Innholdsfortegnelse for 28-Jul-2021 i Country Life

HURRAH for the Proms. This extraordinary festival of music, one of the best achievements of the BBC, invariably amazes with its range and quality: a testament to London’s claim to be the music capital of the world. Now, it’s more welcome than ever. Recorded music, however well the sound engineers have done their work, is no substitute. Nothing replaces the thrill, drama and risk of a live performance. The promenading tradition lives; you can still buy tickets on the day for a smidgen over £7. There is joy in rubbing shoulders (metaphorically: there will no doubt be a degree of distancing) with other enthusiasts. Homo sapiens is a social species. For those at home, 20 Proms are being broadcast on BBC 4: Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Elgar’s Cello Concerto…

THE flip side to the controversy over last week’s BBC Panorama programme, The Dark Side of Horse Racing—which revealed upsetting scenes from F. Drury & Sons in Swindon, Wiltshire, one of only three licensed equine abattoirs in the UK, of former racehorses being euthanised inhumanely, contrary to regulations—is the programme’s apparent failure to recognise how life for former racehorses has improved significantly over the past few years, according to statistics from charity Retraining of Racehorses (RoR). RoR was launched in 2000 by the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) to improve the welfare of retired racehorses and currently has 9,010 on its books. Working with organisations such as the RSPCA and World Horse Welfare, RoR promotes and funds long-term sustainable solutions such as rehoming and retraining and stages more than 40 competitions…

‘It is eccentric, and very English, but in a nuanced, non-banner-waving way’ IF the golden age of Hollywood was the 1930s, the British equivalent was the 1940s, when several domestic filmmakers held their own on the international scene, as well as developing distinctive styles of their own. Not least among these was the flamboyant partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger who, in 1942, set up the independent Archers film production company. The pair had already made four films, notably 49th Parallel (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). Each film branded by the instantly memorable trademark of an arrow thwacking into its target, they embarked upon a creative journey that, across 14 years, would deliver the most characterful, romantic and eminently cinematic body of work to ever…

For anybody contemplating a butterfly safari, there are many things to consider, time, the weather, distance and who might be able to accompany you to confirm that the claimed butterflies have been seen. By far the most tricky of these is time, in as much as knowing when the butterflies are going to appear (or not), which is totally unpredictable, unless you are a butterfly. On my safari, the first butterfly seen flying wild was a small tortoiseshell on January 7, which made me wonder why it wasn't hibernating and if butterflies dream. The last butterfly I saw was a Scotch argus at Arnside Knott in the Lake District on August 14. However, every effort must be made to be ready until mid November, in case any unexpected vagrants arrive.…

• The familiar dock, Rumex obtusifolius, was first classified by Carl Linnaeus in 1753. A move from the Rumex family into the Emex family was proposed by Francisco Campdera in 1819, on the grounds that flowers on the same plant were both bisexual and unisexual. However, research by Austrian taxonomist Tanja Schuster indicated that this reasoning was inadequate and the Emex family was demoted to a subspecies of Rumex in 2015 • The dock species Rumex patientia was known in the past as monk's rhubarb-not a wholly wild notion, as dock and rhubarb are members of the Polygonacaea family. Botanically, the dock is unrelated to the burdock, which is of the Asteracaea family • No fewer than 32 insect species attack dock leaves, including the bean aphid and mangold fly…

WHY is most new housing in Britain so awful? To some people, this will seem a highly prejudiced question, implying that development is necessarily a bad thing. They may even claim that it ignores the manifest unfairness of a society in which the older generation owns large houses and youngsters can’t afford anything. Yet to ignore the low aesthetic quality of most house building simply exacerbates the problem. A recent survey showed that two-thirds of the population would never buy a new home. That’s surely a devastating judgement, given the effort to get more new homes built. Public animosity is one factor in Britain’s woefully slow rate of delivering them. When local people fear that development will spoil their surroundings, they oppose it. The tortuous nature of planning creates delay…

