shirt collar, non-contrasting pocket square, excess jacket cuff, pointless covered buttons and slanted pockets on a non-hacking jacket.

But the seated man’s loudest groan must have been at Mr. Taylor’s flagrant ignorance of the ‘always, sometimes, never’ jacket buttoning rule.

One of these gentlemen is at his workplace, the Captain Fawcett factory and museum, and can therefore be forgiven for donning pantaloons de Nimes. The other (on the left) has no excuse, especially when he has gone to such effort to clad his upper half more or less correctly. Make your mind up, sir – are you a mod or a rocker?

The premises of Captain Fawcett have received many visitors of late. It is surprising that this one was permitted entry, having forgotten to unfasten the lower button on his waistcoat.

“I often see my father reading The Chap magazine,” writes Esme Hodsoll, “and I wondered whether he might be a chap himself? He loves classic cars and has suits made on Saville Row (sic), as well as bespoke shoes. Here is a photograph of him with his Aston Martin. I’ll let you be the judge!”

Madam, thank you for sending this photograph of your father’s Aston Martin. We cannot comment on the appearance of the chauffeur, since he is wearing his work uniform, so perhaps you could send us a photograph of your father as well?

Frank Annable went to an ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ themed fancy dress party and forgot to bring his mask.

Frank Annable assures us that blindfolds rather than masks were provided for anyone in the same room as him, when wearing his Coco the Clown outfit.

Richard Edmonds is something of a beachcomber. On this occasion, having emerged from a bracing nude swim and finding that his clothes had been stolen, he had to cobble a temporary outfit together from bits of debris found along the shore.

What could be more pleasant than a pint of iced water on a windswept beach in the middle of winter? In Randolph Taylor’s case, it would be a jacket that matches his trousers, a pair of braces and a set of cufflinks. Nice bow tie and boater, though.

“We are artists of a retrospective nature,” write twins Philip and Andrew, AKA The Jones Boys, “inspired by 1930s sunbursts and bendy shapes. This image was taken at the Vintage by the Sea event in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe. Although we did look very alike as kids, we have somewhat grown out of our identical chops. We still have to wear different head attire though.”

Sirs, your ruse to wear different head attire in order to distinguish yourselves from each other is helpful, since in every other respect you have both managed successfully to ruin perfectly decent outfits. To wit, cream moleskins with a dark green waistcoat and white shoes; cravat with wing-collared shirt and bowler hat. The list goes on, sirs, and we suggest you use the Hergé Thompson Twins as sartorial inspiration, rather than the other Thompson Twins.

Zurab Gogidze is another Thompson Twins fan, checking an image on his telephone of the Hergé detectives to ensure his false moustache looks cartoony enough. The photograph, he informs us, was taken at the Moustache Party at Pizza Express, Belsize Park, so nothing more needs to be said.

“My wife took this picture of myself (with buttonhole flower) and my friend Smythe (he is holding Sadie dog’s lead) at our friend Clarke’s wedding,” writes ‘Tinker’, providing more reams of useless information. He went on to inform us that, “whilst it isn’t visible, the lower button on the waistcoat is of course undone.”

Smythe is bawling at the camera, having spotted the fact that Tinker’s waistcoat is a formal one, and therefore the bottom button should not be undone. Good old Smythe.

He’ll spot the brogues with Morning Dress next.

Arbuthnot

Splendid Isolation Diary After testing positive for coronavirus, Torquil Arbuthnot was advised by his physician to remain indoors for a week. This is his journal for those seven days.

Sunday

“The Pope suggests that, when I’m feeling better, I should pop over to Rome sometime for an asado, as he makes a mean salsa criolla. He has had a billiards table installed in the Castel Gandolfo, so we can chat over the baize”

I am obliged to take some sort of medicoscientifical test before venturing out, to ensure that I don’t contaminate the general populace. I stick what resembles a swizzle stick up my nose and ask my man Youssef to do the necessary with the chemicals. He informs I have tested “positive” and must self-isolate for several days. I admit I had been feeling rather seedy, but mistook the symptoms for my usual panoply of ailments: gout, Green Monkey

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Fever, Bechuana Tummy, Korsakoff psychosis, etc.

I immediately get on the blower to my man in Harley Street, Dr McTavish. He assures me I had received the toppest quality vaccine available (“aged in sherry casks”, he says) but mutters that, “The wee blighters sometimes get through the best defences.” He confirms I must live a hermit’s life for a week, and advises me to dose myself with whatever panegyrics I see fit.

As I cannot get to evensong, the vicar relays his sermon to me from the top of the church tower via semaphore.

the foreseeable. I pass the morning cataloguing my collection of Cherokee war-bonnets. In the afternoon, after a soothing nap, I work on my operetta about the editor of The Chap, provisionally entitled Gustav Temple: Genius or Madman?

Buckingham Palace telephone, asking my advice on how to handle the kerfuffle around Prince Andrew. I suggest “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” would be best, and that he be made permanent Governor-in-residence of the Falkland Islands and be sent there forthwith on a slow boat, possibly an unseaworthy one. “Too kind,” I murmur when promised “a little bauble” in the next Honours list.

Monday

Tuesday

As I will have to take all my meals in my bedchamber, a little man comes up from the village to re-route the dumb waiter. I dose myself with tincture of laudanum after breakfast. Youssef is instructed to cancel all my engagements and that I will be conducting them by telephone for

Feeling slightly feverish, I fall back on remedies tried and tested in the Amazonian rainforest and the Hindu Kush, namely mustard poultices and hot quinine toddies. The hours pass slowly, so the local amateur dramatics society kindly entertains me with

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a production of No, No, Nanette under my window.

The Pope (an old chum from our seminary days in Buenos Aires) telephones, as he is having “doubts” about the Athanasian Creed. We talk things over and I think I put his mind at rest. He suggests that, when I’m feeling better, I should pop over to Rome sometime for an asado, as he makes a mean salsa criolla. He has had a billiards table installed in the Castel Gandolfo, so we can chat over the baize.

practise casting from the window, but cannot reach the ornamental fountain and keep snagging the line on the topiary. The head gardener kindly digs a temporary pond nearer the house and fills it with trout.

Thursday My old friend Hankinshaw pops round for a few hands of cribbage. He is somewhat fearful of catching Covid, so he wears a World War II-issue gas mask and insists on dipping the playing cards in Dettol before we pass them back and forth under the door. Hankinshaw has kindly brought me a clockwork mouse to add to my collection.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (an old pal from my code-breaking days at Bletchley Park) telephones from Geneva, as they’re having trouble with the Large Hadron Collider. I suggest priming the starter motor with methylated spirits, which apparently does the trick. He also asks me to cast an eye over some calculations, as he thinks he’s missed a plus or minus sign somewhere.

Wednesday I undertake some brisk exercise by doing the Daily Telegraph crossword for twenty minutes, before settling down to pen another chapter of my travel book, Meanderings in Mesopotamia. Later I play chess against one of my automata.

As my valet cannot be admitted to my chambers I am forced to dress myself for dinner, and get in a complete muddle with my collar studs.

One rolls behind the dressing-table and it takes several casts with my fly rod to retrieve it. I then

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in the cricket ground on the south lawn. It reminds me to telephone Sir Andrew Strauss (he was my fag at Radley) to offer my services as England coach. He weeps with gratitude and says my MCC membership will be upgraded to “Platinum”, and could I possibly open the batting as well?

I continue to add to the sum of the world’s knowledge by penning a monograph on Etruscan burial rites. In the pip emma I write a stiff letter to The Times about the intolerable noise made by modern lawnmowers. My exercise for the day is to flick playing cards into an upturned top hat.

While decoding the vicar’s sermon on Sunday, I realised my semaphore is a bit rusty. So I practise by getting Hankinshaw to stand on a far hillside with two flags, and we exchange badinage until he uses one of the flags to blow his nose for the umpteenth time.

Youssef tests me again and – hurrah! – I have now rid my body of Covid. Just to be on the safe side, I will only sortie from the house carried by two ostlers in my sedan chair, which will be infused with Vicks Vaporub and tincture of laudanum. n

Friday I fancy going riding, so Youssef fetches the rocking horse from the nursery and places one of the larger Hobbema landscapes in front of it, and I imagine myself cantering through the Flemish countryside. Elon Musk (an old chum from our days selling second-hand cars on the Cromwell Road) telephones on a scratchy line from the outskirts of Pluto, anxious that his cosmic SatNav isn’t working. I advise him to take a detour around the outer moons of Neptune, thus avoiding congestion in the Milky Way. Elon kindly offers to let me share his cryogenic pod when our time comes as a thank you, but I say one of his amusing dodgem cars would be quite reward enough.

Saturday Since the lead on the television set does not extend to my boudoir, I ask 22 of the under-gardeners to don the creams and recreate highlights of the day’s play

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the Chap...

By Wisbeach

An advice column in which readers are invited to pose pertinent questions on sartorial and etiquette matters, and even those of a romantic nature.

Send your questions to wisbeach@thechap.co.uk

Jonathan ‘Jonny’ Arnold: I am writing to ask for advice on an ever-maddening wardrobe condition I face on a day-to-day basis. I prefer braces rather than a belt to keep everything where it ought to be, yet I find that, without a belt, my shirts tend to rise up, become untucked or bunch up around the shoulders under my waistcoat. What technique can I employ to end this infuriating problem?

Wisbeach: Sir, this conundrum is clearly causing you distress and extreme measures may be required to resolve it. There is a relatively new product on the market called a ‘shirt stay’, whose purpose is precisely to alleviate the situation you describe. Shirt stays connect the tails of the shirt to the tops of the socks, running invisibly down the inside leg. They are available from www.sharpanddapper.com, who were the inventors of this innovative gentlemen’s accessory.

...

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...

Montague ‘Chaps’ Gristle: I am applying for a new passport and a new photographic image of Gristle is required.

I see no mention of dress code in the instructions. I have erred on the side of caution and chosen to wear a tweed jacket, Tattersall shirt and tie. I think a cravat may be regarded as too louche by Passport Control at Kabul Airport, where I shall be landing. However, I am asked to have a ‘plain expression and have my mouth closed’.

William Walker: When enjoying a comfortable win at The Track, is it ever acceptable to celebrate with a full Highland Fling, or is a small tap dance better form?

Wisbeach: Sir, should the winnings amount to more than three guineas, a full Highland Fling is entirely appropriate, unless there are ladies present.

In which case a discreet heel click is more acceptable.

My mother said that I was born with an ‘interesting’ expression. Furthermore, my mouth always opens when a camera flashes. My Natural Health Physician will confirm this, as will Rear Admiral Rodney Crease, DSO, OMG, should I require further testimonials. Do you think a portrait miniature might be acceptable, thus dispensing with a camera?

The artist would be at liberty to change my interesting expression to a plain one.

...

Montague ‘Chaps’ Gristle: I am confined to bed, with a recurrence of ‘malaise d’ennui’. I asked my nephew Pelham to procure three books from the library to help with my recovery. Cheam Library is in a converted telephone box, located at the egress of my street. Due to its size there is no periodical room, photocopying facilities or unisex lavatory.

Pelham returned with French Existentialism, a History, January 12th- January 24th 1953, Titbits Compendium 1976 and Winnie the Pooh: The Deforestation of 100-Acre Wood.

Wisbeach: I believe you have answered your own question, ‘Chaps’ (if I may). Employ a decent portraitist from one of the more traditional realist schools, rather than an abstract impressionist, who may produce a passable work of art but it won’t get you through customs at Kabul Airport.

I fear reading these three tomes will only worsen my

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Distinctive tweed and linen caps for discerning Chaps and Chapesses.

Wisbeach: Sir, we have heard similar tales from other wearers of our Star Lapel Badge. One chap was given an extra portion of batter bits in the premises of ‘Codfather’ seafood brasserie and takeaway in Harlow. Another was presented with the keys to the city of Truro, although this turned out to be a mistake as they thought he was Bernie Clifton. We suggest you wear the badge at all times, and if not offered any complimentary delicacies, simply swivel your monocle towards your lapel in a meaningful manner. n

malaise. Can you suggest a light and frothy novel that will lighten my spirits? Preferably one that has a maximum of ten similes and five metaphors.

Wisbeach: I can indeed, sir. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is the uplifting tale of an ageing intellectual who takes the vapours in Venice to find a higher purpose in life. He makes inappropriate overtures to a German youth and snuffs it on the beach due to a cholera epidemic. This slim novella will make you feel like you never had it so good, sir.

...

Montague ‘Chaps’ Gristle: Due to a fall in sales of Gristle’s Potted Shrimps, I have been obliged to claim Universal Credit. The stipend received, I proceeded to the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz to dispense my largesse. I ordered my cocktail (a ‘Jujitsu’) and masticated the nibbles. I noticed the waiter and the bar manager were constantly looking in my direction. I thought nothing of it and ordered another cocktail (a ‘Dubious Intention’).

As the waiter placed the medication in front of me, he winked and whispered “drinks are on the house, sir.” He then looked to the lapel of my jacket. I was wearing a Chap star lapel badge!

What other doors of good fortune will this totem open?

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ozoneclothing.co.uk

FEATURES 22

Interview: Anna Friel

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Margaret Fountaine

© Paul Hampartsoumian/Shutterstock

Interview

Anna F r i el Chris Sullivan first met Anna Friel when the crew of Brookside moved in next door, and they went on to become firm friends. He caught up with her recently to find out how the actress’s career has progressed since her soap opera days

I

never want people to forget that I come from Rochdale, but I’d like them to forget I did Brookside,” declares actress Anna Friel adamantly, her Northern accent still most evident as she sits opposite me in a pub. “Looking back, all that controversy with Brookside was a good start, it made people know who I was but hopefully – and not just because I kissed a girl on telly – for all the right reasons.”

I first met Friel when she was acting in the longrunning Liverpool-based soap opera Brookside. In a series of episodes her character, the controversial Beth Jordache, had run away from home to London, where she ensconced herself in a Kentish Town council flat. The flat they used for filming happened to be right next to the one I was living in at the time. When Anna saw me dressed in a

“American TV is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Everyone was saying, you’ll never believe how much hard work it is and I’d say, ‘I’m used to it, having been in Brookside!’ But my God, were they right!

You run off the set from one scene, get changed and run back on set.

It’s all so fast and well organised” 22

Anna Friel in Brookside

Friel with Susan Sarandon in Monarch

1940s blue suit, bow tie and a beret, she didn’t think I looked like I belonged in the rather rough council estate, so she asked me if I was part of the crew. Subsequent conversations developed, then a few years later I started bumping into her at all the groovy London parties, and she always remembered me. Then she went out with my great friend Rhys Ifans, so further encounters occurred.

Even though Anna Friel’s career has skyrocketed, she is still very much an ‘ordinary girl from Rochdale’ who is so down to earth it is sometimes disarming.

Friel’s latest project, Monarch, has nothing to do with the royal family but is the tale of a family called Roman who are the fictional first family of American country music. Described as a ‘Texassized, multigenerational musical drama’, the family

is headed by the tough-as-old-boots and incredibly gifted Dottie Cantrell Roman (Susan Sarandon).

Dottie is the universally acknowledged Queen of Country Music and rules the powerful dynasty she has created with her husband, Albie, with an iron hand, though its very foundation in authenticity is compromised by falsehood. The family’s place at the top of the country tree is endangered, while heir to the crown Nicolette ‘Nicky’ Roman (Friel) knows no bounds in her attempts to protect the empire, while paving her own path to mega stardom in gold. It’s an incredible role for a girl from Rochdale but, for Friel, American long-format TV has always been taxing.

“American TV is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” she says. “Everyone was saying, you’ll never believe how much hard work it is and I would say, ‘I’m used to it, having been in Brookside!’ But my

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With Steve Coogan in The Look of Love

“As well as the outer shell changing, everything else changes in a much more positive way. Wisdom, compassion, empathy, values, being parents – we’re learning that people want to watch people they can relate to, not just the unachievable. We’ve got enough of that with the superhero movies”

God, were they right! You don’t ever even see your trailer. You run off the set from one scene, get changed and run back on set. It’s all so fast and well organised.

“And they do it so well, especially with shows since The Sopranos. I think they can achieve such great results because they start off thinking ‘This is going to be a hit’ and throw money at it, but in the UK it’s more like ‘Let’s see if it’s popular, then we’ll put some money into it.’ The Americans are brilliant at episodic drama. It’s like, that was great, shall we watch another one? They are just so good at creating these hooks that keep us watching, and the writing is so good.

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The Look of Love

Friel in Pushing Daisies

Friel in her early television days

Lum in the UK TV series Lum The Adventure Girl, and, after a scholastic sabbatical, was back in 1991 with parts in Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Medics and then Brookside from 1993-95. The latter made her a household – if not controversial – name, due to the aforementioned on-screen snog with another girl (the first lesbian encounter on British television).

The first big thing I did, when I was 13, was GBH; it was the first audition I went to and I got the part. Acting was something I loved and I was good at and I wanted to get better, so I stuck with it,” says Friel. “I was halfway through my A-levels and along came Brookside.

“My grandma said she hated me kissing that girl,” she chuckles. “‘Now I hope you won’t be doing that anymore’, she said, ‘none of that old nonsense’. My mum only said, ‘I don’t really like that, Anna.’ My family were all cool though, really.

I stayed with my mum and dad while filming and drove to Liverpool every day. They were very concerned that I kept two feet on the ground and stayed the same. I was lucky in that I had a strong

“I think the US now makes better TV than movies, because I think all the great writers have moved into TV because it makes more money and is more accessible. A lot of big budget Hollywood movies just go for the obvious and are so formatted.

A lot of them are also so miscast because of boxoffice potential.”

Friel’s first long-format US TV role was as Charlotte ‘Chuck’ Charles in Pushing Daisies, which ran from 2007 until 2009, although her acting CV goes back even further.

“I went to theatre workshop, because my drama teacher at school thought I had talent and should go and investigate it,” she recalls. “So I did these classes three times a week from age six until ten and it was pure improvisation. I think if you can do the improvisation, it will make you a lot more natural as an actor. My parents only allowed me to go if I studied hard at school, which was fine by me as I was good at school and wanted to become a barrister.”

Her first TV role, in 1981 aged five, was as

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Friel in Marcella

Irish dad and a Yorkshire mum who kept me in check and stopped me misbehaving.”

Even though Brookside launched Friel into the big league, it was the theatre that cemented her as a leading British actress.

“It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream that sort of changed things for me, especially for the Americans, as Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer were in it. So people were thinking, if she’s working with them she must be doing well.

“Going back to the stage to do Lulu [based on Wedekind’s two Lulu plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box] in 2001 was really terrifying, as it was such a hard role. It was very dark subject matter. I got murdered and raped by Jack the Ripper every night. I had all these burst ovarian cists at the time and my periods had stopped for such a long time.

I was not at all well and on hormone treatments, which made me even sicker, but I liked the play so much. I would love to get back on the stage again.

I am determined to get better at stage work, as it really improves you as an actress, if you can be that dedicated to tell the same story night after night after night.”

