An artist’s vision in stone
John Martin Robinson applauds this beautiful monograph on the outstanding creation of a visionary owner and a host of talented artists and craftsmen
Architecture Henbury
Jeremy Musson (Pimpernel Press, £50)
THIS beautiful book pays splendid tribute to the finest late-20th-century Classical house in England, which was developed from an initial concept for a domed banqueting temple. Built in 1986–87, Henbury Hall in Cheshire was inspired by the Palladian Villa Rotunda at Vicenza and its English 18th-century derivations at Mereworth, Chiswick, Nuttall and Foots Cray. It is, however, much more compact in scale and owes its detail as much to Vanbrugh as to Palladio; indeed, it is closer to Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard.
Much of the impact of Henbury comes from its setting in an old landscaped park in the foothills of the Peak District. It is a miniature Palladian palace, complete with dome and four porticoes, in a miniature mountain landscape; there is a ‘rightness’ about it that seems pre-ordained.
The house was the brainchild of Sebastian de Ferranti (1927– 2015), a remarkable man who was chairman of the electrical engineering firm founded by his grandfather. After he stepped down from the industrial leviathan of Ferranti in 1982, he channelled his energies and vision into the creation of this extraordinary place. Jeremy Musson gives detailed coverage to the family background, including a chapter on the firm and a biography of de Ferranti as man and patron, which helps to anchor this unusual project in its national and human context.
The Henbury estate had been acquired after the Second World War by Sir Vincent de Ferranti, who intended to build a new house on the site, having demolished
a derelict and dull predecessor. Instead, he converted the stables (called the Tenants’ Hall) and the idea for a new house passed to the next generation. His son Sebastian’s first idea was to erect a park pavilion over the cellars of the old house and various sketch schemes were considered.
The key person behind the design was the New Zealand artist Felix Kelly, well known for his romantic views of country houses and work for George Howard at Castle Howard. At Henbury, he had ‘gothicked’ a subsidiary house, The Cave, for the Ferrantis in the 1970s. Then, in 1981, he painted a romantic oil view of a domed rotunda.
Henbury is thus a remarkably 18th-century concept: an architectural project derived from a painting. The romantic dream, however, needed an architect to translate it into reality.
Quinlan Terry produced initial designs, which obtained planning permission, but client and architect were temperamentally unsuited and Sebastian turned instead to Julian Bicknell, who had worked with Felix Kelly on new rooms at Castle Howard.
Mr Bicknell was responsible for ingenious changes to make the design more habitable. A masterstroke was to increase the size of the two main rooms on the piano nobile—the drawing room and dining room—by extending them unobtrusively into the side porticoes. Another clever touch was contriving the second-floor bathrooms in the pediment roofs of the porticoes.
The house is like a tailored suit of clothes, entirely made for its owner’s practical needs and visionary ideals. All this is described perfectly in the book.
The other masterstroke of Henbury is the craftsmanship: the house is a testament to the astonishing revival of traditional English craft skills from the 1980s onwards. As in the contemporary restoration of Spencer House in London, the key figure was Dick Reid of York, a master carver who understands the Classical Orders. He advised on all the detail, as well as executing the wood- and stone-carving.
The plasterwork was done by craftsmen from Liverpool who survived from the glory days of fitting ocean liners—a nice Northern touch. David Mlinaric was the interior decorator.
Mr Musson’s book, which features a foreword by The Prince of Wales, is a fascinating record of a unique building, as well as a visual treat.
Henbury is an 18th-century concept: an architectural project derived from a painting
History/biography
Code Name: Lise Larry Loftis (Mirror Books, £18.99)
THIS IS THE STORY of the woman known to her collaborators as Lise, who became the Second World War’s most highly decorated spy.
Odette Sansom was born and brought up in France, but married an Englishman and settled in England before the war. When France was overrun by the Germans, she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive as a liaison agent between the French resistance movement and its supporters and suppliers in England.
The task was fraught with danger, but Odette was not deterred by this; her father had been killed in the First World War and her grandfather, who had foreseen another war with Germany in the 1930s, told her ‘it will be your duty to do as well as your father did’. The young agent was determined to live up to these expectations.
What makes this book so memorable is the very real sense it conveys of the day-by-day and hour-by-hour hazards of operating in a Gestapo-dominated environment. Any lapse from the highest standards of security would almost certainly be fatal, resulting in capture, interrogation, torture and execution. The most frequent slip was spending too long to send radio messages back to England; a slow hand at tapping out Morse-code messages could result in the Gestapo getting cross-bearings on the location of the transmitter.
Waiting for supply aircraft to land and messages to be passed on required steely nerves. Fluency in languages was also important; one radio operator could swear convincingly in four.
The author describes in detail the grim conditions that Odette endured after she was caught and imprisoned, the interrogation techniques of the Gestapo and the horrendous tortures inflicted on her. That she was not killed by her captors was probably due to the fact that they believed she was then married to her SOE comrade (and future husband) Peter Churchill, whom they assumed to be related to Winston Churchill. They decided the couple were too conspicuous as prisoners to be randomly murdered.