THE Scottish Highlands are dotted with bothies, the simple huts that once provided accommodation for itinerant workers and remain a treasured part of its more remote landscape. For Lachlan and Annie Stewart, the husband-and-wife founders of Scottish architecture and design firm Anta, these traditional structures provided the inspiration for a new version, complete with modern creature comforts. ‘During lockdown, we realised the potential of creating a separate space in which to go to work or study—somewhere quiet and not in the house, so you don’t have to pore over books in your bedroom,’ says Annie. The result was a compact and self-contained home-working or accommodation space, designed for year-round use and appropriately called The Bothy, as it is built in the Highlands where Anta is based. Of course, the cabin’s…

Red paisley swimming trunks, £180, Connolly (020–7952 6708; www.connollyengland.com) Sport swim shorts in smoke green Copacabana print, £145, Frescobol Carioca x Garrett Leight (020–3893 3611; www.frescobolcarioca.com) Skydiver/Cloud standard swim shorts, £145, Orlebar Brown (020–3856 3210; www.orlebarbrown.com) Crazy Corel Staniel swim short, £120, Love Brand (020–7373 8338; www.lovebrand.com) Printed swim shorts, £115, Hartford (0800 044 5705; www.mrporter.com)…

London SW1, from £1.763 million Outdoor space is always at premium in central London, making The Broadway, Northacre's six-tower development on the former site of New Scotland Yard's headquarters, especially appealing. Four of the 19 penthouses come with enormous private roof terraces of up to 2,346 sq ft, which take in views of Buckingham Palace, St James's Park, Mayfair, The London Eye and, of course, Westminster. All the apartments, which range from one to five bedrooms, also have access to communal landscaped gardens on the fourth floor. The interiors are almost as beautiful, their contemporary look complemented by luxurious 1920s touches (inspired by the jewellery of the time) and a nod to the site's historic surroundings. The Broadway offers owners a 24-hour concierge service and a vast array of entertaining,…

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE’S Ludgershall Meadows—rare, ancient land that has never been intensively farmed and still shows evidence of medieval ridge-and-furrow ploughing—could be lost if the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) cannot raise £330,000 to buy it. The 77-acre plot is home to two of the UK’s rarest butterfly species—black and brown hairstreaks—plus protected great crested newts (above), linnets, reed buntings (below) and skylarks. ‘Floodplain-meadow habitat of the type found here is extremely rare—there are fewer than 1,500 hectares [3,707 acres] in the whole country,’ says BBOWT’s Debbie Lewis. ‘If we don’t buy this land, it is in serious jeopardy from being turned into pony paddocks… resulting in a permanent and irretrievable loss of wildlife.’ Visit www.bbowt.org.uk/ludgershall…

TRIBUTES have poured in for John Woodcock OBE, the finest of all cricket writers, who died on July 18 aged 94. Best known for his writing in The Times (1954–87), he was also COUNTRY LIFE’s last ever cricket correspondent (1962–91), filing meticulous Test Match summaries. Charming, unassuming and universally admired, he loved cricket, the countryside and the Hampshire village of Longparish, where he was born the son of the vicar and died in the same cottage he moved into in 1947. The River Test flows through the village and Woodcock was an accomplished fisherman. He also loved shooting and his ideal day was walking up wild partridge with local farming friends. Woodcock contracted septic arthritis and nearly died aged 15, resulting in seven hip replacements. When asked whether they were…

YOU people are obsessed with speed,’ warns Michael Morpurgo’s tortoise in a new poem written to accompany Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical depiction of our reptilian friends. ‘Imagine an Olympics where the slowest wins... Take it easy and you’ll go happy.’ The author recently recorded the verses alongside the Kanneh-Mason siblings —with additional narration from Olivia Colman —and the updated Carnival of the Animals will be performed live at this year’s Proms. The original text by Ogden Nash focuses on human dominance over wildlife (‘The kangaroo can jump incredible. He has to jump because he’s edible’), but the Devon-based former Children’s Laureate has written from the animals’ perspective and draws on local dialect—his kangaroos ‘lorrup’. ‘Lorruping means to stroll about with the occasional hop and skip,’ he says. ‘It’s a beautiful word.’…

It's time to wave goodbye to the puffins as they head back to sea, where they will spend the next eight months or so bobbing about on the North Atlantic waves and diving swiftly and effortlessly for food. Puffins are among the most endearing of birds, with their orange, webbed feet, black-and-white dinner-suit plumage and large, cleverly hinged bill, with the distinctive red, orange and grey markings that led sea-faring folk to call them sea parrots. The white undercarriage and black uppers give them good camouflage against both aerial and marine predators. When they return next spring, it will be to resettle in colonies on remote islands and cliffs, in comparative safety. Couples will reunite with a touching display of beak rubbing and return to familiar burrows if possible, waddling…