Since then, Friel has honed her craft. She has starred in British TV series such as Without You (2011) and Marcella (2016-2020) and UK movies such as The Look of Love (2013) in which she played the wife of Soho property and porn King Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan), and she is about to star in The Perfect Girlfriend, the onscreen adaptation of Karen Hamilton’s novel. In the US, she starred alongside Kelsey Grammer of Frasier fame in Charming the Hearts of Men last year, was rather exceptional in Books of Blood the previous year, the adaptation of the Clive Barker novel, and last year she played Kansas City cop Sharon Pici in TV series The Box. For many, lockdown was a trial but Friel looks on the bright side, as she spent more time with her

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As Nicolette ‘Nicky’ Roman in Monarch

15-year-old daughter Gracie, whom she had with ex-partner, actor David Thewlis. “It wasn’t until I had to stop that I realised how I go from one job to the next. You don’t realise what you’re carrying with you and what you’re brushing under the carpet. I would have preferred not to have gone through lockdown as a single mother, but I’ve had time to work on myself, look after my skin, exercise and get fresh air, and realise how important it is to keep up with the people that you love, and make sure you tell them so all the time.”

“Being a mother really puts things into perspective. It reminds us of how we are meant to be. We see our kids and see how much stuff changes us. It’s not that I couldn’t care less about my career. It’s just that I now feel more confident, because if I coped with this gruelling schedule on three-hour sleep, with breast milk pouring out all over the place and being a good mum, then I can do anything. But I love and adore being a mum.

Seeing my daughter’s lovely smile is the best way to start and the best way to end the day and, as soon as I go to her room, we will have a little cuddle.”

Now aged 45, Friel has had time to consider, consider and reconsider her career again, and has emerged all the more philosophical and entirely upbeat about her future.

“I did wonder about turning 40 and being thrown on the scrapheap,” she says. “But as well as the outer shell changing, everything else changes in a much more positive way. Wisdom, compassion, empathy, values, being parents – we’re learning that people want to watch people they can relate to, not just the unachievable. We’ve got enough of that with the superhero movies.”

Inevitably, the final question for Anna Friel from any interviewer is, what would you like to do next?

“I’d like to go out dancing to seventies disco music,” she replies. n

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Lepidoptery

MARGARET FOUNTAINE An historian once assertively wrote ‘‘…a globe-trotting lady scientist could not possibly hope to be taken seriously either as traveller, lady or scientist”.

Yet, as Olivier Woodes-Farquharson discovers, over a hundred years ago pioneer Margaret Fountaine was excelling at all of those, also finding time for some unconventional romance

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“Instinctively an obsessional type, Margaret poured her time, energy and life into studying and collecting them, and as butterflies couldn’t get drunk and cheat on you like Septimus Hewson had, it was a love that would last until her last breath”

aturday 15th April, 1978 was a fairly quiet news day. There was yet another British nuclear test, but most people seemed too engrossed with listening and dancing to disco to care too much. For once – and this is not something that you can say very often – all the excitement was happening in Norwich.

For in the Castle Museum, a sealed black metal box was being opened, on the strict instructions of its original owner who had died 38 years previously; its contents had remained a genuine mystery since. On breaking the seals, 12 leather-bound journals were found within, totalling

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The sealed box containing Margaret’s journals being opened in 1978

3000 pages of diaries written in captivating prose, together with an assortment of photos, some vivid drawings and even some pressed flowers.

They were the work of Margaret Fountaine, a trailblazing lepidopterist born 116 years earlier near that very city, and whose diaries would reveal an extraordinary combination of intrepid travel, pioneering science and globetrotting romance.

Her upbringing was hardly a natural springboard for such a life. A strict but useless clergyman father and seven younger siblings, in the hamlet of South Acre in Norfolk, suggested she would be destined for home schooling, becoming a governess, marrying off to a suitable suitor and carrying on a life of suffocating tedium. But Margaret was having none of it. She first revealed her more obsessional side as a teenager, where she fell passionately for an Irish chorister at Norwich cathedral with the hearty Victorian name of Septimus Hewson. Neither was it a passing fancy,

“From Switzerland, she would ultimately set off to over 60 other countries in almost all continents, armed with a butterfly net, incongruous clothing and an indomitable will.

And almost everywhere she went, it seems, she attracted plenty of attention. For although some of the photos of Fountaine make her seem straight-laced and a little sad, she was anything but” 34

The Painted Lady, an illustration by Barrie Morris

Margaret Fountaine at work in the field

for it ate at her for fully seven years. She followed him, learned his routines and took out her feelings on her diary – which she started 100 years to the day before they were allowed to be opened. That Hewson was a relentless drunk, swindler and blackguard didn’t put her off, and even after he was kicked out of the cathedral and sent home to Limerick, she wrote to him asking to visit, before finally declaring her tireless love.

Hewson made the right noises, with Fountaine leaving with the assumption that they were betrothed. Weeks later, and with her subsequent letters unanswered, a different missive arrived, this time from his family, suggesting that she was wasting her time, as he had betrayed them as well as her for all manner of reasons.

Heartbroken, she finally realised how much of her life she had wasted, during which her time to ‘marry off ’ the traditional way had come and gone. Fountaine needed a distraction to focus her obsessional nature and soon after fate dictated that, with a wealthy uncle passing away and leaving her a £100-a-year income, she now had the means to fund that distraction.

This may still have been the age of the Grand Tour of Europe, but seldom had it been done by single women. Margaret initially set off with her sister Rachel, armed with little more than Thomas Cook’s pioneering Tourist Handbook, the original travel guide. Taking in France and Switzerland, it was in the latter that she suddenly rediscovered the animal that had charmed her so much in her childhood garden: the butterfly. Instinctively an obsessional type, she thereafter poured her time, energy and life into studying and collecting them, and as butterflies couldn’t get drunk and cheat on you like Septimus had, it was a love that would last until her last breath.

From Switzerland, she would ultimately set off to over 60 other countries in almost all continents, armed with a butterfly net, incongruous clothing and an indomitable will. And almost everywhere she went, it seems, she attracted plenty of attention. For although some of the photos of Fountaine make her seem straight-laced and a little sad, she was anything but. Her fizzing diary entries reveal a passionate, charismatic and attractive soul who couldn’t be filed away as ‘demure’. Chasing

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butterflies in remote Tuscan villages, she casually mentions: ‘I spent most of my time with the Baron… as I might have expected, he too ended by making me an improper proposition’.

But Fountaine more than knew how to look after herself. Moving to the Corsican mountains, where she had heard there were little known, endemic species to be found, she stumbled across a different kind of rare specimen, the notorious bandit Jacques Bellacoscia, who had first announced himself by murdering the Mayor of Ajaccio. Most outsiders, even male, would have been petrified at such an encounter; not so the inimitable Margaret, who squeezed in some socialising when not exploring: ’I drank with Jacques, and sometimes in the quieter walks of life, I love to look back upon that wild mountain scene, the outlaw and his clan, the savage dogs who prowled about the grey rocks and the purple heather’. Her diaries also revealed that her successful coping mechanism when coming across the unsavoury – and very likely armed – types in the wild mountains was to do the most un-Victorian thing possible and ‘swear for all I was worth’.

collector/traveller who encouraged her to continue and to apply a more scientific bent to her pursuits.

Despite realising that she had a long way to go to have a collection to rival Elwes’, she took his advice with predictable gusto. In 1897, therefore, her first port of call was Sicily, where again she found herself braving Mediterranean brigands in order to secure her prize. She linked up with Signor Enrico Ragusa, Sicily’s pre-eminent Lepidopterist, for local advice before setting off alone, this time collecting new and detailed observations on habitats, varieties of sub-species, and starting to use the scientific (Linnaen) names for her butterflies instead of the common names in her write-ups.

Her subsequent paper made it to The Entomologist journal, a true rarity both for a supposed amateur and for a woman in what was still overwhelmingly a man’s scientific world. Some of her collected specimens were of such high quality that they were accepted for display by the British Museum, who always insisted on exceptional quality and rarity.

Fountaine had properly arrived.

Yet such success did nothing to slow her down, as she promptly hotfooted it first to Trieste and then to Budapest, where the local butterfly experts were entranced by her – a little too much in the case of Dr Popovich, one of their number who joined the list of many to fall under her peculiar, indefinable spell. She did not reciprocate his ardour, but her passions were aroused soon after when she joined them on a collecting expedition in the Transdanubian Mountains and was charmed to the hilt by another of their group, the fair-haired and faintly mysterious Herr Torok. Lovesick she may have been, but it didn’t stop her branching off on her own to undertake 12-hour hikes armed only with a hunk of bread and a flask of Sheep’s milk, while still dressed in bafflingly inappropriate clothing. The expedition complete, she delivered her second article to the Journal, which was promptly published. In 1898, she was elected a member of the Royal Entomological Society (RES).

It is again hard to overstate how impressive this was. It was a time of major transition for the world of Natural History study, and most scientific societies were not even contemplating female admissions; the few that did were inordinately choosy. As one sniffy historian phrased it, ‘A globetrotting lady scientist could not possibly hope to be taken seriously either as traveller, lady or scientist’.

While the RES still only had six female members in 1910, they appear to have been at the more

“Khalil Neimy, 15 years Margaret’s junior, speaking English with a bizarrely strong American accent, professed his undying love to her the day he laid eyes on her in Damascus.

Carelessly, he omitted to mention that he had a wife and family, and she eventually fell for his charms” Fountaine would need occasionally to return to England, although increasingly disliked it. She usually bought six pairs of plimsolls, and sometimes some silk dresses, from Harrods, which she would ask to be slit down the sides in order to insert pockets and be able to carry huge butterfly-boxes, to the bewilderment of the tailor. But as her collection and reputation grew, she was also invited to see the collection at the estate of Henry Elwes, another

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progressive end, and were enthused by Fountaine’s presentations on the few times she was able to make their meetings in London.

The travel bug never left Margaret, even though her diaries, breathless and revealing in so many ways, are maddeningly vague about dates.

In a way this was unsurprising, as there was no obligation at the time to travel with a passport and records are not kept as they are now. What we can be sure of is that she was off next to the French Alps in 1899 to collect and breed the caterpillars of certain little-known species, before the Middle East beckoned and in 1901 she made it to Syria. Here, after all her previous crushes, she would meet her true kindred spirit.

Not that Khalil Neimy was an obvious catch. 15 years her junior, speaking English with a bizarrely strong American accent, and initially acting as her ‘dragoman’ – interpreter, local fixer and travel companion all-in-one – he professed his

undying love to her the day he laid eyes on her in Damascus. Carelessly, he omitted to mention that he had a wife and family, and Fountaine eventually fell for his charms. To his credit, he was a hugely able companion on all her subsequent expeditions from then until 1928, including to South Africa, Asia Minor, the Caribbean, India, Tibet, Australia and more, and she was at pains later in life to ensure their vast 22,000-specimen collection would be known as the Fountaine-Neimy collection.

Even for our less austere times, their relationship was unconventional. They were certainly lovers, but he was also her employee.

Largely, it was a set-up that suited them both, even though she later found out that not only was Neimy not divorcing his wife as promised, but was also racking up a good few more children with her as he dragged his feet on signing the papers. The kindhearted Margaret eternally forgave him, and was genuinely grief-stricken when he contracted a fatal

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Margaret with Khalil Neimy

malarial fever in 1928. Yet still she pressed on to collect new specimens and suffered for it. Once, in order to lay her hands on a rare but beautiful white specimen she visited a remote village in Tibet: ‘I passed a terrible night on the floor – the place was infested with fleas and vermin’.

Neither did her charms ever dim. On a ferry to Crete she was propositioned by the Egyptian ship’s officer; travelling down the Amazon she simply could not shake the relentless pursuit of a randy Brazilian, despite her best efforts (‘It forced itself upon my unsuspecting brain that very soon he would be out of his pyjamas; it reminded me of the days of long ago’); in the African bush she stumbled across a wandering Frenchman one morning who had proposed marriage to her before the sun set. Indeed, notwithstanding her intelligence and grace, her looks may also have become more exotic, for after contracting a nasty bout of malaria in Morocco she chose to start bathing in diluted creosote to put off the leeches, which permanently turned her skin a darker shade.

Even in later years her energy and drive

were relentless, and she breezily recounts either cycling up hills for a day to look for certain species, or galloping on a pony for 45 miles in Tibet.

Exaggerated and unlikely as this may seem, they are corroborated by eye-witnesses. And her evolving views were prescient too, as she was one of the first in her field to notice that nature’s bounty was not limitless, and that if everyone turned lepidopterist, butterflies would soon disappear; not that she herself could consider stopping. Her blend of no-nonsense, expectation-shattering travels and scientific discovery, coupled with her strange approach to love, allowed her to set a precedent that has yet to be matched.

It was on a dusty, remote Trinidadian road in 1940 than the indefatigable 78-year-old breathed her last. Found by a passing monk, she had endured a massive heart attack. Even in death, her hand still reached out to her beloved butterfly net, which she had dropped and which remained tantalizingly out of reach in her final moments. Yet thanks to her good planning and powerfully-written diaries, her unique story could and would be celebrated yet. n

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BRITISH LEATHER GOODS WWW.ETTINGER.CO.UK

SARTORIAL 44

Photoshoot: La Bowtique

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Leather Satchels

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Pratt & Prasad

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Grey Fox Column

Photoshoot

LA BOWTIQUE Gustav Temple meets Mickael Korausch, founder and maker of La Bowtique bow ties, to discuss his day job on Savile Row, how he learned to make bespoke bow ties and whether you can wear a polka dot pocket square with Black Tie

Models: Mickael Korausch www.labowtique.com, Johan Ekelund www.sharpanddapper.com; Elom Gabriel www.elavanyo.com; Gerald Onourah www.collarbonelondon.com Photography: Ross Robertson @roo_withaview PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN IN THE CLUB ROOM AT HUNTSMAN, SAVILE ROW WWW.HUNTSMANSAVILEROW.COM

“Tying a bow tie is a skill every man should know, like changing a tyre on a car. Once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget. Learning to make them takes a little bit longer! Ideally you should match the bow tie to the facing on the lapels of the dinner jacket”

How did you come to be one of the few bespoke bow tie makers in the country?

I came to the UK when I was very young, and on a visit to Brighton saw a copy of The Chap in Snoopers Paradise. I really liked the aesthetic, so I looked into that classic British style more and started wearing vintage clothes. I also saw an advert for one of the Chap parties, the 10th anniversary one at Bloomsbury Ballroom, so I went there in my finest tweed suit and met lots of like-minded people, then more of them at The Chap Olympiad.

I wanted a decent bow tie and had found it almost impossible to find one in France. Only Charvet in Paris had them and they were way too expensive. Even in London there was no single place you could buy a good bow tie, and certainly not a bespoke one.

So I tried making my own, and at first it was a lot of trial and error, with no experience in sewing.

Then my mother introduced me to a seamstress friend of hers in France, who taught me to sew properly and gave me advice on construction.

Then my skills just developed from there.

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ou work at Huntsman of Savile Row. What’s your job there?

I am front of house, guiding the clients through the whole bespoke process, from choosing the right cloth to choices in cut and style. I am the interface between the client and the cutter and tailor. It’s a very sociable job and I have made many friends among the customers.

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So you learned how to make bow ties by making bow ties?

Exactly. The process of learning was very long and slow. I learned everything by making mistakes, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, and all about fabrics and different linings. I now have dozens of different patterns, from the standard curved shape to the pointed batwing style.

Is there something a little bit stuffy about an informal bow tie, or can young men carry it off with an ivy style?

I don’t like the word ‘stuffy’. Yes, bow ties do look particularly good on young, slim chaps, but there’s no reason for them not to work on older or wider fellows. Bow ties always look better than a tie when there is a small space to fill, like on a double-breasted suit or with a waistcoat or Fair Isle sweater. When a tie is worn with any of those, most of the tie is not actually visible, but with a bow tie you can see the whole thing. You have to choose the right collar for a bow tie – cutaway collars should be avoided and especially spearpoint. Bow ties are displayed much better with a standard collar shape to show them off.

It sounds as though making a bow tie is a bit like tying one – lots of trial and error?

Tying a bow tie is a skill every man should know, like changing a tyre on a car. Once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget. Learning to make them takes a little bit longer!

Ideally, you should match the bow tie to the facing on the lapels of the dinner jacket. So I work with clients at Huntsman, where we make a lot of formal wear, to make the client a bow tie in exactly the same fabric as the facings on the lapels of the jacket they’re having made.

When it comes to formal wear, how much should men experiment without departing too much from tradition?

I think it’s better to stick to the traditional, but I see no reason to jazz things up for a more party atmosphere. Black tie events are usually a celebration of something, so why have everyone dressed exactly the same? Creativity and fun have their place with black tie, as long as you’re having a nice time and you’re not wearing anything silly. I don’t approve of things like black shirts or messing about too much with the classic monochrome palette. Dark red socks and even scarlet socks can work with black tie, for a subtle splash of colour in a discreet part of the outfit, though I sometimes wear grey socks with black tie, to retain the monochrome tone throughout. The black tie pocket square should ideally be white, but we have been experimenting with a few departures, such as a touch of grey or black on a white pocket square.

What was your aim when you launched La Bowtique?

To be the only maker of bespoke bow ties of a very high quality. There is also a ready-to-wear range, available in Gaziano & Girling, at 39 Savile Row, and from the web site. I specialise in bow ties, though I do also make a few ties and cravats, as well as pocket squares.

Where are the bow ties made?

In my workshop in Bethnal Green. With my time limited by my day job at Huntsman, it is getting difficult to keep up with all the orders. I need an apprentice but the right person is very hard to find.

Not many young people have the skill and patience to learn something this intricate.

What are your next plans for La Bowtique?

The most important thing is to find someone to help expand the ready-to-wear range and collaborate with more people. I’d like to develop new products for ready-to-wear, offering more elements to the black tie collection and expand that range.

I’ve been working with illustrator Fab Gorjian.

He made some paintings and I turned them into pocket squares. We used off-white, cream, some with a gold or black stripe on white, a variation on black and white. One even has a red lipstick design on white. n

Who are your favourite bow tie wearers?

My friends on Savile Row, mainly. Of course there are a few famous names like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, while Roger Moore wore them in the 70s but with classic style, along with Michael Caine, but I prefer to admire people for their style who I actually know. I’m not someone who really idolises anyone.

Lots of my customers (who I can’t name, of course!) look very elegant. The guys in the photo shoot all look amazing in black tie.

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MICKAEL (right) WEARS: Large Dropped Bow Tie in Black Satin JOHAN WEARS: Large Classic in Black Grosgrain

JOHAN WEARS: Medium Diamond in Black Satin

GERRY (middle) WEARS: Large Dropped in Black Velvet ELOM WEARS: Large Classic in Black Velvet

You’ve tried the rest, now get the best A huge range of beautiful antique pocket watches, from the mid-19th century to the Second World War, and every conceivable style of antique watch chain.

