Freak fire scare for Snowdon
ONLY a timely intervention by the Earl of Snowdon’s daughter Frances has prevented her society cameraman father’s vast archive of photographs — not to mention his £8 million home — from going up in smoke.
Lord Snowdon, former husband of Princess Margaret, had left a magnifying glass in the sun at his Kensington house.
Lady Frances, 32, who is his daughter by his second wife, Lucy Lindsay-hogg, arrived by chance at her 82-year-old father’s house and discovered a plume of smoke rising from his desk.
‘The sunlight had caught an obscure angle of his magnifying glass and the leather exterior was beginning to smoulder,’ says mother- of-two Frances, who is married to art gallery owner Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal.
‘Within an hour, everything — the scrapbooks, camera equipment, the house I had been brought up in, the studio he has used for 35 years, not to mention my father sitting in the kitchen — would have gone up in smoke.’
The narrow escape has had an unintended consequence. It has prompted Frances — whose husband’s grandfather Hugo was librettist to composer Richard Strauss — to catalogue all her father’s work online.
Just the other day it was revealed that Francis Wheen, deputy editor of Private Eye, lost a 50-year archive of his life and work in a garden shed fire at his Essex home, so her efforts are more than timely.
Frances has set up the Snowdon Archive, which will be launched officially next month.
It features film interviews and exclusive access to her father’s extensive Polaroid albums and 50-odd scrap books dating back to 1957.
Among other things, it includes a brief biography of her father, which relates the fact that he was cox of the winning Cambridge team in the 1950 Boat Race, famously the only time the two teams’ oars touched until this year’s Varsity race.
‘I wanted it to be alive with his stories and not like a retrospective or a museum,’ says Frances. ‘I’m introducing my father’s work to a new generation.’ VETERAN public speakers adjust their remarks to take account of their audience. Not so Michael Winner, who admits the talk he gave to 300 members and guests of the Lady Taverners to celebrate the charity’s 25th anniversary this week was peppered with expletives.
Indeed, when Winner invited guests for questions, he was asked by one woman: ‘Why do you always use such vulgar language?’
This was followed by a man, who bluntly told Winner: ‘There are a lot of ladies present, could you kindly stop using that language.’ According to one guest, even the president, broadcaster Angela Rippon, looked embarrassed. But the film director turned restaurant critic remains unrepentant.
‘I have given this talk thousands of times using the same language — to women’s institutes, the National Film Theatre, the American National Film Institute in Washington and Oxford and Cambridge universities,’ he tells me.
‘No one has ever complained before. I am very surprised. However, Angela told me afterwards that the great majority of the ladies were laughing so much that they cried.’