Odette not only survived these experiences, but also maintained her silence on all the information regarding her fellow operatives until she was eventually liberated by the victorious Allies.
After the war, she was awarded the George Cross and made the subject of a Royal Mail postage stamp in recognition of her courage and devotion to the cause of free France. She also testified in war-crimes trials, married twice and, proving herself to be truly one of life’s survivors, lived to the age of 82. John Ure
Publishing Faber & Faber: The Untold Story
Toby Faber (Faber & Faber, £20)
THE NAME Faber & Faber is a byword for respectable, independent, old-fashioned literary publishing. T. S. Eliot dignified the company’s offices for 40 years, establishing it in the vanguard of 20th-century Modernism with authors from Joyce and Pound to Auden and Spender. Post-war poets featured Hughes and Larkin, then Heaney and Muldoon.
Charles Monteith, new blood in Faber & Faber’s office, discovered Strangers from Within, an unpromising novel written by a Salisbury schoolmaster, on the ‘slush pile’, lopped off the first chapter and relaunched it as Lord of the Flies. Robert Mccrum, later new blood, introduced Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro and Milan Kundera.
Yet this story, engagingly told in scrapbook form by Toby Faber, grandson of the founder, is of a firm lurching from disaster to disaster. Drawing largely on its exhaustive archive, he gives affectionate portraits of the principals—geoffrey Faber, Eliot, Richard (son of Walter) de la Mare among them—meeting for the ‘Book Committee’, firewatching during the war, turning down Animal Farm (the fish that get away...), but always in a dizzy spin about money.
When the dynamic American Frank Morley was invited to join the new firm in 1929, he was strongly discouraged by Alfred Harcourt of Harcourt Brace. Faber’s, asserted Harcourt, was ‘a bunch of Oxford amateurs’. Indeed, Geoffrey Faber, for most of his publishing career, doubled as Estates Bursar of All Souls College, Oxford, his one secure source of income. Monteith, his 1950s recruit, was another All Souls Fellow, decried by Warden Sparrow, snobbishly, as having ‘flair, but not taste’. (Eliot commented, wisely, that he found ‘taste’ a handicap.)
Faber, a decent man with more taste than flair, fell into publishing by accident. In 1924, he took over the Scientific Press, in which the wife of Maurice Gwyer, yet another All Souls Fellow, had an interest.
Faber & Gwyer, sustained by the pair’s weekly The Nursing Mirror, lasted five years, until the partners fell out and Faber substituted a non-existent twin. With Eliot on the board, Faber & Faber’s list would be never less than distinguished, but, over its 90 years, it has been the random titles that paid the bills—from Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? (1930), an investigation of the Resurrection, to Derek Llewellyn-jones’s Everywoman: A Gynaecological Guide for Life (1971) and The Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book (1985).
The ultimate saviour of the firm’s independence was announced in 1936 as Mr Eliot’s Book of Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats. Published as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in 1939, it was adapted for the stage 40 years later by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cats brought untold millions into the firm’s coffers and 50% of Faber & Faber is now owned by a trust set up by Eliot’s widow. James Fergusson
Nature Stronghold
Tucker Malarkey (Short Books, £16.99)
THROUGH THE confederacy of fly-fishing, the world can be changed. That is the message of this story of Guido Rahr, a backwoods boy from Oregon, who, as a young tearaway, bunked off school to catch reptiles and trout and, later, would take his fight to protect wild salmon to Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. Flyfishing connected this loner to like-minded oddballs and world leaders. Disparate individuals they may have been, but angling was a remarkable bond.
The fish that inspired his mission was the salmon, in particular the seven species native to the Pacific coasts of Russia, Canada and America. By the 1990s, their survival in his north-western American homeland was seriously threatened. Poaching was out of control; on Sakhalin Island, thousands of salmon were being stripped of their eggs and left lying 3ft deep in the forest—a modernday parallel to the extinction saga of the Great Plains bison.
Mr Rahr became a crusader for the salmon, convening meetings of fly-fishermen, businessmen and politicians in places that took three days to reach.
He was involved in groundbreaking scientific trips, which proved that spawned salmon, scavenged by bears and Arctic mammals, underpinned the whole forest ecology on Russia’s pristine Kamchatka, location of the world’s great unknown salmon rivers. His concept of ‘strongholds’ envisaged properly protected safe havens for the cherished fish.
The author, Tucker Malarkey, journeyed with Mr Rahr to the remotest great river in Siberia, the Tugur, and witnessed extraordinary meetings between extraordinary people. All of this, including how she got injured along the way, she describes with elan. In the final chapters, she gives a vivid account of fishing for the mysterious taimen, the biggest salmon of all, in turbulent, log-jammed, wilderness torrents.
This book is both a wonderful adventure story and an inspiring lesson in how to achieve effective species conservation that bridges hostile continents. Michael Wigan Michael Wigan is the author of ‘The Salmon’ (William Collins)