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JOHAN WEARS: Medium Batwing in Black Satin

MICKAEL WEARS: Large Dropped in Black Satin JOHAN WEARS: Large Classic in Black Grosgrain

ELOM WEARS: Medium Classic in Black Velvet GERRY WEARS: Large Dropped in Black Velvet

GERRY WEARS: Large Dropped in Black Velvet

ELOM WEARS: Large Classic in Black Velvet

JOHAN WEARS: Large Classic in Black Grosgrain

Accessories

BURDEN OF REAMS Gustav Temple advocates paying as much care and attention to the portmanteau in the hand as one does to the suit of clothes on the body

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“There is a fashion for men with large beards, tattoos and a sense of selfimportance to sling their portmanteaux over their shoulders via a shoulder strap. This aids them to cycle furiously on a singlespeed velocipede towards important meetings with small-batch coffee roasters and producers of podcasts”

hat is wrong with the above photograph, apart from the fact that the gentleman is not wearing a hat? The poor fellow has clearly made an effort to dress smartly, by donning a blue two-piece suit, but what is that thing weighing down his right shoulder? If he’s about to go trekking in the Himalayas, he’s wearing the wrong clothes entirely and he’ll definitely need at least a Panama hat, if not a Solar Topi.

The leather briefcase in his right hand indicates that he is not on the way to the airport to catch the first plane to Nepal, but on his way to a business meeting of some kind. There is no business setting in which whoever he is meeting

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will be delighted to watch him heft his great black rucksack on to the table. He certainly will not be taken seriously by his potential future colleagues.

The leather briefcase probably contains all that he needs for the meeting (a sheaf of papers, a laptop, a copy of Forbes if it’s for business; microfiche and pistol if it’s for pleasure).

Readers will undoubtedly have witnessed this many times before: the sight of a man in a passably elegant suit with the apparent intention of wrecking the shoulder pads by slinging a heavy rucksack over his back. It is as absurd as trekking in the Himalayas with a briefcase (though probably not as stylishly eccentric).

Many men seem to believe that, once they’ve put all their effort into choosing the right suit, shirt, cufflinks, socks, shoes and watch, the matter of luggage is a mere afterthought. Gentlemen, it is no such thing. One’s personal portmanteau should be

selected, both upon purchase and for each day’s tasks, with as much care and attention as one’s suit of clothes. If you go to all that trouble with your clothing, why go and ruin it by accessorising it with the sort of thing a ten-year-old boy might take to school?

In days of yore, a man would expend as much time, effort and money on the purchase his two or three items of luggage as he would the rest of his outfit. He would have spent a decent amount of moolah on three key items. One large suitcase for foreign travel (leather, reinforced, compartments for cufflinks and secret documents); one overnight valise for weekend trips in the UK (leather or canvas, small enough to fit in the overhead racks of a railway carriage, large enough to contain evening dress, country tweeds and several changes of underwear); and one briefcase for work purposes.

The term ‘briefcase’ evolved from the use lawyers

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© Leigh Darnton

made of them to transport their briefs (the legal kind as opposed to the undergarment kind) to court. The item, usually made of leather, evolved from the 14th century satchel, originally called a ‘budget’, whose French name bougette evolved from the Latin word bulga meaning ‘leather bag’. The name ‘budget’ evolved into the financial term still in use today – and of course, in Britain, still presented once a year in a red despatch box by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

All of this means, in short, that one should carry around one’s business appurtenances in a case made of leather. There is a fashion for men, particularly those with large beards, tattoos and a sense of selfimportance, to sling their portmanteaux over their shoulders via a shoulder strap. This aids them to cycle furiously on a single-speed velocipede towards their important meetings with small-batch coffee roasters and producers of podcasts. There is nothing

wrong with a leather satchel with a shoulder strap, but generally the ones made in earlier decades only had a carrying handle, and this mode of conveyance is still not the cause of any great inconvenience. It is also far more elegant when arriving at a business meeting, for it precludes the awkward moment when one has to bow one’s head and shoulder in order to remove a bag strapped across one’s chest.

A leather briefcase or satchel with only a carrying handle can even be flung rather insouciantly on to the table, giving the others at the meeting the impression that they are dealing with a no-nonsense type who is ready to get straight down to business.

Do you think your satchel, briefcase or portmanteau cuts the sartorial mustard?

If so, feel free to send a photograph to chap@thechap.co.uk for publication n

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Sartorial

PRATT & PRASAD Gustav Temple bespeaks a two-piece suit from bespoke tailors Pratt & Prasad, and finds that having a suit made reveals a lot more about the man underneath it than his sartorial preferences

“The conversation during the measuring is a distraction from the awkwardness of a man placing his tape measure across one’s most private areas, namely the embonpoint. Further distraction comes when Haddon seems to have become a chiropractor, repeatedly prodding me in the lower back. Is this some modern variation on rock of eye?”

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s I meander along the fully gentrified upper regions of St John’s Hill, Clapham, it occurs to me that seeing a tailor is like a mixture of entering a clothing emporium and visiting a doctor. When I relay this to Haddon Pratt, the tailor I am visiting, he concurs, adding that the tailor is not going to cure your ailments, only disguise them.

Haddon Pratt, Founder and Head Cutter of Pratt & Prasad, welcomes me at the door of his two-floor apartment on Huguenot Terrace, a grand Georgian building gracing the main thoroughfare north from Clapham Junction. Is it odd going to someone’s home for a tailoring appointment? Not when their home has been turned into a sartorial showroom and fitting room, with tailor’s dummies,

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“Then Haddon produces his magic wand – a small cardboard cutout of a suit that, when placed over the fabric swatch, suddenly gives a much stronger impression of what it might look like as a garment. With a sudden sense of certainty, a 12oz black twill by Dugdale is selected. Haddon mentions one client who spent two three-hour sessions purely selecting his cloth”

piles of swatches and tape measures everywhere.

The initial stage of the consultation takes place seated on tweed and leather sofas and is initially more like a counselling session. “What do you want from life, sir?” could almost be one of the questions, though not actually asked.

What does follow from the mouth of the tailor is a series of searching questions that delve into the heart of the matter of what one wants from one’s suit. After some deliberation on the couch, Haddon elicited from his client: “I want a plain black suit that I can wear to weddings, funerals and business meetings, and I would like it to bear some resemblance to the vintage ensemble I am wearing today.”

After half an hour of leafing through dozens and dozens of swatches, the selection is narrowed down to three. Then Haddon produces his magic

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wand – a small cardboard cutout of a suit that, when placed over the fabric swatch, suddenly gives a much stronger impression of what it might look like as a garment. With a sudden sense of certainty, a 12oz black twill by Dugdale is selected. Haddon mentions one client who spent two three-hour sessions purely selecting his cloth. “For some clients, this is their first bespoke suit and they’ve saved up all their money for it, so they want to get it right.”

Thence to the lining. Another pile of swatches is summoned, ranging from silks adorned with skulls and farm animals to plain fabrics. Reader, I hope you will appreciate that I eschewed the former and selected a plain scarlet lining. A brief discussion ensues about how the client’s choice of lining reveals more of the true man beneath than the suit’s outer layer, bringing us back to the therapist’s couch.

And so to the measuring. Who doesn’t feel, while being measured for a suit, the weight of the years resulting in the figure under the tape measure? All those steak dinners, pints of ale,

bottles of fine wine and delicious (at the time) canapes, all those occasions when going for a jog or setting foot in a gymnasium were the last things on one’s mind; they all reel into the memory like a near-death moment. Too late now, my friend. At least the result of all this is not death, but the new life that a bespoke suit can bestow.

While Haddon flies his tape measure around my ruined body, I ask him about his own suit, a rather natty violet single-breasted two-piece with peaked lapels that almost reach the shoulder seam, reminiscent of Tommy Nutter.

“This is one of the first suits I made for myself after going solo. I always build in these huge ‘take flight lapels’. I was trained as a cutter by Terry Haste, who had been head cutter for Tommy Nutter when he worked alongside Edward Sexton.”

Haddon hails from Redditch in the Midlands, where at some point most of his family had worked in the John James factory known locally as Needle Industries (the same needles they make are still used

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The suit at baste stage during the first fitting

on Savile Row today). Having completed a fashion and tailoring diploma, Haddon started his career as an apprentice at Canary Wharf tailors English Tailoring, whom he harassed every day until they gave him a job. There he learned coat making, then moved to the Disguisery in central London to work as a trouser maker. Through The Disguisery, Haddon gained exposure to Savile Row, and that’s where he met Terry Haste, who offered him a job as an undercutter. This was more like a traditional apprenticeship, with the qualification at the end of it (when the cutter decides his disciple is ready) being the ability to set up on your own as a tailor.

Haddon waxes lyrical of his respect and fondness for Terry as his mentor, and they are still very good friends today.

The conversation during the measuring is a distraction from the awkwardness of a man placing his tape measure across one’s most private areas, namely the embonpoint. Further distraction comes when Haddon seems to have become a chiropractor, repeatedly prodding me in the lower back. Is this some modern variation on rock of eye? Turns out it’s Haddon’s way of finding out the true position of a man’s natural waistline: when the man nearly falls over while being prodded, he’s found it.

When it comes to style details, Haddon and I agree to refer to the jacket by its proper tailoring term: the coat. Lapel width merits a long discussion, my only stipulation being that mine should not be ready to take flight. Pockets and vents take us deeper into the minutae of tailoring. By this stage of the process, one has either placed one’s trust in the tailor or not. And I had, so took Haddon’s lead on the single-vent option with traditional straight, flapped pockets. I did however insist on a ticket pocket, which I genuinely use for rail tickets.

The question of inside pockets is always taxing.

How many of us have acquired a vintage jacket, only to find that our various gentlemen’s appurtenances simply don’t fit in a coat made for a man who didn’t possess a field telephone, a bulky wallet full of plastic cards or a miniature kettle from which to consume nicotine vapour? We agreed that the coat would include one pocket of the exact dimensions to holster my vaping device.

Armholes are another facet of vintage clothing that clashes with modern sensibilities, and indeed temperatures. The middle-aged western male of the 21st century can be defined by always being too hot

and always needing a lavatory. No amount of decent tailoring can fix the latter, but the armholes of the coat may be cut in such a way that there is plenty of room for the armpits to breathe, without sacrificing a clean armhole line. As Haddon explains, you can always go deeper but not shallower once the armholes have been cut, because naturally you can’t put fabric back on. During further discussion about the cut of the coat, we establish that I tend towards the drape cut of Anderson & Sheppard as opposed to the sharper lines of Huntsman. This Haddon chap really knows his Savile Row and such references are received with a nodding familiarity.

Trousers: flat-fronted, high-waisted, slant pockets, no turnups. There is of course a place for a pair of fishtail waisted pantaloons with button fly and turnups in a gentleman’s wardrobe, but my wardrobe is already full of those. Haddon tells me he is in fact currently making such a pair in a bold windowpane check, for a client in Switzerland whom he recently flew over to fit.

THE FIRST FITTING The baste stage is a kind of cloth sketch of the suit one is bespeaking. It bears only a passing resemblance to the finished article, but this means that most of it can be adjusted, bar the choice of fabric. This is the moment where your swatch selection reveals itself as a half-built garment, and you can even catch a glimpse of the lining inside the pockets. I can already tell that this is the suit I wanted. It has the right shade of black, and the right weight of cloth to give it a decent drape.

Haddon also adds that heavier fabrics require less maintenance. He mentions a dinner jacket commissioned in 8oz cloth for someone living in Bermuda. “Light cloths are beautiful, but they do need to be cared for,” he says rather sagely. “I only hope there’s a decent dry cleaner in Bermuda.”

The adjustments are made: a wider armhole here, a nip and tuck around the trouser there, sleeves lengthened to reveal precisely 3/4 inch of shirt cuff.

The large baste stitches all over the coat will be replaced by fine stitching; they are only there to hold the whole thing together as loosely as possible, giving plenty of room for changes. Once, one of Pratt & Prasad’s new clients took a shine to the huge stitches and asked if they could be left on the pockets.

Haddon and I both raise our eyebrows and sigh.

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from the Italian natural shoulder. English tailoring, as Haddon informs me, is much more structured.

The scarlet lining is superb, providing a discreet flash of Count Dracula when it falls open. Haddon proudly inserts my vaping device into its speciallly constructed holster and it fits like a glove, magically disappearing from view once the coat is buttoned, and having no effect on the drape.

We try it with and without waistcoat and the coat hangs perfectly either way. The suit overall has the effect of flattening down the silhouette, hiding all the sins of the flesh. As Haddon promised at the beginning of all this, he may not have cured my ailments, but he has done an excellent job of disguising them.

By way of contrast to my black suit, he shows me the half finished Edwardian ensemble he’s making for another client. A starkly cutaway coat with only one fastenable button in a bold Dashing Tweeds windowpane check of fabulous colours, with plus fours and a high-cut Edwardian waistcoat.

The contrast between this and my two-piece black suit couldn’t be greater, proving that Mr. Pratt can turn his expert hand to everything at, and in between, these two sartorial extremes. n

THE SECOND FITTING Two weeks after the first fitting, I ascend the stairs to the room containing the nearly finished suit with nerves of steel. It is now too late for any major alternations. The suit I am about to try on is the result of a dialogue – dare one say a meeting of minds? – between client and craftsman, who were complete strangers only four weeks ago. Is this, I wondered, how Stevie Wonder felt when he was en route to hear the first mix of Ebony and Ivory?

First the trousers. An anxious glance south to ensure there is the right amount of break (there is), although this is one detail that can still be adjusted at this stage. The hang is elegant and unfussy, with a cut that is both fitted, yet aeons away from the ‘slim-fit’ spray-On pantaloons favoured by many young bucks today. The coat still has baste stitching all over it, but has been more or less finished bar the fine stitching. The drape is excellent, immediately making the vintage coat it was modelled on look tired and ill-fitting by contrast.

All those snap decisions made at the initial consultation are now made flesh: the angle of the pockets, the slight lift on the shoulder, to differentiate

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Style Column

© Jonathan Daniel Pryce

GREY FOX COLUMN David Evans considers the future of Savile Row in the aftermath of the pandemic, and what bespoke tailors can do to keep the tradition of tailoring alive www.greyfoxblog.com

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t’s always good when winter is past and the days begin to lengthen throughout February and into spring. I live near one of London’s Royal Parks, where wild deer roam free and, from early February, skylarks shout their airy and joyful song above the joggers, dog walkers and humming traffic. That feeling of release, of warm pleasures to come, is echoed by our gradual liberation from the pandemic (hopefully it doesn’t all kick off again before this column is printed). Below I nibble at this theme

of moving things on, of looking ahead to the next step in the journey rather than back at the bog we’ve just struggled through.

The restrictions of covid, coupled with increasing concerns about the environment, are inspiring changes in the way we select and wear our clothes. I’ve touched on this in recent columns, so won’t repeat much here, but the lockdown preference for sloppy casual is being tempered by an almost relieved return to tailoring, albeit in a more relaxed style. Buying

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© Artefact Tailoring

“Some tailors feel they could make themselves more approachable by having more welcoming premises and being open about prices. Walking into a Savile Row atelier can be a daunting experience, although, from my experience, you will receive a warm welcome even if you buy a pair of socks”

used and vintage clothing is increasingly popular, and many of us take a close interest in the ethics and sustainability of the products we buy. We are tending to look for clothes that will last because they were made well.

For tailors in Savile Row and elsewhere, business has been quiet and they have struggled, although for many it is picking up now. The better-established survived covid by travelling abroad for business (when they were able do so), online fittings, or by focusing on military and other specialist work unaffected by the pandemic.

Some have widened their client base by selling women’s tailoring; others have been helped by their customers putting in multiple orders to make up for those lost during lockdown.

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Things were already hard for Savile Row before covid. Rents and business rates are high and some latitude from landlords during lockdown has only temporarily alleviated the problems. A walk down The Row now reveals popups, a coffee shop and stores selling products other than tailoring. The days of the street being populated almost entirely by bespoke tailors are over. If you want a genuinely bespoke Savile Row suit, act soon as things are changing.

I’m not knocking these developments; harsh commercial reality means that only the fittest survive. I’ve heard some comment that bespoke tailoring is now less costly and in some cases better quality outside the UK. I’ve met men who claim to find it cheaper to fly to Naples, say, to order a bespoke suit – and they may prefer the relaxed styles they find there to more structured English tailoring. Savile Row’s landlords have to take care not to let the heritage die by charging their tenants unaffordable rents, although ultimately they may decide that Savile Row is less important than maximising profits.

These are external factors. For the tailors themselves, some feel that they could make themselves more approachable by having more welcoming premises and being open about prices. Walking into a Savile Row atelier can be a daunting experience, although, from my experience, you will receive a warm welcome even if you buy a pair of socks. Tailors should also ensure they respond with agility to customers’ changing needs. Women tailors have arrived in and around The Row over the last few years, blowing away some of the cobwebs (I list some of these at the end of this column). A good, tailored garment looks as good on a woman as on a man – in fact better. The next step is somehow to encourage more of us to try the delights of bespoke (see page 67).

Looking more widely at menswear, we have recently seen Chester Barrie, Hardy Amies, Kilgour, Jaeger and others decline and fall. At time of writing, the future of Gieves & Hawkes is in doubt. The reasons for the demise of these brands are complex and it has to be recognised that tailoring generally is in the doldrums.

My impression has been that some of these brands have sought younger customers in their advertising. Ignoring the older man, a viable and financially stable sector of the market, makes no financial sense. Others who rely on the heritage

of great British brands, without delivering the quality and styles that made them great in the first place, have not done so well over the last few years, irrespective of the pandemic.

What I’d love to see is the best aspects of British style, its quality and history, its stories, myths, shapes and materials, being developed to keep it ahead rather than being devalued by a drive for a younger market, the dictates of fashion or even unadulterated profit. I’ve talked in a previous column (issue 108, Summer 2021) about how British menswear has influenced the style and shapes of men’s clothing in the West.

The UK still has much to say when it comes to fashion but, apart from some very creative but not widely commercially viable fashion designers, there seems to be little effort to find a sellable version of British style that will work in the postcovid world. Ralph Lauren took British styles and made them worldwide best sellers; where are the British brands that will do this? It demands creative marketing and I’m not sure this is always a British strength.

“Ignoring the older man, a viable and financially stable sector of the market, makes no financial sense.

Others who rely on the heritage of great British brands, without delivering the quality and styles that made them great in the first place, have not done so well over the last few years, irrespective of the pandemic” Ralph Lauren’s advertising over the last few decades glows with classics like herringbone tweed, Fair Isle and Shetland knitwear, formal tailoring, evening wear, pinstripes, brogues, Scottish tartans and English silks – products loved from the US to the Far East. Let’s grab back this essential Britishness and move it on, making it marketable and irresistible for both men and women. This can be done by taking back those aspects the UK has become famous

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© Jonathan Daniel Pryce

for: the tweeds, flannels, corduroy, leather wear, knitwear, hat making, English shoemaking and the shapes of its tailoring that became the basis for US and Italian styles. The products shouldn’t just be rehashed classics, but need to be fresh, contemporary and wearable. The word ‘wearable’ is key here – most of us won’t wear the excesses of creative high fashion, as we prefer safer styles. We look for clothes that don’t make us feel self-conscious. We want to be relaxed and smart, but the clothes must have enough edginess to enable us to develop looks that reflect our personalities, adventurous or otherwise. The relaxed British man (and woman) points the way forward. Let’s follow them.

Finally, I want shamelessly to promote a new weekly feature on my blog and Instagram.

