Types and Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015, by Roy Strong
Types and Shadows: The Roy Strong Diaries 2004-2015 By Roy Strong Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25
Roy Colin Strong was born in Middlesex, the son of a hypochondriacal travelling hat salesman. The only book in the house was a medical dictionary. He grew up feeling like the family changeling. But, in a few clean bounds, he climbed clear of his parents’ milieu, becoming the director first of the National Portrait Gallery and then, at 38, of the V & A.
Foaming with sixties velvet and frills, and mounting alarming exhibitions, he made a conspicuous and divisive figure on the curatorial circuit. In 1973, to the astonishment of all who had met him, he met the queen of British set-designers, Julia Trevelyan Oman, and in his own words ‘eloped’ with her.
It was the beginning of a mutually adoring marriage. Together, Strong and Trevelyan Oman bought a house, The Laskett in Herefordshire, and created a large, now famous private garden there: an allegorical construct of monuments and symbols, the vegetable embodiment of their entwined lives.
These diaries begin in 2004, a year after Julia died of pancreatic cancer. Strong is 70 and a knight of the realm. His task is to emerge from sorrow’s underworld and start a new passage in life. ‘I must move on.’
To this end, he follows the traditional paths of faith and reality TV, appearing as a server in Hereford Cathedral and as a mentor on a mesmerising TV series called The Diets That Time Forgot. Fat poor people are made to undergo slimming regimes from the past, overseen by Sir Roy in a 19th-century tailcoat, ‘as though I was born to it’.
We also find him putting his house in order, making alterations for the single life, sorting Julia’s papers and trying to effect her last wish: that their garden should go to the National Trust.
There is a problem here: The Laskett’s charms are by their nature more manifest to its creators than to anyone else, though Strong has never had time for divergent views on its merits. He can’t imagine a criticism unmotivated by spite or envy. Consequently, negotiations with the Trust, dragging its feet in a manner instantly readable as a ‘no’ to anyone other than him, are vexed and fractious.
Strong is in some ways a realist. He sees his diaries as ‘the jottings of a self-employed writer observing a scene in which he is no longer a central figure’, and he’s not sure how much they’ll appeal. That’s over-modest. By now, Strong is more than that: he has acceded to the pantheon of the officially Great and Good – a rare consummation of a life. Anyone who wants to know what it’s like up there, on the stretch of the greasy pole nearest to heaven, could do worse than enquire within.
Greatness and Goodness in this country is a strange condition: more of an apotheosis than a promotion, associated but not concomitant with celebrity or distinguished public office. You have to work at it and be the Right Stuff: to love ceremonial and regard dullness in your fellow man as a virtue.
Then you will find yourself queuing to attend the kinds of events that figure here: the Coastal Command Memorial; the Queen’s Diamond Wedding; a supper at Westminster Abbey; the funeral of Billy Tallon, Page of the Back Stair at Clarence House, who liked to greet the Queen Mother’s guests with a full curtsy and died of sclerosis of the liver.
Hosts of senior thespians and junior royalty appear in your social round; and your journals, with their lists of names and hats, may develop symptoms of
Jennifer’s Diary, late of Harper’s & Queen magazine, albeit cattier: ‘Princess Alexandra, beautiful as always, was impeccably attired in dark green velvet and diamonds. Others … fell short.’
Strong had given up his diaries until a friend persuaded him to resume, saying he was ‘this period’s Mr Pepys’. Pepys? It’s a poor analogy for a diarist with dwindling respect for and dying curiosity about this world’s novelties.
There are, of course, passages of impressive penetration and wit: an unimprovable description of an Indian dinner party as ‘hours of alcohol and starvation’, or the critique of the Duchess of Northumberland’s controversial garden at Alnwick Castle: ‘The mistake she made was to bill it as a garden. It’s the modern equivalent of Vauxhall or Ranelagh, pleasure grounds in which things happen.’ A lifetime of discrimination is compressed in that remark.
But the general tone is of perceived decline: ‘Everywhere one looks, it is down, down, down’; ‘We lamented the absence of any great people.’
Where are the great men? Doing The Diets That Time Forgot, perhaps.