My Masters of Style series looks at men and women who have caught my eye because of their remarkable abilities to select and wear clothes well. I’ve found people from all over the world to take part and I hope that they will inspire us to find our own style. I’m a great believer in the democratisation of style. Each of us is on his or her own style journey. We can decide to go down the fashion road, a prisoner of the

fashion brands that prefer to tell us what to wear each season for their own commercial ends, or we can search out our own style. To do this we are inspired by so much that we see around us, including those whose personal style we admire and can take elements of. That is what I aim to provide in Masters of Style. Please follow this on Grey Fox Blog and on Instagram @greyfoxblog.

If you’d like to be featured, or know someone who’d be suitable, do get in touch with me.

Some women tailors in London: (Note this isn’t a comprehensive list) Caroline Andrew: carolineandrew.co.uk The Deck: thedecklondon.com Gormley & Gamble: gormleyandgamble.com Susannah Hall: susannahhall.com Alexandra Wood: alexandrawoodbespoke.co.uk Lawton: lawtonltd.co.uk Kathryn Sargent: kathrynsargent.com Banshee: bansheeofsavilerow.com Katherine Maylin: katherinemaylin.com n

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CONTEMPORARY TAILORING

hunterki ngs ley.com

CHAP LIFE 82

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Interview:

What Katie Did

Food & Drink

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Biography: Henry Morton Stanley

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Motoring

Interview

WHAT KATIE HAS DONE Gustav Temple meets Katie Thomas, founder and doyenne of vintage-style lingerie brand What Katie Did, champion of the vintage scene and the pioneer for a retrospective revolution in ladies undergarments www.whatkatiedid.com

“From a psychological point of view, tight fitting clothing, in particular latex, corsets and shapewear, can be calming and comforting. While latex isn’t practical as everyday wear, shapewear certainly makes a more durable alternative. I guess you could say that What Katie Did bridges the gap between fetishwear and Spanx”

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ow did it all start for What Katie Did? In the mid 1990s, I started collecting pieces of vintage lingerie, mostly from Portobello Road Market. While it was still common to find affordable 1950s fashion in the 1990s, finding the right lingerie or seamed stockings was a lot harder – and that’s without the rather icky factor of wearing a dead old lady’s lingerie! This led to me starting up a tiny website selling 1950s style seamed stockings and reproduction lingerie. When I started What Katie Did in 1999 we used to sell reproduction vintage lingerie from other brands, and after a few years went into designing and manufacturing our own pieces.

What was the initial response from the public when you launched your 50s-style lingerie?

To begin with, I just sold stockings from a shop in Camden market and the response was fine, as Camden was and is an alternative market. It wasnt until we started selling lingerie and doing shows that we had more of a response: a very split response. People either loved what we were doing, or would point and laugh at the ‘granny knickers’ and ‘Madonna bras’.

Your background in the fetish scene is well known. Do you see your brand as a kind of bridge between an extreme club scene and

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vintage scene become smaller, our product offering is growing so that should fill any gaps.

more mainstream shopping habits?

It is really interesting you should bring this up, as in the mid 1990s the fetish club scene was all about latex (or rubber as we used to call it), which, if you haven’t worn it, really is the most flattering fabric to wear. It smooths and cinches, and it comes as little surprise that back in the 1950s, mainstream lingerie brands did make everyday girdles in latex as well as elasticated fabrics.

From a psychological point of view, tight fitting clothing, in particular latex, corsets and shapewear, can be calming and comforting, as it gives the wearer a permanent hug (just look at the trend for weighted blankets). While latex isn’t practical as everyday wear, shapewear certainly makes a more durable alternative. I guess you could say that What Katie Did bridges the gap between fetishwear and Spanx!

Is the British fascination with vintage clothing actually a form of nostalgia, in the absence of any strong new fashion trends or icons to lead them?

This is another great question, as the lack of new trends has really made fashion rather boring. It’s really interesting to look at alternative fashion and how it’s evolved. It’s not just about nostalgia for the 1940s or 1950s, but also the 1970s; punk fashion is in vogue again, with performers such as Youngblud and Machine Gun Kelly championing looks of the punk era. Since the mid-80s, there haven’t been any strong fashion trends for teenagers to be inspired by, which is why perhaps they continue to look to the past.

“Spanx and Skims by Kim Kardashian pay homage to the tight fitting clothing of Atomage, showing off the body while making it inaccessible. Meanwhile latex has also become more mainstream, being worn by performers such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, again channelling the ‘look but don’t touch’ inaccessability of Atomage”

Are we ever going to get another Marilyn Monroe?

I’m sorry to say we’re unlikely to ever have another Marilyn, but in a way that’s good, as she had a pretty hard life. One of the things that was alluring about Marilyn is that we don’t know everything about her. Today we know every little thing about a celebrity’s life, which takes away the mystique.

Are your corsets actually made to change the size of the wearer’s waist?

The short answer is that if you were to wear a corset for 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, then yes, over time it would change your waistline. If you then stopped wearing the corset, your waist would slowly return to how it was before.

If you were to wear a corset for 8 hours a day, after a few months you might notice that your rib cage tapered a little due to being constantly compressed. This is the main change that happens when you wear a corset. To put it bluntly, the waistline section you’re looking to compress with a corset is a mix of fat, organs and muscle, so when you take your corset off, the insides to back to the way they were before (if you do yoga you’ll know what I’m talking about here!) The more you wear a corset, the more tightly and comfortably you’ll be able to lace, and this is the big difference to occasional and daily wear.

Your brand’s association with the vintage scene is very strong. Do you think the vintage craze shows any signs of coming to an end, having been around since the 1980s?

I remember somebody asking me what I’d do when the vintage craze ends, but that was about 15 years ago and since then it’s grown immensely. There are other more commercial vintage reproduction brands that have moved into the 1960s and 1970s, but by remaining in the 1950s (or the Dior years: 1947-57, as I like to call them) it keeps us very special. While we do make a few pieces that aren’t 100% vintage inspired, they always have a little detail that is period correct. In the last couple of years we’ve expanded into clothing, so should the

Is more extreme fetish clothing no longer such an oddity? Are people less shocked by people in latex masks etc?

Extreme fetish clothing is still made to shock: just

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1940s Luna Bra and Corset

Harlow Nouveau Suspender Belt

look at the black hood designed by Balenciaga and worn by Kanye West. A lot of people’s perception is dependent on how the garments are worn and presented. Kanye or Kim wearing a black hood on an ordinary street is far more shocking than a black hood being worn in a fetish club.

Did you benefit from the revival of burlesque culture in the early 21st century?

The popularity of burlesque certainly did us no harm in the early 2000s. I think there was a time when every burlesque performer owned a pair of our frilly knickers! At that point we were still building up our collection of good quality basics, with a view that performers could accessorise and customize to make our pieces unique to them.

There were quite a few tiny indie brands making really beautiful corsets and lingerie with lots of frills and flounces that have disappeared over the years, so I think we probably did the right thing in focusing on fit and classic 1950s designs.

What is the link, if any, between what WKD are doing today and fetish wear?

While fetishwear evolves and goes in and out of fashion, I’m hoping that people will continue to look to the past for inspiration, as they have been doing for over a century now. Mainstream designers continue to be inspired by 1950s fetishwear: Schiaparelli have just included several Bullet Bra looks in their Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2022.

The earliest 19th century fetish photography featured corsets and heavily focused on ‘conceal and reveal’. This was followed in the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Yves Richard and Diana Slip, and then through to the 1940s and 1950s

by Irving Claw, who was famous for his lingerie bondage pictures of models including Bettie Page.

In the 1960s, as nudity and lingerie became less shocking, fetish wear became more covered-up, with John Sutcliffe of Atomage working with full coverage latex and leather bodysuits. In the 1970s the fetish look went mainstream with punk, which combined the hard looks of Atomage with 1950s corsets, bullet bras and fishnets while Madonna (bless her!) ensured that fetish fashion remained mainstream throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Today corsets, or corset inspired fashion at least, continue to hit the headlines, while Spanx and Skims by Kim Kardashian pay homage to the tight fitting clothing of Atomage, showing off the body while making it inaccessible. Meanwhile latex has also become more mainstream, being worn by performers such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, again channelling the ‘look but don’t touch’ inaccessability of Atomage.

“The majority of our customers buy it to wear regularly and it’s designed to be worn frequently (as in not fall apart after a few wears!) We also have customers who will buy a set for a special occasion or vintage event such as The Goodwood Revival, but it’s certainly not seen as a novelty” How do you think the public’s perception of burlesque has changed, in light of the #metoo movement?

I don’t work in burlesque so don’t have any experience of the public perception. Due to my work, I do have a lot of friends in the industry and since #metoo there has been a lot going on behind the scenes, and performers have been more open talking about their experiences, which in turn is helping the scene become stronger from a performers’ point of view.

Has your customer base changed since the early 2000s?

We’ve always had a wide customer base from vintage fashionistas, fans of alternative fashion, fetishists and lovers of luxury lingerie, so nothing very much has changed from a retail perspective.

Over the last few years we have done a lot more film and costume work, due to streaming channels like Netflix and Amazon Prime making much more period dramas, so the media can now be classed as a customer base in itself.

Where do you manufacture?

Most of our lingerie and all of our clothing is manufactured in India, in a factory we’ve been working with since 2002. I did look at manufacturing in the UK, but none of the factories were interested in making the tiny quantities I wanted and now most of the factories have sadly closed down. We work with a factory in Nottingham, which makes our Liz lingerie and

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Morticia Black Corset

Trixie girdles. Our Glamour Seamed Stockings are made in Derbyshire, while our Glamour Seamed Stockings are made in Italy.

the cost to compensate. I think they expected us to say no and not to bother making them. They were rather alarmed when we said, ‘no problem’!

Sadly it didn’t work out and the factory has now closed for good. The machinists were the only really valuable part of the business. Machinery can be replaced (albeit at a huge cost) but once the machinists dispersed, it would be impossible to bring them back together again. In addition, the workforce was ageing: we found that while grandmothers and mothers worked together (and it is mainly women in the UK lingerie factories) the daughters weren’t going into manufacturing.

I understand you attempted to buy a UK factory but it didn’t prove viable?

It’s really interesting that UK lingerie factories were concentrating on the lowest end of the market, when surely the opposite should be the case? We made satin and velvet pyjamas in the UK a few years ago, and there were a few complaints from the factory workers, as they found the velvet hard to sew and said they’d have to add an extra £2 per garment to

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Waspie Corset Luna Extreme

Katie in Jayne 1950s short-sleeve jumper

Despite the skill needed in the UK, it’s a minimum wage job, and many were still working as much for the social camaraderie as for the money.

year out. While the general styles remain the same – Bullet Bras, Waist Cinchers, Girdles etc – designs are often reworked to improve fit or ease of wear.

For example, our Glamour Waist Cincher originally had a side hook and eye fastening, and we noticed people were having problems figuring out where it should be positioned, so we moved it to the front.

Have you had your concept copied by any of the mainstream underwear brands (without naming any names)?

Oh yes! People think What Katie Did is so much bigger than it actually is. We’ve had a few big (and little) brands doing very close copies, presumably thinking they’ll clean up, but it’s actually still a very niche market.

Do you think customers buy your underwear as a novelty, or do they wear it every day for comfort rather than display?

Just like all the other fashion featured in The Chap, it’s designed to be worn. The majority of our customers buy it to wear regularly and it’s designed to be worn frequently (as in not fall apart after a few wears!) We also have customers who will buy a set for a special occasion or vintage event such as The Goodwood Revival, but it’s certainly not seen as a novelty. n

Have you had to adapt or change your product line since first launching, or is the appetite for your wares pretty consistent?

Our best selling pieces make up our Continuity Classic range, which remains in production year in,

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Biography

Henry Morton Stanley Chris Sullivan on the 19th century explorer who was ordered to go and find Dr. Livingstone in Africa and ended up serving a much bloodier cause for King Leopold of Belgium

“This was an era when explorers and adventurers such as Richard Burton and James Speke were akin to 20th century pop stars – their exploits known all over the globe – while Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back skeletons and skins of gorillas and told of how these hairy beasts abducted women and subjected them to ‘purposes too vile to mention’”

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registered as John Rowland, Bastard. He was the first of five illegitimate children born to housemaid Betsy Parry and either renowned drunkard John Rowland or a lawyer named John Vaughn. His mother having left in disgrace, the boy, now aged six, was sequestered in St Asaph’s Union Workhouse, where he was sexually abused by both teachers and older inmates, resulting in a fear of physical contact for the rest of his life. Aged 15 when he left the confine, in 1859 he chanced upon a stranger who took him to Missouri, where the boy changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley. From then on, he became a world-class obfuscator who simply created his past life and avoided facts like the Black Death. He claimed for many years that he was American, but

octor Livingstone, I presume” is a phrase that has echoed through the corridors of history for well over a century. But if truth be told, the only person who reported on this legendary epithet is the man himself who is said to have uttered the words – Henry Morton Stanley.

An inestimable reprobate, his story is the stuff of fiction, his actions severely questionable while his rendering of his exploits has been scrutinised ever since he first put quill to vellum. Nevertheless, like a character from some bygone Victorian melodrama, the actual life of Henry Stanley was far stranger than fiction.

Stanley was born on 28th January 1841 in the town of Denbigh in North Wales; his name

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The closest Henry ever got to a smile

I presume it’s time to utter your killer line, Mr. Stanley?

“King Leopold offered to pay Stanley 50,000 francs a year ($500,000 in today’s money) to finance an expedition to garner as much ivory as was humanly possible, aided by massive firepower. In the pre-plastic age, ivory was hugely sought after and fashioned into everything from crucifixes to billiard balls and false teeth”

whereupon he enlisted in the Union army, only to fall foul of dysentery and be discharged. He joined the Confederate Navy and promptly deserted.

In 1865 he started working as a journalist for a local St. Louis newspaper, travelled to Turkey as a correspondent and his career as a scribe took off.

On his return to the US, he began writing sensational accounts of the war against the indigenous American Indians. His pugnacious reports incited hatred among the white readers, which sold newspapers and soon he was made foreign correspondent for the New York Herald.

Now based in London, Stanley was able to savour the Scramble For Africa that his writings in part had precipitated.

This was an era when explorers and adventurers such as Richard Burton and James Speke were akin to 20th century pop stars – their exploits known all over the globe – while Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back skeletons and skins of gorillas, and told of how these hairy beasts abducted women and subjected them to ‘purposes too vile to mention.’

The British saw themselves as bringing Christianity to the “savage natives” of Africa and,

lapsed into a Welsh accent when drunk. He said he ran away in a daring midnight escape over the walls of St. Asaph, but was actually taken to live with his granddad.

Having joined the Confederate cause, in 1862 Stanley fought in the battle of Shiloh, was captured and imprisoned in a typhoid-ridden POW camp,

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Dr. David Livingstone

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British journalist Edmund Morel, who exposed the horrors meted out by Stanley in the Congo on behalf of King Leopold

even though slavery had only ended in 1838 in the UK and British ships had dominated the slave trade, saw themselves as the nation that had ended slavery. This incentive to storm into the bush as the great saviour gave Stanley formidable impetus. As he wrote in his memoir, “Like a gladiator in the arena… any flinching, any cowardice and he is lost.”

Stanley ventured into the interior of the continent in search of lost hero, renowned physician, explorer and prospector David Livingstone. For the last three decades, Livingstone had denounced slavery, searched for the source of the Nile, had been the first white man to cross the African continent from coast to coast and, more importantly, had preached the gospel. He had not been seen in four years, having gone in search of slave traders in 1866.

In 1869, Stanley was, according to his memoir, summoned by his newspaper boss James Gordon Bennet to the Grand Hotel Paris and ordered to go in search of Livingstone. “Go and find him wherever you may hear where he is…

FIND LIVINGTONE!” Stanley must have missed the urgency of the order, for he didn’t leave until a year later.

Off he jolly well went to Africa, dressed in pith helmet and jodhpurs, funded by the newspaper to find Livingstone. He first went to the slave island Zanzibar and arrived in West Africa in the Spring

of 1871, with a dog named Omar and 190 cooks, porters, guards and guides, in what was the biggest African expedition to date.

He really did find Livingstone and, according to Stanley, they became great chums. Stanley was adored by the French and feted by American generals but the British, having heard of his true past, shunned him, while his fiancé married an architect instead. By 1877 he was back in Africa, crossing the continent from West to East. Always both cognisant and wary of those who might outshine him, out of the 1200 men who applied to join the expedition, he chose three entirely unsuitable cohorts who had never left the British Isles. A hotel clerk named Fed Barker and the Pockock brothers, two Cornish fishermen, one of whom could play the bugle – so all wasn’t quite lost.

A mini army comprising 365 souls, they carried 16,000 pounds of guns, ammunition and explosives and left a bloody trail of hundreds of dead Africans, armed only with spears and bows and arrows in their wake. “We have destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score of villages. One beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers, so I opened on them with the Winchester repeating rifle.

Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” Stanley, with the skin of a rhino, reported such victories in both the New York Herald and the

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Telegraph, who had funded his enterprise. Others were more condemning. The British Anti-Slavery Society attacked Stanley with venom, and he was also condemmed by Sir Richard Burton for his treatment of the African people.

In his memoir Through The Dark Continent Stanley relished his adventures and, even though it reads like a horror story for anyone this side of the Mediterranean, he attracted international fame. But worse was yet to come.

In 1873, Stanley sat down with King Leopold of Belgium (one of the most despicable murderers in history, right up there with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot). Having read of Stanley’s exploits, King Leopold had designs to expand his personal fortune throughout the Congo. They came to an agreement that the King would pay Stanley 50,000 francs a year ($500,000 in today’s money) to finance an expedition to garner as much ivory as was humanly possible, aided by massive firepower. In the preplastic age, ivory was hugely sought after and fashioned into everything from crucifixes to billiard balls and false teeth.

“It is indispensable,” instructed Leopold, “that you should purchase for the Comité d’Études (ie Leopold himself) as much land as you can obtain.”

Stanley was Leopold’s man for five years in the Congo, during which time Leopold cut a bloody swathe through the land, massacring some 10 million Africans while maiming millions more.

Leopold masked his vicious empirical endeavours under the guise of bringing civilisation to the Congo. In 1885 he promised European leaders that the he was duty bound to proceed with his philanthropic and humanitarian mission that would improve the lives of these entirely subjugated Africans. He was granted 770,000 square miles to create what he named the Congo Free State, in fact a private colony run along bloodthirsty lines to cultivate and trade minerals, rubber and ivory.

Stanley ventured forth for Leopold and, under a compassionate guise to rescue Emin Pasha (left), the governor of Equatoria, set off in 1888 looking for new territories for the Belgian King. However, his reputation was soon to be tarnished, after one his fellow ‘saviours’, Army Major Edmund Musgrave, was killed by a porter after almost whipping a man to death. Others witnessed many such brutalities, including British journalist Edmund Morel, who detected a fortune in rubber frequently returning from the Congo, while in return only guns, ordnance explosives, iron manacles and man traps were sent back.

The value of the goods coming from the Congo Free State was five times that of the goods coming from Europe, so Morel correctly deduced that this wealth had been garnered through slavery, forced labour and murder, and campaigned relentlessly to expose the abuses meted out by King Leopold.

By 1908, the tyrant’s rule was deemed so brutal and genocidal that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, denounced it and the Belgian parliament forced Leopold to relinquish control of his personal kingdom, AKA The Congo.

In 1908 Belgium took over the colony, but it was not until 1960 that, after a long fight for independence, the Republic of the Congo was founded. When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing. The protests against Leopold and his ugly history in Congo still rage today. In 2019, the cities of Kortrijk and Dendermonde in Belgium renamed their Leopold II streets, with Kortrijk council describing the king as a “mass murderer”.

The atrocities meted by Leopold in The Congo are extremely pertinent, as it was Stanley who really hastened the Scramble For Africa and its overthrow by a litany of European powers. What started as a philanthropic quest to find Livingstone had ignited decades of rape, murder, torture and annihilation in Africa.

The publishing of Stanley’s exploits made him a world-famous writer, even though one tract, The Congo and The Founding of its Free State (1885) was a stack of lies, edited by none other than Leopold himself, which portrayed Stanley and the King as benevolence incarnate. Subsequently, in 1890, even though Stanley had been charged by the British Consul of Zanzibar Dr John Kirk with “excessive violence, wanton destruction, the selling of labourers into slavery, the sexual exploitation of native women and the plundering of villages for ivory and canoes,” he became Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth North in 1895 and was knighted in 1899. He died in 1904 and is still regarded by many as a hero.

As Reverend J.P. Farler wrote in 1877, after interviewing Stanley’s black porters, “Stanley’s followers give dreadful accounts to their friends of the killing of inoffensive natives, stealing their ivory and goods, selling their captives, and so on. I do think a commission ought to inquire into these charges, because if they are true, it will do untold harm to the great cause of emancipating Africa. I cannot understand all the killing that Stanley has found necessary.” n

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Stewart Atkins photograpahy www.maitresseclothing.com @maitresseclothing

FOOD & DRINK 102

Absinthe Cocktails

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Cooking for Chaps

Drink

ABSINTHE COCKTAILS Gustav Temple advises cocktail-loving readers how to press into service that dusty old bottle of absinthe in the drinks cabinet

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ost of our readers undoubtedly went through their absinthe phase many years ago, and a dusty bottle of the stuff languishes on the bottom shelf of the cocktail cabinet. Unless you are already a huge fan of Ricard, Pastis or Pernod, the milky, liquorice-tinged aperitif with the added ingredient of wormwood soon pales beside far more worthy pre-prandial concoctions such as a large G&T or a Moscow Mule (vodka, lime juice, ginger beer).

Not to mention a Dry Martini with five parts gin and a bottle of vermouth through which a single sunbeam from the direction of France has passed,

“The myths that swirled around absinthe when it first came back on the market in the late 1990s were mostly successful marketing intrigues. Absinthe was said to cause hallucinations, make you insane and turn you into some sort of drunken mystic”

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Cafe Table With Absinthe by Vincent Van Gogh

The Absinthe Drinker by Pablo Picasso

“Recent scientific studies by one of the world’s leading absinthe experts, Ted A. Breaux, “have demonstrated beyond doubt that pre-ban absinthes contained no hallucinogens, opiates or other psychoactive substances. The most powerful ‘drug’ in absinthe is and has always been a high volume of neatly disguised, seductively perfumed alcohol”

or Roger Moore’s technique of freezing a Martini glass, swirling some Noilly Prat and then emptying it, before filling the glass with gin.

The myths that swirled around absinthe when it first came back on the shelves in the late 1990s were mostly successful marketing intrigues.

Absinthe was said to cause hallucinations, make you insane and turn you into some sort of drunken mystic. This myth was helped on its way by all the paintings from the Belle Epoque period, fetishising absinthe bottles, glasses and drinkers as if they were tripping the light fantastic. Having been given the nickname of ‘La Fee Vert’ (The Green Faerie) in the late 19th century also boosted the drink’s otherworldly reputation.

The truth is that Absinthe only gives you hallucinations in the same way that drinking a whole bottle of any 70% ABV spirit would.

Absinthe does not cause madness, unless you were

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a First World War French trooper stuck in the trenches in 1915, with plenty of other insanity factors. It was indeed banned in France in the early 20th century, but mainly in response to strenuous efforts by the Temperance Movement. It was also illegal in the US from 1912 to 2007, but was never banned in the United Kingdom. Recent scientific studies by one of the world’s leading absinthe experts, Ted A. Breaux, “have demonstrated beyond doubt that pre-ban absinthes contained no hallucinogens, opiates or other psychoactive substances. The most powerful ‘drug’ in absinthe is and has always been a high volume of neatly disguised, seductively perfumed alcohol.”

Absinthe takes its name from the herb that gives the drink its flavor, Artemisia absinthium, aka grande wormwood. Wormwood is one of the bitterest herbs on the planet, so it is no surprise that absinthe is such an acquired taste. However, as a cocktail ingredient absinthe is extremely useful, and forms the basis of several classic cocktails, most of which only use absinthe to coat the glass before adding the more palatable ingredients.

The Corpse Reviver No. 2 hails from preProhibition days, with the claimed purpose of rousing the drinker from the dead. It first appeared in print in the 1930 edition of the Savoy Cocktail Book, author Harry Craddock, head barman at the Savoy Hotel, London. Harry also invented the Corpse Reviver No. 1: “To be taken before 11 am, or whenever steam and energy are needed.” The Corpse Reviver No. 2 features gin, Lillet blanc (a kind of French vermouth), orange liqueur and fresh lemon juice, served in a glass that has been rinsed with absinthe. It is a refreshing and invigorating cocktail at any hour of the day, but take heed of Harry Craddock’s counsel: “Four of these taken in swift succession will un-revive the corpse again.”

A more contemporary absinthe cocktail is the Last Resort, created by New York bartender Dushan Zari. It develops the flavours of a Brandy Sour, changing the base spirit to Massenez Poire Williams, a pear brandy, and rinsing the glass beforehand with absinthe.

Who could have invented a cocktail that uses absinthe and champagne other than Ernest Hemingway (who also gave one of his book titles to another absinthe cocktail, The Sun Also Rises)?

Death In The Afternoon simply tops up a shot of absinthe with champagne, creating an aperitif that may require the assistance of a corpse reviver no.2 if taken in excessive quantities.

ABSINTHE COCKTAIL RECIPES A selection of cocktails using absinthe as their base, at least one of which can be made from the existing ingredients of a half-decent cocktail cabinet

CORPSE REVIVER NO.2: • • • •

•

Absinthe, to rinse 3/4 oz London dry gin 3/4 oz Lillet Blanc 3 /4 oz Triple Sec or Cointreau 3 /4 oz Freshly squeezed lemon juice

Rinse the inside of a chilled coupe or cocktail glass with absinthe, discard the excess and set the glass aside. Shake the gin, Lillet Blanc, orange liqueur and lemon juice in a shaker with ice and strain into the prepared glass.

LAST RESORT: •

1/4 oz absinthe oz Massenez Poire Williams 3 /4 oz lime juice, freshly squeezed 3/4 oz rich simple syrup 1 egg white arnish: fresh grated G nutmeg, 3 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

• 2

•

• • •

Coat the inside of a chilled coupe glass with absinthe and discard the excess. Put the pear brandy, lime juice, simple syrup and egg white into a shaker and vigorously dry-shake (with no ice) to emulsify the egg whites. Fill the shaker with ice and shake until well chilled. Strain into the absinthe-coated glass.

Garnish with grated nugmeg and three drops of Peychaud’s Bitters.

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Old Absinthe House in New Orleans, 1955

The Sazerac is the absinthe cocktail that has continued to grace most menus in decent cocktail bars, some of which serve it with a shot of absinthe on the side (a ridiculous practice, naturally).

Bartenders will argue into the early hours over whether a Sazerac should be made with cognac, bourbon or rye whiskey – some even averring that all three should be present – but the rye version offers the spiciest of flavours. The most important ingredient is the Peychaud’s Bitters. Those who already have Angostura Bitters and baulk at the notion of purchasing a second type of bitters are not those who wish to be taken seriously.

When Creole apothecary Antoine Amédée Peychaud created his bitters in 1830, his intention was not to widen the bitters market or anything as vulgar as that. He simply wished to create

bitters based on anise and gentian with a floral, minty aroma, to be used as a medicinal tonic. As a native of New Orleans, where he had fled as a refugee from the island of San Domingo after a slave rebellion, Peychaud would have enjoyed the cocktails popular in Louisiana at the time, mostly brandy-based.

Meanwhile, another local entrepeneur named Sewell T. Taylor became the local agent for French cognac brand Sazerac-du-Forge-et-Fils. Around 1855, the Sazerac was first created, using Taylor’s brandy and Peychaud’s bitters.

Thomas H. Handy bought up both the bar and the bitters recipe when they fell on hard times, renaming the bar as the Sazerac Coffee House.

But when the Phylloxera bug wiped out nearly all of France’s cognac production, the house cocktail

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DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON: • • •

1/3 oz absinthe 1/6 oz cane sugar syrup 4 oz champagne

Pour the first two ingredients into a champagne flute and stir. Top up with champagne.

Garnish with a rose petal or lemon twist.

SAZERAC: • • •

•

•

•

1/3 oz absinthe 2/3 oz cognac 2 /3 oz bourbon/ rye whiskey 1 /3 oz pure cane sugar syrup 3 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters 1 dash Angostura Bitters

Pour the absinthe into a tumbler, top with water and leave to stand. Shake all the other ingredients over ice in a shaker, empty the tumbler of absinthe and water, and strain the contents of the shaker into the tumbler.

The 1807 Absinthe House, still going strong

became almost impossible to produce. Handy panicked and switched rye whiskey for the cognac, and the definitive version of the Sazerac was born.

After lobbying in Louisiana by the New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society (surely a song by the Kinks in there?), the Sazerac was finally declared the official cocktail of New Orleans in 2007.

From the Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book of 1931 comes Duchess (not to be confused with a gin-based cocktail called The Duchess), a drink that bears many similarities to a Manhattan, being made with equal parts dry and sweet vermouth, but absinthe instead of bourbon. This is the cocktail among those suggested here with the largest absinthe content, and is therefore recommended for those with their souls firmly rooted in fin-de-siecle Paris. n

DUCHESS: 1 1/2 oz Sweet Vermouth 1/2 oz Extra Dry Vermouth • 1/2 oz absinthe • 1/2 oz chilled water • 1 dash Angostura bitters •

• 1

Stir all ingredients over ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass.

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Cooking

COOKING FOR CHAPS Nicole Drysdale marks the changing of the seasons with succulent slowcooked lamb and pilaf rice, followed by chocolate and cherry hot cross buns Share your results with @nicolethechap

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he feeling of a change coming is lovely, and a spring menu helps to force a sense of change. Stepping away from starchy root vegetables and warming stews, I’m slowly but eagerly craving more zing and a lightness in my food. These recipes are perfect for the centre of a spring table, without being too traditional. I’ve chosen Middle Eastern flavours, which is the perfect marriage for lamb and pomegranate seeds. The lamb is cooked slowly so that it falls off the bone when shredded.

Any leftovers could be served cold in a wrap or flatbread with some salad and yoghurt/tahini dressing. The pomegranate molasses is sweet and sticky and the yoghurt and tahini dressing balances the spice of the harissa on the carrots. Long, thin, sweet carrots work best, while purple carrots (if in season) would also look wonderful.

One could serve plain rice but the pilaf, although very plain looking, is so delicious and moist and it also works well with many other dishes. If you were entertaining vegetarians, you could add roast cauliflower and some roast leeks to the table, cooked in similar spices. The blackened lemons aren’t there purely for decoration. Simply cut in half and dry fry until the juices start to run out and they are nicely charred. Squeeze over the lamb and rice for extra flavour and zing.

Apart from the proving time with the hot cross buns, these really are quick and easy to make, with the results being so luxurious. Best eaten warm from the oven or toasted the next day, always with a lashing of melted butter. What I love about hot cross buns is their ability to be so welcoming to so many different flavours.

Obviously there is the traditional recipe, but I’ve gone for cherry and chocolate in this variant – although I wouldn’t recommend using glacé cherries. The sour cherries are more similar to the traditional dried fruit normally used. Many other dried fruits such as figs or apricot would also work well. Orange and chocolate is another fine pairing.

The cherries could be swapped for juicy raisins, more orange zest and a couple of drops of orange extract. Chocolate powder could be added for an extra level of chocolate hit, and you could even add some orange zest to the butter. Fresh fruit can be used in a hot cross bun as well as dried. I love the combination of pear and white chocolate chip. I’ve used a honey glaze with the cherry and chocolate, but alternatives include apricot jam, marmalade or a mixture of honey and a light jam. I always forget about making hot cross buns until I see them at the end of the aisle in the supermarket, but in actual fact they are stocked all year round so there is no reason why we can’t make them when we fancy, with our flavour combinations reflecting the seasons.

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Slow Roasted Lamb in Paprika and Pomegranate Molasses Serves 8 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cooking Time: 4.5 Hours

Ingredients 1.5kg Lamb shoulder 1 tsp ground coriander 1 tsp ground cumin 2 tsp smoked paprika 1 tbsp Olive oil 3 tbsp Pomegranate molasses 2 Cloves of garlic – sliced 500ml Vegetable stock 1/2 bunch fresh coriander 100g Pomegranate seeds Salt & Pepper Method 1. Remove the lamb from the fridge 1 hour before cooking.

2. Pre-heat oven to 220.

3. Mix the spices, oil, garlic and pomegranate molasses together in a bowl.

4. Place the lamb in a large roasting tin and rub the mixture all over to coat.

5. Pour the stock around the sides of the lamb and cook in the pre-heated oven for 45 minutes.

6. Reduce the heat to 180 and tightly cover the lamb with tinfoil. Place back in the oven for a further 3½–4 hours, or until the lamb comes away from the bone easily with a fork.

7. Once cooked, remove the lamb from the roasting tray and shred. Return the lamb to the tray and mix around to coat in the cooking juices. If you want crispier lamb, pop it back in the oven (uncovered) for 10–15 more minutes.

8. Serve the shredded lamb on a large dish and sprinkle with the chopped coriander and pomegranate seeds.

Pilaf (Turkish Rice) Serves 6-8 Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients 500g Basmati rice 75g Orzo (pasta) 2 tbsp Butter 4 Cups stock (chicken or vegetable) Salt Sprinkle of coriander (optional)

Method 1. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over a low heat.

Add the orzo to the pan and cook until lightly golden.

This should only take a couple of minutes.

2. Add the rice and stir to combine and coat the rice in the butter for around 3 minutes. Season.

3. Add the stock and turn up the heat to bring to a boil.

Once boiled, reduce the heat to medium and place a lid loosely on top. Allow to simmer for 10 minutes then place the lid fully on the pan and remove from the heat.

4. After 5 minutes, fluff up the rice with a fork. Serve, adding a sprinkle of chopped coriander if desired.

Harrisa roasted carrots Serves 8 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cooking Time: 25 minutes

Ingredients 600g Carrots 500g Tub natural yoghurt 3 tbsp Tahini paste Juice of 1 lemon 2 tbsp Olive Oil 2 tbsp Harrisa paste 1 tsp Cumin seeds Salt and pepper Sprinkle of sesame seeds Method 1. Pre-heat the oven to 180.

2. Peel the carrots. If long and thin leave whole, but cut larger ones in half lengthways.

3. Mix together the oil, harissa, cumin and seasoning in a large bowl.

4. Add the carrots to the bowl and toss together until coated.

5. Place the carrots on a large roasting tray and cook in the pre-heated oven for 25 minutes, turning half way.

6. While the carrots are cooking, mix together the yoghurt, tahini, lemon juice and seasoning in a large bowl.

7. Spread the yoghurt dressing out on a serving plate and place the roasted carrots on top. Drizzle the cooking juices on the top and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Hot Cross Buns with Dark Chocolate and Sour Cherries Makes 12 Prep Time: 15-20 minutes Cooking Time: 25 minutes, plus proving

Ingredients 450g Strong white flour 250ml Milk 50g Unsalted butter 1 Large egg – lightly whisked Pinch of salt 1 tsp ground cinnamon 2 x 7g Sachets yeast 150g Dark choc chips 120g Sour cherries 100g Caster sugar Zest of 1/2 large orange 50g Plain flour plus small amount of water Runny honey to glaze

Method 1. Place the milk and butter in a small saucepan over a low heat until the butter has melted. Stir in the egg and mix together.

2. In a large bowl combine the flour, cinnamon, yeast, chocolate chips, cherries, sugar, zest and salt.

3. Add the wet mixture to the bowl and use a fork to form a soft dough.

4. Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes, or until dough is smooth and elastic.

5. Line a large baking tray with parchment paper.

6. Divide the mixture into 12 equal sized balls and place them on to the baking tray, leaving space between to allow them to rise.

7. Loosely cover with cling film and place somewhere warm for 1–1.5 hours until they have doubled in size.

8. Pre-heat the oven to 180.

9. Mix the plain flour with enough water to make a paste. Pour into a piping bag (or ziplock bag and cut off a small corner) and pipe a cross over each of the buns.

10. Place in the pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes until a nice golden colour.

11. Transfer to a cooling rack. Loosen the honey by warming it slightly over a low heat, adding a dash of water if needed.

12. Brush the honey glaze over the buns and allow to cool.

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MOTORING 114

Maria Teresa De Filippis

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Ford Mustang

Motoring

Maria Teresa de Filippis Actuarius recounts the extraordinary tale of the first woman ever to make the start line of a Formula 1 race

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“In young Maria’s case it was the taunts from her brothers regarding how fast she could drive that pushed her into entering the 1948 Salerno-Cava de Tirreni hillclimb, in a Fiat 500. The resulting win would not only silence her siblings but also ignite her interest in motor sport”

he Formula 1 championship was first contested in 1950, just five years after the end of the Second World War, and at a time when the repercussions of global conflict were still a part of everyday life. It is perhaps a sign of the prevalent optimism for the future, rather than dwelling on the recent past that, instead of being a matter of surprise or resentment, it is merely a matter of record that the inaugural champion was the Italian Giuseppe Farina aboard an Alfa Romeo. The 1950s was a decade where a new social enlightenment walked confidently into the future, hand in hand with the inherent promise brought by technological advance.

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Maria Teresa de Filippis with Stirling Moss at SIlverstone in 1959

As is the way with these things, the reality is far more complex. There were also grimy backstreets with equally grimy children playing on bomb sites, while the promise of clean limitless energy cowered under the persistent cloud of potential nuclear conflict. Most of Europe lay in ruins, and women who had enjoyed new freedoms and independence had to relinquish their jobs to returning servicemen. Formula 1 offered the same restrictions: no women raced initially, but the first female racer would compete only eight years later and, up to the point of writing, a mere five women have entered Formula 1 races. Of these, only two have progressed to the start grid.

The pioneer, who would make history by taking to the track in a championship race in 1958, was Maria Teresa de Filippis. Born in 1926 in Naples, Maria was the daughter of an Italian Count and Spanish mother. In a similar manner to Stirling and Pat Moss, a keen interest in riding horses would evolve into a career racing cars. In young Maria’s case it was the taunts from her brothers regarding

how fast she could drive that pushed her into entering the 1948 Salerno-Cava de Tirreni hillclimb, just south of Naples, in a Fiat 500.

The resulting win would not only silence her siblings but also ignite her interest in motor sport.

More successes followed as she learned her sport, gradually moving up the categories in the Italian sports car series. She competed in a number

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Maria Teresa de Filippis in the late 1950s

“Maria is on record as having said that she only experienced discrimination once in her career when, in what remains a shocking example of how bad things could be, the director for the French Grand Prix barred her entry with the comment “The only helmet a beautiful woman should wear is the one at the hairdresser”

ment. Unsurprisingly, her mounts tended to be home-grown and eventually she was to be found competing at the wheel of an 1100 OSCA. It was at this time that she met fellow racing driver Luigi Musso, who was also destined for a career in Formula 1, and they fell in love. They would journey to races together and Musso would coach her with her driving. But despite being engaged at one point, they never married and were separated by the time both arrived at the top tier.

Taking second place in the Italian Sportscar Championship was testimony to how fast Maria was, but she was also brave. During her rise through the ranks she broke bones and had to be cut from cars after accidents, yet this diminished neither her speed nor commitment, and it is unsurprising that she came to the attention of the big teams. Enzo Ferrari was rejected, Maria not liking his domineering management style, but Maserati was a different proposition. 1955 saw her signed to race for them and, in 1957, she had her first experience at the wheel of a works 250F, possibly the most iconic and

of the top tier events, such as the Mille Miglia, and formed a notable friendship with Nuvolari (still regarded by many as the greatest racing driver ever) when he protested against her disqualification in the 1950 Giro di Scillia due to a technical infringe-

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De Filippis in her Maserati 250F at the Italian Grand Prix in 1958

certainly one of the most successful F1 cars of the front-engined era (see box, right).

Fangio, yet another perennial favourite for ‘greatest ever’, was the lead driver and reigning champion. Maria would later describe him as a ‘father figure’ as he offered advice and helped to develop her skills. Fangio once told her ‘You race too hard’, a clear indication that to make it at the top a racer needs more than raw speed – she also needs control and discipline. In fact, very few are successful straight away in Formula 1, as the skill sets gained in lower formulae need to be refined and honed to the point of perfection. So it was with Maria: a strong result at the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix with a privately entered 250F was followed by failing to qualify at Monaco. Still, she was not to be denied her place in history, and at Spa she did manage to qualify, becoming the first woman to take the start of a Formula 1 Grand Prix, finishing in 10th place.

In 1959 she joined her friend Jean Behra at his Behra-Porsche team, but in the relatively short championships compared to today would only enter five F1 races in total, qualifying to start in just three of them. Maria walked away from the sport at the 1959 German Grand Prix. Musso had died during the previous season in France, just one of

her friends to be lost on the racetrack, but when Behra fatally crashed at Avus, it was the final straw in an era where death was seen merely as a potential consequence of competing.

Maria is on record as having said that she only experienced discrimination once in her career when, in what remains a shocking example of how bad things could be, the director for the French Grand Prix barred her entry with the comment “The only helmet a beautiful woman should wear is the one at the hairdresser.” The media were always looking for the ‘woman’s viewpoint’ rather than simply treating her as a successful driver, but her fellow competitors at least recognised and respected her ability. Maria would marry in 1961, raise a family and only come back to the sport when she took up the post of secretary in the Club Internationale des Anciens Pilotes, later rising to become its vice president. She died in 2016 at the age of 89. Maria Teresa de Fillipis was a talented and determined racer whose legacy is only just starting to be built upon, with the advent of the ‘W Series’ championship. She was a true trailblazer who deserves to be better known. n Maria Teresa de Filippis 11th November 1926–8th January 2016

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The Maserati 250F If you look back through the history of Formula 1, you will find distinct eras of car design. Whether defined by the introduction of game changing technology, such as Lotus with ground effects, or regulation change as with the reintroduction of turbo chargers in 2014, each has distinct aesthetics and each its legion of fans. The first of these was the ‘front engined era’, picking up where pre-war racing had left off. Despite the success of the Auto-Union Grand Prix cars, the standard configuration until 1939 and into the postwar years had remained with the engine up front driving the rear wheels and with the pilot somewhere in between.

The Maserati 250F is arguably the most iconic of these front-engined cars. Born in 1954 of a stable with an impeccable pedigree, it was the work of Colombo, Colotti and Fantuzzi. They mixed Italian flair with an almost Germanic single-mindedness to produce a powerful car with sophisticated and exploitable handling. However, its appeal extends far beyond mere performance. While aerodynamics was a fast developing science at the time, there was still room for the divine touch of the artisan. The proportions of the 250F may be sublime, but this was beauty born from function. That long tail visually balancing the streamlined snout contains the fuel tank, which gets a lot of weight over the rear wheels for that all important sprint off the start line. Seen from the front, the oval cross section climbing away to the windscreen is lithe and efficient, the side view presenting a taught, naturally developing compound arc from extremity to extremity, the muscular and low-set rear purposely accentuated by rivets.

As this was intended to be a customer car, there were 28 built, all with the variety one would expect of a hand crafted racer. Three general styles developed during production with, for some, the snub-nosed early cars being a little too blunt and fussy. Equally the

later Piccolinos, shrunk in an attempt to keep the car competitive, possessed too little presence. Most 250Fs, though, have an elegance that approaches perfection, with the unadorned oval intake at the front, angled slightly forward, bringing a hint of aggression to balance the overall delicacy.

Most 250Fs are powered by the twin cam 2.5 litre straight six engine, with the later more exotic V12 never quite delivering on its promise. Fed by triple twin choke Webbers and exhaling via the ultimately efficient straight run open exhaust, the sound is positively intoxicating. Warming the engine by blipping the throttle delivers a series of hoarse barks, hard acceleration unleashes a howl that tears the air. It would be a shame if all this failed to deliver, but the 250F took eight victories, including Fangio’s legendary win at the Nurburgring, eight pole positions and numerous podiums between 1954 and 1960. It also took Fangio to two of his world championships and Stirling Moss to 2nd in the 1956 championship. Its front line career would be brought to an end by a change of rules and the rear engine revolution led by Cooper. Towards the end it was outclassed, but six years is a very long time in F1 and the Maserati 250F remains a favourite in historic racing today.

Motoring

MUSTANG SALLY Alf Alderson gets behind the wheel and the history of an American icon, the Ford Mustang

O

f the wide and varied marques of car that were manufactured in the USA in the 20th century, one stands out above all others as the quintessential American automobile – the Ford Mustang.

The name still lives on almost sixty years after the first Mustang hit US car showrooms in 1964, but it’s generally accepted that the classic Mustangs, as featured in so many songs and movies (see box) are those of the 1960s.

Consequently, this article focuses on the early Mustangs, on the basis that from the 1970s onwards the Mustang somewhat lost its way, becoming longer, wider and heavier and, in the 80s and 90s in particular, lacking in the style and elan that marked out the original car. Today’s sixth generation Mustangs give a nod, styling wise, to their iconic 60s forebears, but since they tend to be the vehicle

“First manufactured in 1964, the two-door Ford Mustang came with three body styles (convertible, coupé and fastback) and was expected to sell 100,000 units in its first year; it beat this four times over, making it the most successful US vehicle launch since the 1927 Ford Model A, and within two years there were over a million Mustangs on American roads”

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You can have any colour you like as long as it’s red

of choice for drug dealers and rich boy racers, they have no place in this publication.

Prior to the Mustang, America had, of course, always been the country of the big car, with huge, petrol guzzling V8 engines growling away beneath bonnets the length of an aircraft carrier and suspension that offered an equally maritime feel.

However, American servicemen stationed abroad during World War II and the Cold War had discovered the fun of driving small, nimble sports cars such as MGs, Alfa Romeos and Jaguars, and in the early sixties the marketing men (or the ‘Mad Men’) at Ford realised there was a demand in the US for something similar.

Indeed, the early Mustangs were described as a ‘pony car’ by Car Life editor Dennis Shattuck – a name that has stuck to this day to describe an affordable, sporty, compact four-person car that features a long bonnet (‘hood’ to use the colonial term), short boot (‘trunk’, ditto) and ‘open mouth’ front end, along with a wide range of feature options that allowed buyers effectively to personalise their car.

First manufactured in 1964, the two-door Ford Mustang came with three body styles (convertible, coupé and fastback) and was expected to sell 100,000 units in its first year. It beat this four times over, making it the most successful US vehicle launch since the 1927 Ford Model A, and within two years there were over a million Mustangs on American roads.

Production costs were kept low by utilising mass-produced parts shared with other Ford models, such as the Ford Falcon and Fairlane, and the car was aimed at the youth market in particular, which may go some way to explaining its popularity in films and music.

Early vehicles sported a 170 cu in (2.8 litre) six-cylinder engine and three-speed manual transmission, sold for a base price of US$2,368 (compared to $2,658 for an imported MGB GT) which included bucket seats, carpeting, floor shifter, sport steering wheel and full wheel covers. However, options such as a four-speed manual gearbox, air conditioning and power steering could increase the price by up to 60%, while the popular later option

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Sound and Vision Steve McQueen, Bullitt

Few cars have appeared in movies and popular music as frequently as the Ford Mustang. There are at least fifty pop songs featuring the word ‘Mustang’ in the lyrics (although some refer to the wild horse after which the car was named), from the classic ‘Mustang Sally’ by Wilson Pickett to the rather awful ‘Mustang Ford’ by T-Rex; other artists who have waxed lyrical about the vehicular icon include Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, Elton John and Rod Stewart.

Gone in Sixty Seconds

In the movies, the car has at times become almost as much of a star as the actor driving it – if in any doubt think of Bullitt and Steve McQueen screeching around San Francisco in his ’68 GT Fastback (sold at auction recently for $3.74 million).

Other box office hits to feature the ‘pony car’ include Gone in Sixty Seconds, originally shot in 1974 then remade in 2000 with Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie. This particular Mustang even had a name, ‘Eleanor’, and it was played by a 1967 Shelby GT500. Seven Eleanor replicas were created for the 2000 production, with five being totalled during stunt sequences, while in 2019 the original Eleanor was sold at auction for $2.2 million.

A 1969 Mustang Mach 1 features in the John Wick

Diamonds Are Forever

series, while a ’71 Mach 1 (the heaviest and longest Mustang built) is one of the stars of the show in Diamonds Are Forever, escaping from the baddies on two wheels down a narrow alleyway with James Bond at the wheel (Sean Connery’s stunt double Bill Hickman actually did the driving). Observant viewers may note that the car enters the alleyway on its right wheels and leaves on the left wheels.

An earlier Bond movie, Goldfinger, was the first ever to feature a Mustang, in this case a 1964 white convertible with red interior, which was used as a product placement when the movie was released on 17th September 1964 at its London premiere. The convertible enjoyed the privilege of featuring alongside Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, while a turquoise coupé featured in the second Bond movie, Thunderball.

Goldfinger

Are you gonna put the surfboard on the bucket seat, honey?

of V8 engines, initially a 260 cu in (4.3 litre) with 164 hp then a 289 cu in (4.7 litre) producing 210 hp, also increased the price.

The V8 is an option still favoured today by classic car collectors, despite the associated increase in fuel consumption – my own V8 has a later 302 cu in (4.9 litre) engine, which averages approximately 15-20 miles per gallon, much to the irritation of my eco warrior friends; even so, the car is actually carbon neutral, given its age and thus actually more environmentally friendly than a new electric car, as well as being far prettier and much more fun to drive. Plus there is no road tax and no MOT required.

As mentioned above, advertising campaigns for the Mustang focused on the youth market, but not entirely – glossy magazine images of shiny young men and women removing their surfboards from the roof of their Mustang on a California beach pretty much summed up the sun-kissed, hedonistic mid-sixties US lifestyle that the rest of the world yearned for, but Ford were also keen to point out that the car worked equally well for families, with its four seats and (by American standards) good fuel economy, while period reviewers praised it for its handling.

That said, American racing car ace Carroll

Shelby somewhat witheringly described the basic Mustang as a ‘secretary’s car’ before he set about upgrading the car for racing in the form of the Shelby GT 350, which put out more than 300 hp, had track-tuned suspension and racing stripes and is the version of the car that often comes to mind for many people when they picture a ‘classic’ Mustang.

Despite Shelby’s disparaging remarks, the ‘secretary’s car’ was a spectacular hit from day one, receiving over 2,500 positive reviews in US newspapers on the day it was launched. Its success forced other car manufacturers to come up with competition, including the 1967 Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Firebird and the 1970 Dodge Challenger, in what became one of the most colourful periods in American motoring history and the start of the ‘muscle car’ invasion of American roads.

The Mustang’s influence also extended further afield, with Europe getting its own version of the pony car in the form of the Ford Capri in the early seventies, designed by Philip T. Clark, who was also involved in the design of the Mustang – the similarities in styling are very apparent.

As the sixties drew to a close, the Mustang was redesigned and as a result morphed into what we would now regard as the classic muscle car – the

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The author’s 1967 Mustang Coupé

overall dimensions of the vehicle increased, which allowed a more powerful big block engine to be offered for the first time, but the original Mustang shape could still be readily discerned in these bigger models.

From 1969, various performance and decorative options also became available, giving the Mustang a more aggressive look – these included functional (and non-functional) air scoops, cable and pin hood tie-downs and both wing and chin spoilers. Additionally, a variety of performance packages were introduced that included the Mach 1, the Boss 302, and Boss 429, the two Boss models being built mainly to homologate the engines for racing. 1969 was also the last year for the GT option, while a fourth model, the Grandé, was made available, but only as a hardtop; it offered a softer ride, ‘luxury’ trim, including wood, and 55 pounds of extra sound deadening.

The Mustang was gradually moving away from the classic, stylish appearance of the original models and, as is the way of such things, it would never again achieve the success of the original in terms of sales or simple, timeless good looks.

My own love of the Ford Mustang harks back to Christmas 1969 and the gift of a Hot Wheels set from my parents, which included a model of a ’68

Ford Mustang. Somewhere at the back of my mind for the following fifty years there had been a hankering to own the real thing, which I finally gave in to last year, buying a 1967 Mustang Coupé in very fetching original lime gold paintwork with matching interior.

I have no wish to repeat the antics of my original Hot Wheels Mustang (I’m not sure exactly where one goes to do the loop the loop in a car in any case), but there is immense pleasure to be had in cruising along the Queen’s highway, V8 burbling away while bringing a smile to the faces of so many who see this archetypal American car pass by. n

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FLÂNEUR THE O R I GI N A L F R AGR A N CE FRO M T H E CH A P

Ava i l abl e excl u si vel y fro m www.thechap .co.uk

REVIEWS interview: 128 Author Dominic Janes

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136 Valerie Leon

146 Marthe De Florian

154 Am I an Album Cover?

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Book Reviews

Antiques & Collectables

Author Interview

DOMINIC JANES The Chap’s new literary editor Ed Needham meets the author of British Dandies: Engendering a Scandal and Fashioning a Nation www.strong-words.co.uk

T

he Chap is delighted to welcome to its ranks our new literary editor, after Alexander Larman bowed out due to far too many other literary commitments.

Ed Needham is the editor of Strong Words, a magazine launched in 2018 all about new books, full of loquacious reviews, author interviews and stories behind the great novels of history. Ed’s first interview for The Chap is with Dominic Janes, the author of British Dandies: Engendering a Scandal and Fashioning a Nation (Bodleian Library, £30), a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of dandyism, from 18th century macaronis to the aesthetes of the late 19th century.

“Fashion is about being up to date with the latest trends that a lot of other people are up to date with.

With individuals who proclaim themselves to be dandies, they are not just following the next fashion trend, but have said, “I have a personal style, and sometimes that is going in a different direction to where fashion in general might be, but that’s fine because it is very much about me”

CHAP: What first drew you to investigate the dandy?

JANES: When I was at school, people had this thing about ties. You couldn’t experiment because everyone wore school uniform, but if you wanted to be fashionable you wore your tie really short, rather than the really long, Donald Trump thing.

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CHAP: How did one go beyond being merely fashionable to achieve the status of dandy?

JANES: A lot of fashion is actually about conformity: you are up to date with the latest trends that a lot of other people are up to date with. So you stand out, but you don’t stand out too much.

With individuals who proclaim themselves to be dandies or are called out as dandies, they are not just following the next fashion trend, but have said, “I have a personal style, and sometimes that is going in a different direction to where fashion in general might be, but that’s fine because it is very much about me.” So there is a character in dandyism and exemplary dandies which is about individualism. Another thing is a certain degree of dedication. So you have a project where paying attention to how you dress is very much part of who you are, and you do it whether or not other people think it is appropriate.

So even in school people were playing around with how you could fit in but also get ahead at the same time. Later in my academic career, that led me to thinking about why men who wanted to play around with clothing so often got slapped down, and I found when researching this book that a lot of it was about accusations of gender impropriety, effeminacy and calling out dressy men for being alleged homosexuals. So I thought, here’s some juicy stuff, and that’s how I started.

CHAP: When was the peak age of the dandy?

JANES: The peak controversy, when everyone is talking about dandies and using the word ‘dandy’, is really around the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

This is a period when newspapers are debating the phenomenon and there are all sorts of cartoons about it. There are also controversies earlier in the eighteenth century and later in the nineteenth century, but they don’t focus on using the word dandy, so there is dandy-like behaviour, but the fullon dandy craze is a very Regency thing.

CHAP: Whose attention did the dandy most wish to attract?

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of Argyll or whatever. They are trying to reinvent themselves by doing a bit of shopping.

CHAP: To what extent was all this peacocking associated with debauchery?

Did it serve a lascivious purpose?

JANES: If you go back to eighteenth-century styles of dandyism, there is a tradition of what was called libertinism, that basically means you can go off and have sex, but it was also a political programme, because it was about resisting the moralisers and the church-goers. So the kind of dandyism you got with the ‘macaronis’ (wealthy young men who’d brought no end of European affectations and giant pompadours back from their Grand Tour) had an element of sexual liberation about it. The Regency dandyism was much less about sexual adventuring, and more about saying that even during the conditions of wartime I can have an elegant existence. And the final kind, which is the aesthetes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for a lot of them this behaviour was queer signalling, because dressing with a great deal of care by this time was increasingly associated with a kind of narcissistic, homosexual kind of thing. There was that popular association where you could put an orchid in your buttonhole and people would say, oh, that person might be gay. And if you wanted to meet other people who were interested in that kind of thing, it was a good way of signalling to them.

CHAP: Which garments, fabrics or accessories were considered particularly scandalous and took a certain amount of courage to wear?

JANES: This varies through time, but one of the consistent themes through the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is male costume that is very precisely cut to the body, particularly jackets cut in very tightly at the waist. That was regarded as daring and a bit transgressive, because in women’s fashion where they were heavily corseted, having a very tight waist was specifically regarded as a kind of sexual symbol of female desirability. So turning up with a jacket cut very tightly to your waist – it seems you had to be pretty brave to do that. On the issue of fabrics, in the eighteenth century they regularly pass laws against the import of French fabrics and in particular things like silks. So if you are in a period when there is an embargo, people will notice if you are wearing brightly coloured French silks, and call you out for being unpatriotic.

JANES: People who satirised the figure of the dandy said it was narcissistic, and about someone who is strictly entertaining themselves. And you might say, what’s wrong with that? But a lot of people had problems with it. The second thing is a sense of competition among people who were claiming a bit of individuality, and this is where dandyism shades into celebrity. If you are going to do celebrity, it is helpful to do a look that goes along with it. And celebrities are competing with other celebrities for attention. So one of the reasons why dandyism for men sometimes gets attacked is because people think, this is someone who wants to be a celebrity, but doesn’t have what it takes in terms of being a sportsman, or a poet, or the Duke

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CHAP: Who or which group of people has the strongest claim to represent the spirit of dandyism more recently?

JANES: Not so much recently, but in the sixties and seventies a lot of pop stars, such as Mick Jagger, were playing around with long versus short hair, silk shirts rather than cotton shirts, and quite a few definitely fit into a kind of sixties version of dandyism. Cecil Beaton does a lot of dandy photographs in the interwar period, and he is still busily photographing in the sixties, so when he photographs Mick Jagger there is a link from the earlier to the later twentieth century. I am not sure that we are in a great age of dandyism right now.

A lot of visual creativity is going into digital self-

presentation, a phenomenon of digital dandyism, and I get the feeling that some of the creative energy is being drained off from more traditional clothing into those areas.

CHAP: Do you have a most admired dandy?

JANES: That’s always tricky, because you feel the ghosts of the others standing there, glowering and tapping their canes. I’ve written quite a lot about Oscar Wilde, and although I think there are problems with him, in that he is almost like a living cliché with all the epigrams and so on, he was so important in terms of cultural change, identification and the elaboration of celebrity that I am still fascinated by him. n

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BOOK REVIEWS

By Ed Needham www.strong-words.co.uk

NON-FICTION

Brigade in 1854. Being a little skittish, it required a slug of laudanum to help it lead the Earl’s funeral procession in 1868. And not forgetting Whistlejacket, subject of the 1762 George Stubbs masterpiece. The catalogue for a 1985 Tate exhibition claimed that Stubbs, having almost completed the painting in a yard where a stable lad was leading the horse up and down, took the picture off the easel and leant it against a wall to “view the effect of it.” On seeing its own oversized image, Whistlejacket began to “stare and look wildly at the picture” then tried to attack it, at which point Stubbs had to beat it off with his palette. A whistlejacket, Magee helpfully informs, is also a cold treatment made of gin and treacle.

IN PRAISE OF FAMOUS HORSES

By Sean Magee (W&N, £9.99)

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his is a compendium of equine celebrity from track, history and fable, arranged in classic A-Z format, from ‘Aaron’ to Zippy Chippy’. Aaron was a horse that once belonged to DH Lawrence, and although the novelist was not much known for his elegance in the saddle, he was supposedly so fond of Aaron that on the horse’s death he had its hide crafted into a duffel bag. Zippy Chippy was a “famous loser” on American tracks: 100 races, no wins.

In between, one might find the hapless Mister Chippendale, which failed to win a walkover (a one-horse race) when his jockey forgot to weigh in; Hercules, winner of Carthorse of the Year at the fictional 1937 Acton Gymkhana and which provided the locomotion for the Steptoe’s rag and bone cart; Apocalypse, Four Horsemen of the; and Occident, the horse captured for all eternity in the famous Edweard Muybridge photograph. This was the image that proved the assertion of Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of California and founder of Stanford University, that at one point in the stride of a galloping horse all four hooves are off the ground, thus demonstrating that generations of equine artists, unable to imagine such defiance of gravity, were mistaken.

Among the more detailed entries are a biography of Ronald, the horse that carried the Earl of Cardigan in the Charge of the Light

AFTERMATH

By Harald Jahner (WH Allen, £9.99)

B

efore the Second World War, Germany laid claim to being the planet’s most cultured nation. After, it found itself back in the Stone Age. Or at least, the rubble age. The fighting left 500 million cubic metres of debris, among which “over half the population of Germany were neither where they belonged nor wanted to be, including 9 million bombed out people and evacuees, 14 million refugees and exiles, 10 million released forced labourers and prisoners, and countless millions of slowly returning prisoners of war.” How were they even to make it to the next day, let alone “become ordinary citizens again”? It became known as “no man’s time, laws had been overruled, yet no one was responsible for anything.

Nothing belonged to anyone any more, unless they were sitting on it. No one was responsible, no one

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Book Reviews

was ensured protection.” The author describes four Berliners, including an orchestra conductor, emerging from an air raid to find a white ox in the street. Starving, yet lacking abattoir skills, the conductor has enough Russian to seek guidance from a Soviet soldier, who helpfully shoots the animal. As the Berliners tentatively get to work with kitchen knives, hundreds of men, women and children emerge from basements and tear the carcass to pieces. “So this is what the hour of liberation looks like. The moment we have spent twelve years waiting for?” wrote one woman in her diary. First, though, the residents had to meet their liberators: the vengeful and rapacious Russians, and the unreal Americans, with their spectacular teeth and unthinkably casual style of lolling in their seductive vehicles. Also heading into this Year Zero rebuild was the Heimkehrer, or homecomer from the war, “barely recognisable, scruffy, emaciated and hobbling. A stranger, and invalid.” Women and children had survived and run the cities in their absence, and did not welcome these bad-tempered, ungrateful derelicts. Yet as the wreckage ebbed, one idea refused to take hold. Germany could not accept itself responsible for the war’s victims, preferring that role for themselves: their loss, their hunger, their rubble.

forensic socialising, deserves a book of his own, but the real stars are the outré terrors who plotted their way into the editor’s chair. The ultra-snooty Edna Woolman Chase (1914-52) told a poor staffer who had attempted suicide, “We at Vogue don’t throw ourselves under subway trains, my dear. If we must, we take sleeping pills.” Diana Vreeland (1963-71) took fashion to a new level – of expense (once spending the equivalent of $7m on a single shoot) – while also “providing extravagantly insane advice such as ‘Why Don’t You . . . wear violet velvet mittens with everything?’” Good question.

Not even WWII dimmed the madness, with Hermès’ “exquisite leather cases for gas masks” a key Blitz accessory in the UK. The reign of Anna Wintour will be taught to business students for centuries to come, and one wonders what will remain when she retracts her personal nuclear core from the company.

But even more urgently, does Vogue, unthinkable of unthinkables, risk falling out of fashion? Can an elitist brand make new friends in an age when diversity and inclusivity are the big credentials? And as Vogue has never shown the slightest interest in what anyone else thinks, will it have a go at “listening”?

GLOSSY: THE INSIDE STORY OF VOGUE

By Nina-Sophia Miralles (Quercus, £12.99)

I

f ever a magazine understood the special relationship between women and shiny paper, it is Vogue. Launched as “a dignified authentic journal of society, fashion and the ceremonial side of life,” its pages have drawn the curious to its privileged glow since 1892. Whether they come to gawp at the hilarious prices or are genuinely seeking handbag silhouettes for autumn/winter, Vogue is fashion, and Glossy tells a jaunty story of elite relationships, business acumen and alluringly strange individuals. The great magazine entrepreneur Condé Nast bought the title in 1909 and aimed it squarely at a new market: extremely rich women.

Using the finest editorial ingredients to create a luxuriant home for advertisers became the Condé Nast brand, and Vogue was its flagship. Nast, with his

FICTION LAST DAYS IN CLEAVER SQUARE

By Patrick McGrath (Penguin, £8.99)

C

leaver Square is the Kennington, south London, address of the elderly Francis McNulty, to whom the last days of the title in part refer. Beneath this rambling old boy’s roof are a Spanish housekeeper called Dolores and a cat named Henry Threshold, plus temporarily McNulty’s daughter Gilly and sister

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Book Reviews

KITCHENLY 434

Finty, who appeared “at dead of night in heavy rain dressed all in black, such that I was convinced she was the incarnation of Death Itself.” Also causing alarm is a spectral presence in “the uniform of a highly decorated military officer.” It is filthy, stinking and sometimes lurks in the garden, but at others stands weeping in McNulty’s bedroom, causing him to bring the bedsheet to his nose.

This disintegrating veteran is the generalísimo Francisco Franco, who at the same time is lying insensate on his deathbed in Madrid, a pathetic intubated husk, also running down his last days.

McNulty has a sharp interest in the old fascist’s demise, having driven an ambulance for the Republicans at the siege of Madrid in the Civil War, and has plenty to share about his service, including rescuing an eight-year-old Dolores from a bombed-out house. To his daughter and sister though, the appearance of the old dictator is a clear indication of something else: that Francis is losing it.

Yet keen to harvest his more distant recollections is journalist Hugh Supple, seeking “context” for a piece on “the slim volumes of Romantic poetry” prompted by McNulty’s experiences under bombardment in Madrid.

These memories are still robust, and this mixture of domestic squabble, furtive apparition and war reminiscence are a lively mix in McNulty’s charming voice; not the mutterings of an old nutter, but the prologue to a long-concealed revelation of beloved companions and firing squads, and the entourage’s decamping to Madrid, where old grievances will be addressed in a most original and satisfying fashion.

By Alan Warner (White Rabbit, £9.99)

K

itchenly 434 is the phone number that would at one time have connected a caller to Kitchenly Mill Race, the serene stately home and rural recording base of guitar hero Markus ‘Marko’ Morell. Mr. Morell is far too busy fulfilling the touring duties of a late seventies prog rock legend to spend much time at his mansion. Yet the vast pile must be held in permanent readiness, should the alert ever come through that the Morell Roller is heading for Sussex. Leading the team at Kitchenly, in his own mind at least, is Marko’s old childhood chum Crofton Clarke, who expounds in unintentionally entertaining detail on the complexity of his “retainer” role: the timer on the gates, the curvature of the drive, the curtain-pulling schedule of the house’s 55 windows; no aspect of his job description is too mundane to withhold.

When once confronted with an empty fridge, Marko and his Scandinavian model girlfriend Aurelie took themselves off to Bali rather than face the unknown rituals of the village shop.

But when two local girls appear at the gates seeking autographs, the outside world intrudes, and Crofton slowly reveals himself to be utterly devoid of clue. His social skills require a far more urgent upgrade than any rock star’s inability to find a light switch, and his surreal and inappropriate interpersonal style comes to dwarf his employer’s vanities. The workplace can be rich and fertile soil in which to cultivate delusions of grandeur, and Crofton, while keeping the moat clean and the lawn clipped, has let his personal botanical garden of lunatic self-deception run to spectacular and uncontrolled seed. n

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Interview

VALERIE LEON Gustav Temple meets the actress who starred in practically every cult film and TV series from the 1960s and 70s, as well as the legendary ‘Hai Karate’ adverts www.valerieleon.com

“I never knew quite what to wear to castings, but for that one I wore a maroon catsuit with a gold brocade coat over it, which had belonged to my mother. The producer looked aghast and said, ‘What kind of outfit do you call that?’ I cheekily replied, ‘a Bond girl outfit’. It got me the job!”

I

f you have watched some of the Carry On films, episodes of The Persuaders! and The Avengers, two of the James Bond films and Hammer House of Horror’s Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb, you will have seen Valerie Leon, who was in all of them.

Gustav Temple meets the actress once described as ‘the English Raquel Welch’.

But by the time you were asked to appear in The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, the James Bond franchise was already huge, wasn’t it?

Yes, it was a big deal. I remember meeting Cubby Broccoli the producer, at Pinewood Studios, and I told him I didn’t want to be killed off. And that’s a crazy thing to say, because when you’re killed off you generally have a better role. Despite that, I got the role as the hotel receptionist, had a dress made especially for me and I got flown to Sardinia to this amazing hotel and complex owned by the then Aga Khan for the role.

A Bond Girl is forever! It doesn’t matter if you have a small cameo role or are the leading lady, you are forever known the world over as a Bond

When you took acting jobs in Bond movies, Carry On and Hammer House of Horror films, did you have any idea at the time that they would become cult movies in the future?

I am lucky to have been associated with three major British film series that have all become cults. As to whether I knew at the time, I had no crystal ball!

At the time, none of those films were iconic.

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Revenge of the Pink Panther

The Spy Who Loved Me

trunks from Casino Royale in 2006 sold in 2012 in a charity auction for £44,450!

girl. Just yesterday I had an order from Jakarta in Indonesia for a signed photograph from The Spy Who Loved Me.

I expect the bikini worn by Ursula Andress in Dr No fetched even more. Have you kept any of your outfits from the Bond movies?

Unfortunately I sold them, and probably undersold them at the time, which is a great shame. The leather catsuit I wore in Revenge of the Pink Panther especially, as my daughter wore it once to a party, so perhaps I should have kept it for my granddaughter?

What was the outfit you wore for the audition for Never Say Never Again, which got you the part?

I never knew quite what to wear to castings, but for that one I wore a maroon catsuit with a gold brocade coat over it, which had belonged to my mother. The producer looked aghast and said, ‘What kind of outfit do you call that?’ I cheekily replied, ‘a Bond girl outfit’! It got me the job!

And I suppose you already were a Bond girl, after The Spy Who Loved Me? Well, yes, although Never Say Never Again was the ‘unofficial’ Bond film, as it was not produced by Broccoli and Saltzman.

So tell me about working with Roger Moore and Sean Connery on the Bond movies. Were they at all similar?

Absolutely not, in any way, shape or form! Roger used to say that he was the lover and Sean was the killer. Sean of course is always seen as the definitive Bond, but there have been so many and each one has brought something different to the role. Sean had swarthy charisma and Roger had his humour.

Timothy Dalton they say took a more romantic approach, and Craig of course is very gritty. I found out recently that Daniel Craig’s swimming

“In The Persuaders! I was playing an out-of-work actress driving a space rocket car promoting soap. During filming Roger Moore gave me a completely unscripted kiss.

I just closed my eyes and enjoyed this kiss, opened them and gave a huge grin, all of which they kept in. I’ve never forgotten that! And therefore Roger is my favourite of all time” 139

Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb

What about Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, did you keep anything from that?

I do still have the script from that. I’m told that could be worth a lot of money, so I’m hanging on to it. The amazing thing about Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb is that it was such a jinxed movie.

First of all, I did the first day’s filming with Peter Cushing, who played my father. But at the end of the day’s shoot, he heard his beloved wife Helen was desperately ill, so he had to pull out. Another Hammer actor called Andrew Keir took over virtually immediately.

I went in to the studios one morning to be told that the previous night director Seth Holt had given a dinner party with his wife. As the guests were leaving, he turned to her and said, “I’m going.” And he died right there and then of a heart attack. I’d worked with Seth previously, on a film called Monsieur Lecoq that never saw the light of

day. I was only standing in for an American actress called Julie Newmar and I never thought that one day I’d be Seth’s leading lady. I was devastated when I heard about his death and I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. The producer Michael Carreras took over as director. I remember crying and they had to patch me up. The show must go on sort of thing. Hammer Films and Carry On films were done on a very low budget, only a sixweek schedule or something, so they didn’t want to interrupt filming.

I was only in my twenties and I never really asserted myself. I now regret that enormously.

Despite my glamorous image, I was actually quite shy; I was living my life in a bit of a bubble. I put a barrier around myself, which when looking back I sometimes regret, now that I think of all the people I worked with and could have remained friends with.

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Carry On Abroad

“People love the Carry On films! I met this man who does these tours called Brit Movie Tours (www.britmovietours.com).

They take people around old film and television locations in a coach. He booked me to take part in three last year and they sold out immediately”

You managed to resist offers for roles that required nudity, except for 1969’s Zeta One? I was with a friend for dinner last night and I mentioned that film, which had all sorts of great people in it, like James Robertson Justice and Charles Hawtrey; it was a very strange movie!

A few years ago I brought out an A5 booklet of photographs called Everything But the Nipple, which referred specifically to that role in Zeta One, and it sold extremely well. I’ve only got one copy left and I’m sure it would be very desirable.

Although maybe you resisted some of the exploitation that was happening all through the industry. You kept your dignity, didn’t you?

Did taking a role in The Ups and Downs of a Handyman seem like a good idea at the time?

Someone made a collection of clips for me and

143

Yes, I think I did. It was kind of everything but the nipple, really!

that one was in there. I remember wearing a seethrough sort of housecoat, but I don’t recall doing anything untoward, if that’s what you’re driving at. I certainly avoided any of those Confessions Of… movies, which did involve a lot of nudity.

further back you get people like Judy Garland, who was fed drugs to keep her going.

Of all the Hollywood stars you worked with, which one made the best impression on you?

My favourite of all time was Roger Moore.

I worked with him four times but the most memorable time was when I did an episode of The Persuaders!, which he happened to be directing. This episode was called The Long Goodbye. I was playing an out-of-work actress driving a space rocket car promoting soap. Roger was such a tease; during filming he gave me a completely unscripted kiss. I just closed my eyes and enjoyed this kiss, opened them and gave a huge grin, all of which they kept in. I’ve never forgotten that! And therefore Roger is my favourite of all time.

Were you offered roles in other films like that which you turned down? When you look back, do you heave a sigh of relief that you didn’t go down that road?

Obviously, because of the glamorous image I’d created – which was not really me – I was offered roles like that, but I didn’t do them.

“Although my bed scene with Sean Connery didn’t involve any sex. In the morning when we were rehearsing, we had a lovely time in bed, but when his wife came in to watch the filming in the afternoon, Sean couldn’t get out of bed quickly enough!”

You still continue to work in film and television. Has behaviour on set changed a lot since your heyday in the sixties and seventies?

Yes, they’re very strict around sex scenes, and there has to be someone there on set to make sure no-one’s being exploited. They didn’t do that in my day.

Although my bed scene with Sean Connery didn’t involve any sex. In the morning when we were rehearsing, we had a lovely time in bed, but when his wife came in to watch the filming in the afternoon, Sean couldn’t get out of bed quickly enough!

Whereas the Carry On films don’t have quite the same taint of sleaze, do they? They’re seen as a bit naughty and silly, but harmless.

People love the Carry On films! I met this man who does these tours called Brit Movie Tours (www.britmovietours.com). They take people around old film and television locations in a coach.

He booked me to take part in three last year and they sold out immediately. I’m driven to a pub in Buckinghamshire where they did some filming for one of the Carry On films, and I meet and greet the punters when they come off the coach and tell a few stories. It’s remarkable that after all these years people are still interested in the Carry On films.

And it isn’t just old people on these tours; they have plenty of young people too.

What about the famous hellraising that went on in the old days on film sets?

Every day, everybody would go to the bar at lunchtime, but I’d go to my dressing room alone, shut the door, eat my sandwich and learn my lines. I didn’t socialise much when I was younger. I cannot emphasise how shy I was back then. We all wish we could have our time over and do things differently. I was really odd when I was younger. I think I’ve only really grown up in the last twenty years.

It sounds as though you’ve got over your shyness, with all these talks you’re doing?

Yes, I certainly have! I’ll be talking about Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb for a Talking Pictures event in March, then I’m doing a few film conventions later in the year. I do a lot of those. Although the acting roles seem to have dried up, at least I’m lucky enough to be making a future from my past. n

What is it about the Carry On films that transcends all today’s political correctness?

I think it’s the innocence, the humour, the characters like Charlie Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor, Kenneth Williams. The sad thing is that Charlie Hawtrey and Joan Sims died in poverty. People were exploited, even in the sixties, and when you go

To find out about Valerie’s future live events and talks, visit www.valerieleon.com

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Mystery

A PECULIAR PARIS APARTMENT Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe on the startling discovery of a perfectly preserved belle epoque timelock capsule in Paris With gratitude for the help of Raechel Leigh Carter

T

he French of today are mesmerised by Michel Houellebecq’s depressive purr.

There are even lost Gallic souls who sadly believe it when President Macron – a big fan of the ‘Iron Lady’ – proclaims that there is no such thing as French culture. It’s ironic that we need Americans like Michelle Gable, with her rose-tinted bestseller A Paris Apartment, to remind us that, at the end of the 19th century, sophisticated ladies like Marthe de Florian were all the Parisian rage. The whole of the Parisian social elite gathered in her boudoir, where they could view her painted likeness captured for eternity by the most fashionable portraitist of the day, Giovanni Boldini.

Believe it or not, the following story is true. In 2010, auctioneer Maitre Olivier Choppin de Janvry

“Through the grey fog of dust and the saturated atmosphere, a bright life could be imagined. An existence frozen in time, not unlike the hands of time on the dial of the small golden alarm clock, situated in the middle of hairbrushes and mignonette perfumes” 146

The apartment had been perfectly preserved for over 70 years

discovered a 1900 Bonbonnière (a bijou apartment) in Paris at the Square La Bruyère. Under a thick layer of dust, he couldn’t believe his eyes: he was entering into a 140-metre square flat, and not your usual 9th Arrondissment pad. This was a real palace of wonders, untouched by human hand for a century.

It was like being the heroes of Irwin Allen’s 1960s TV show The Time Tunnel. He felt he was witnessing the life of a demi-mondaine who seemed to have left the place just a few minutes ago. In the boudoir stood a never-seen-before portrait by Boldini.

There was also a remarkable psyche console (a kind of dresser); drawers full of letters; a multitude of trinkets; faded lace and even an extravagant stuffed ostrich in the entrance. Try to imagine the amazement of Maitre Olivier Choppin de Janvry

upon discovering this place, entirely frozen in its 1900 state.

Everything was made of quiet luxury and voluptuousness, all in the full rococo style so typical of Paris at the turn of the century. Through the grey fog of dust and the saturated atmosphere, a bright life could be imagined. An existence frozen in time, not unlike the hands of time on the dial of the small golden alarm clock, situated in the middle of hairbrushes and mignonette perfumes.

Ming vases and Louis XVI shepherdesses were shaded by dusty curtains with shell prints. The first time he entered this chamber, Maitre Choppin de Janvry made a spatio-temporal journey that the Situationists would have described as psychogeographical; entering this apartment, untouched

147

Mignonette perfumes under a carpet of 100-year-old dust

“This woman, who was actually named Mathilde Beaugiron, was born in 1864 from humble beginnings. Thanks to her great beauty, she was able to wine, dine and charm the whole of the French Third Republic cognoscenti”

for almost a hundred years, was like visiting Marthe de Florian’s inner self.

Marthe de Florian was what was then called a demi-mondaine, or courtesan. Today we would say she was a call girl or a ‘Pretty Woman’. This woman, who was actually named Mathilde Beaugiron, was born in 1864 from humble beginnings. Thanks to her great beauty, she was able to wine, dine and charm the whole of the French Third Republic cognoscenti.

Indeed, fiery missives signed by French statesmen, including Prime Ministers and Presidents such as Georges Clemenceau,

148

Marthe De Florian by Giovanni Boldini

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Raymond Poincaré and Paul Deschanel, were found in a drawer, along with others from wealthy businessmen such as Aristide Boucicaut, (the founder of the world’s first department store Le Bon Marché) and Ernest Cognacq (founder of the Parisian store Samaritaine). These letters were tied up in bundles with ribbons of different colours for different senders of both sexes, for Marthe, like many cocottes of the time, was bisexual.

The features of Mademoiselle de Florian are known to us thanks to a handful of photographs and one painting. And not just any painting either, since the expert Marc Ottavi is categorical that it is indeed a 1903 canvas painted by Giovanni Boldini, a highly en vogue painter at the end of the nineteenth century. Readers of The Chap visiting Paris can admire Boldini’s master works exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay, ranging from portraits of people like the aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, to images of prostitution in the exhibition ‘Splendours and Miseries’. Many historians have wondered whether Marthe had paid the painter’s emoluments ‘horizontally’, since it would have cost a small fortune to obtain a portrait of such a large size by an artist of this stature.

The Boldini portrait was sold at Drouot for the modest sum of 1.8 million euros. On the day of the sale, the atmosphere was electric; everybody was excited by the louche yet glamorous legacy of its previous owner. It was eventually an Italian buyer who won the lot. The lucky bidder was then offered, as a bonus, some samples of Marthe’s saucy correspondence; letters which would have only previously been recovered by blowing up a safe with TNT. One can only wonder about the incredible destiny of this woman whose parents were modest craftspeople. Despite beginning her professional career as an embroiderer, Mathilde Beaugiron managed to climb the social ladder courtesy of ‘the bedroom promotion routine’.

Let’s not forget that, at the time, the only way for an ‘ill-born’ woman to progress in society was to indulge in mutually beneficial exchanges in the form of bedroom sports sessions. Gil Blas, the popular periodical of the time, did not mince its words when evoking Marthe as “A blonde frivolous woman with chubby and pink flesh like cherry blossoms, a baby face lit up by two pretty eyes. She lives in a charming apartment where the more refined luxury is combined with the best comfy facilities. A Louis XV living room, a renaissance dining room, a bedroom... all invisible to the

“We meet her in Longchamp, dressed in a white suit like Marguerite de Faust, or in the Bois de Boulogne, very flirtatious with a gallant Boyar.

Marthe de Florian is beautiful, of a chatelainelike aristocratic beauty, for whom spears were broken in the age of chivalry” common man.” The author went on to describe, “We meet her in Longchamp, dressed in a white suit like Marguerite de Faust, or in the Bois de Boulogne, very flirtatious with a gallant Boyar.

Marthe de Florian is beautiful, of a chatelaine-like aristocratic beauty, for whom spears were broken in the age of chivalry.”

Readers would be entitled to wonder, ‘But how can you keep an empty apartment in such a pristine state for so long?’ The key to the mystery lies with Solange Beaugiron, Marthe’s granddaughter, by then a 90-year-old woman, who had lived there in 1940 before moving to the Ardèche. Following Solange Beaugiron’s death, a notary was asked to carry out a furniture inventory at the apartment, which, for mysterious motives, Solange had kept and paid for, despite leaving it unoccupied for so many years.

This mystery excited the interests of journalists as far away as the United States.

151

The only known photograph of Marthe de Florian

What we do know is that Marthe ended up marrying a merchant, allowing her to access the ranks of the bourgeoisie, before dying in Trouville on 29th August, 1939. As for Solange, she also followed a remarkable trail, settling for good in the Ardèche after the exodus of 1939, becoming the author of rose-tinted romantic dime novels for Jours de France. The lady who would never return to her grandmother’s apartment had published most of her novels, set in the belle époque period, under the pseudonym of Solange Bellegarde. One of these soap operas, Gloria, would even be adapted for the screen by renowned director Claude Autant-Lara.

Michelle Gable’s A Paris Apartment, published in 2014, was not very far from a rose-tinted dime novel, taking great liberties with the social and historical realities of Marthe’s time. The book is more reminiscent of Hallmark TV movies than serious literature. It depicts a kind of Paris emptied of its reality and adapted to the psyche of readers

who dream of a postcard-sized Paris. You know, croissants, small puppies, glasses of Claret, guys wearing berets… the kind of stuff you would never find in real life but more likely in episodes of The Simpsons or Sex and the City. Those who would like to learn about the real Paris of La Belle Epoque would do better by reading The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, illustrated by Jacques Tardi, a cult graphic novel adapted into English by American publishers Fantagraphics.

Marthe’s Boudoir, now emptied of its past vestiges, refurbished and rented to new tenants, has not yet revealed all of its secrets. Now it is up to you to dream up your own version of the story. Jacques Derrida invented the concept of ‘Hauntology’, in order to create contemporary works inspired by past popular culture ghosts. We are still waiting for the film, the novel or the music album or even the video game that will synthesize this immobile time travel story. n

153

AM I

Alb COV

AN

um

ER?

As an homage to some of the legendary vinyl album covers of yore, we invited readers to send in their ‘Chappified’ versions. Further attempts to recreate such seminal artworks should be sent to chap@thechap.co.uk

In Through The Out Door LED ZEPPELIN/CLAIRE GREER

154

London Calling THE CLASH/ANT DRAPER

Island Life GRACE JONES/WILLIAM WALKER

A Single Man ELTON JOHN/GUSTAV TEMPLE

John Minns on the fall and rise of vinyl recordings of popular music

Emile Berliner: German-American inventor (1851-1929 ) Emile Berliner was born into a wealthy family of Jewish merchants from Hanover, Germany. He was expected to join the family business, but his heart was in another place. As a child he was fascinated by mechanical equipment and the new technology that was emerging from the second Industrial Revolution in America. As an adult, he would later be drawn into the production of audio technology to store and reproduce the human voice.

His planned inauguration into a restrained, predictable family business would stifle his creativity, so in 1870, at the age of 19, he set sail for America. To keep his head above water after his arrival in the US he took various jobs, including stable boy, shop worker and bottle washer. In the evenings he would attend the local educational institute to study Physics.

Emile would later go on to invent a number of items: a soundproofing material, a type of rotary engine (helicopter), the microphone diaphragm (the precursor to the modern microphone) and many others. In 1887 he was granted a patent on the first flatbed Gramophone and the first flat disc record.

These two items would help to pave the way for what would later be known as the music industry, bringing delight to billions of people throughout the world. The Record Disc was initially made from vulcanising rubber that included a mixture of slate dust and shellac (a secretion from the lac beetle).

The discs would eventually morph into records being made of Polyvinyl Chloride, inheriting the colloquial name of ‘Vinyl’.

Percy Phillips and The Quarrymen On 12th July 1958, five teenage musicians entered the premises of Phillips Sound and Recording Services, a family-run home business trading from 38 Kensington Road, Liverpool. The shop sold a variety of home and electrical goods, including batteries, radios, record players, and

televisions. On occasion, it would also double up a recording studio. The business was run by exarmy veteran Mr. Percy Phillips. The boys, calling themselves The Quarrymen, had arrived that day with the intention to make one single vinyl record at the cost of 17'6d (less than a pound in today’s money). The group consisted of John Lowe (piano), Colin Hanton (drums),with George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had just turned sixteen, on guitars and vocals. Mr Phillips would act as producer and recording engineer. The recording studio was at the back of the shop in Percy’s partially converted living room, with old carpets and curtains draped around the studio to inhibit and dampen the ambient noises from the busy road outside. There was no rehearsal and the boys went straight into the recording of their first song, recorded from a single microphone hung from the ceiling. The A-side was That’ll Be The Day by Buddy Holly and Jerry Alison.

Once completed, the boys discussed what to put on the B-side, deliberating between themselves until Percy Phillips shouted, “You’re not going to take up all of my day for 17'6!”

McCartney and Harrison had written a song earlier called In Spite of All the Danger, but Lowe and Hanton had not heard it before, so they had to busk their way through it. At the end of the session, in less than ten minutes in total, the rarest and most valuable vinyl record in history would be made on a fragile 10'' shellac-coated metal disk.

In what could have been a shocking twist of fate, at the end of the session, after the fragile record had been cut, it could easily have been destroyed, thus depriving the world of this gem that would go on to be one of the most valuable records in the world. When the time came to pay for the record, the boys could only find 15' 2'6d, short of the 17'6 required. Mr Phillips, the hardened first world war veteran and noted for his brusqueness, refused to hand over the record until it had been paid for in full. Fortunately for history, three days later he was reimbursed with the deficit and the record was handed over. The record was then circulated between the various members of the group a week at a time, eventually landing in the hands of Lowe and in his custodial safekeeping, where it remained in his sock drawer for more than 20 years.

The record was eventually retrieved and sold to McCartney for an undisclosed amount in the 1980s.

He subsequently had the original record remastered (each time it was played it gradually eroded) and fifty copies were made and given to friends and

colleagues. Needless to say, these remastered versions are rare and highly collectable in their own right and are literally worth more than their weight in gold, changing hands for upwards of £10,000.

Other Valuable Records A rare copy of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles was sold at auction in 2013 for $299.000. An original 1967 pressing signed by all of the Fab Four sold for nearly ten times over the original estimate of $30,000. Records do not necessarily have to be by famous artists, with sales running into millions, to be valuable. Motown and Northern Soul legend Frank Wilson had relatively small amounts of record sales, but a single 45rpm copy of Do I Love You (Indeed I do) will set you back £100,000 today, for only 250 copies were produced.

If you are lucky enough to find one, check that it is not warped, as many are and devalued accordingly.

Alternatively, if you do happen to have slightly more than a bit of loose change in your pocket, how about splashing out on the only known copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s 2015 Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, which was sold in 2021 for a reported $4 million.

The Demise and Resurrection of the Vinyl record In the early 1960s, another Philips, this time an electrical products company from the Netherlands, introduced its first tape cassette. It was incredibly popular with a new youthful and eager market, leading to a significant reduction in vinyl sales. In 1982 Philips, now working with Sony, unleashed the CD onto the market. A slow starter at first, but by 1988 CDs outsold vinyl for the first time. By 2003, CD sales started to peak, also with the introduction of digital downloads, iPods and streaming, and vinyl got pushed even further back in the popularity stakes.

Vinyl looked set to disappear altogther as a musical commodity. Then a strange anomaly occurred and vinyl record sales started to rise again.

By 2020 vinyl records were outselling CDs for the first time since 1986, and by the first half of 2021 there was an increase in sales of 86% from 2020.

Most record buyers today are in the 25-35 year age group. So why did this occur?

There is a strong element of process and ritual involved in acquiring vinyl, a need for the individual to find something to facilitate a more tranquil respite from a frantic and fast-paced life in a modern world. The ritualistic process starts with the tactile removal of the disk from its cover, switching on the record player, cleaning the disc, placing it on the record bed. The rejection of an entirely digital age and a return to the more sensory process of absorbing culture. Vinyl records are objects to be revered and placed on show, with their large-format iconic cover art, often by legendary artists. It is not surprising therefore that the vinyl record has made a resounding comeback from potential obscurity.

ACQUISITION & COLLECTION

SUGGESTED READING: Rare Record Collector 2020 price guide, a must for the budding collector and investor, with previous back issues available on eBay. Record Collector magazine back issues are also available, to chart price rises and drops over time to help you keep your finger on the pulse.

There are many record fairs throughout the year, dotted all over the UK; a place to meet other aficionados and collectors.

Rare records often turn up at rock and roll memorabilia auctions, as well as the occasional lucky find at a boot sale or antiques fair.

THE FLUMMOXER Readers are invited to ponder the purpose of this issue’s antiquity conundrum, and one provider of the correct answer wins a superb pair of Fox Cufflinks.

Send your answer to chap@thechap.co.uk

Iain Douglas Lamb correctly identified last issue’s flummoxer as a stick of sealing wax, into which to press one’s signet ring when melted.

Darcy Sullivan shares the award-winning quips from The Oscar Wilde Society’s contest, sponsored by this very magazine

E Everybody loves a good Oscar Wilde quote — they’re succinct, funny, paradoxical, wise and, above all, witty. The Oscar Wilde Society’s third Wilde Wit competition, run in conjunction with The Chap and The Oldie, challenged entrants to match his style with their own original entries. We received more than 300 entries, and the winners would make Oscar smile.

Our top entry came from Darcy Alexander Corstorphine, who is no stranger to this contest. In fact, he took top place in the first two Wilde Wit competitions! This year he achieved another feat, tying with himself for first prize with the two

aphorisms below.

All three of our witty winners receive signed copies of Oscar Wilde: A Man for Our Times, the catalogue of Jeremy Mason’s Wilde collection published by Bonhams, graciously supplied by Mason. This is a beautiful, full-colour 64-page catalogue full of Wildean rarities.

Visit the Oscar Wilde Society website to learn more about the contest, and to see videos of the three winning entries, read by Gyles Brandreth and other honorary patrons of the society.

WWW.OSCARWILDESOCIETY.CO.UK

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CROSSWORD 1

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By Xeno

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N A N S T I G U M A

U S U A B M L A R L I N S C H E H C A T H G E R E A I R I N S T

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ACROSS Across

Solutions to crossword 110, CHAP Winter 21 E A L G O L E C N A N D U L A G O G V D U L E A R E R I N D M L I S E A N I N C T

I C O U L O A R A L D O T E W I G G Y

E N S E D E X P R I T V R F E V E R M M O N E Y N T U B A H O H E E L N L L O B A L S R I E L D S

DOWNDown

6. They’re skilled at shooting. Could be Spencer? (8) 1. Chap’s got time to be in charge (6) 1 Chap's They're shooting.

Could time to be in charge (6) 8. 6Seafood leadsskilled to seriousatissue around tents (6) be Spencer?

2. Brief show of secret got Kremlin intelligence 9. The team heads (4) (8)power of saying sorry (4) 2 Brief show of secret Kremlin intelligence 10. One with thick skin is maybe rich sooner (10) 3. Hesitation before Bella takes right cover (8) 8 Seafood leads to serious issue round tents (6) team heads (4) 11. Poet naps every so often with gangster and 4. Observe good book covered with stolen diamonds (4,6) long-distance friend (3,3) 5.

Adversary in scruffy top with pen on (8) takes right cover ( 9 The power of saying sorry (4) 3 Hesitation before Bella 13. Head of Government in German city shows 7. Area revealed by sound of horses, starting to 10theOne 4 cover with thick skin is maybe rich sooner (10) blow our Observe after-effects (8) (13) good book covered with stolen 14. Their career is in ruins (13) 8. Be contemptuous about cycling diamonds (4,6) foot sores (5) 11 Poet naps every so often with gangster and 12. Spooner’s shortage of pastries 16. Destroyer scrambles U-boaters (8) - get porkies! (4,2,4) 5 Adversary long-distance friend (3,3)to black 18. Money grabbing editor introduced 14. This food’s not set! (1,2,5)in scruffy top with pen on (8) white (6) tenderly holding church instrumentalist (8) 13andHead of Government in German city shows15. Morgan7is Area revealed by sound of horses, starting 20. Serving unit to be platoon’s doctor (10) 17. Young fool, finally done, returns paper (5) the after-effects (8) blow our cover (13) 21. Panzer with roof off reeked (4) 19. Threat of ranged bombing... (6) 22. finding fish inis filthy 21. ... sound either way (4)about cycling foot sores 14Hard 8 the Their career in place ruins(6)(13) Betrumpet contemptuous 23. Track down and record six deliveries (8)

16 Destroyer scrambles U-boaters (8)

18 Money grabbing editor introduced to black 162 and white (6) 20 Serving unit to be platoon's doctor (10)

12 Spooner's shortage of pastries - get porkie (4,2,4) 14 This food's not set! (1,2,5) 15 Morgan is tenderly holding church instrumentalist (8)

‘PUSHED THE BOUNDARIES OF CONTEMPORARY TELLY’ DONALD CLARKE, IRISH TIMES

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