I WAS interested to read Athena’s article about the management of railway stations (July 14). It made me think of my late brother, renowned Yorkshire artist Graeme Willson, who was described in his obituary as the country’s leading mural artist and was commissioned to produce two, titled Passengers, for Surbiton Railway Station in the early 1980s. They earned acclaim from art critics and a local newspaper said: ‘An Art Deco station on the outside and inside it housed one of London’s most impressive grand scale examples of commissioned public art.’ The murals were there for about 15 years, until being torn down and thrown in a skip without warning. There was public outrage, but it was too late. Graeme dedicated his life to creating beauty and to bringing art out…

WHEN did I become obsessed with butterflies? The answer is simple—I don’t know. As a child, I quickly became aware of them. There were white ones, ‘cabbage whites’, that father blamed for eating our cabbages as caterpillars; brightly coloured ones in the spring that fluttered against the window panes, trying to get out of the house; and others in the autumn that tried to get in. However, at that stage, that is as far as me and butterflies went. Then, years later, I met an amazing countryman—well, a Londoner who had moved into the countryside as a child during the Second World War as an evacuee—called Gordon Beningfield. By the time our paths crossed, he had metamorphosed from an urban child at risk from war into a quite extraordinary watercolour…

I’M hazy about the exact time, but it’s about 2pm and a summer’s afternoon like they used to make. Pulsating sun, sultry, nothing stirring, except for a desultory cabbage white butterfly, nothing sounding except for crickets in the long grass on the lane. The birds, exhausted by breeding, have entered the great July silence. One bird only sings: a wood pigeon deep in the lime tree, roocooing absent-mindedly, soporifically. A countryside so stilled and breathless it seems trapped in a sequence of landscape paintings: pale Limousin cattle grouped under the parasol of an oak; the field of creamy, heavy-headed wheat awaiting cutting; the Light Sussex hen sprawled in a dust bath; the hay meadow awaiting the scythe; the horse, nose forwards into the high hedge, submerged in mauve shade. And,…

A FEW miles outside Macclesfield is Henbury Hall. Based on Palladio’s Villa Capra, ‘La Rotonda’ (‘Variations on perfection’, May 19), it is a neo-Classical feat of modern architecture. It was the brainchild of the designer Felix Kelly, his client, businessman Sebastian de Ferranti, and the Classical architect Julian Bicknell. Completed in 1986, it represents the extreme of a conundrum faced by those planning to build a house: does one go for a traditional style or a more modern look? Whatever the direction, it doesn’t have to be about extremes. Architect-turned-landscape designer Anna Spruit would be the first to admit that this dilemma wasn’t an issue when she began planning a house in West Sussex. ‘I wanted it to be modern because I am an architect—I wouldn’t have considered building anything…

Sail away with me BRITISH yacht-broker Edmiston has seen record-breaking sales this year already—selling an astonishing 25 yachts (all more than 100ft long) so far in 2021 (January 1–July 1). Ten of these have been more than 165ft in length. It all equates to a total sale value of €490 million (£423.5 million). Perhaps it’s the Covid effect—a floating holiday home being the perfect place to create a bubble and isolate. ‘In 2020, we sold 25 yachts. We have surpassed this figure in the first six months of this year already,’ informs Edmiston’s commercial director (www.edmiston.com). Mind, body and soul ILAPOTHECARY is a modern-day company addressing modern-day issues, but with its roots firmly planted in the remedies and techniques of the past. Here, you can have treatments that heal and…

Styled…

NOT many artists make their best work last, but Hepworth made The Family of Man (1970) near the end of her life, nine totemic walking figures originally intended for a Cornish hillside. They might be primeval ancestors or ancient Britons or a bronze family made for herself, in lieu of the flesh-and-blood people whom she had lost. A complete group stands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park, but there are part sets at Wakefield and on the saltmarshes at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, as well.…

Puzzlers After a 16-month hiatus, the COUNTRY LIFE crossword competition is back! See page 116 Leicestershire It's finally become the last English county to have an officially recognised flag; the new standard features a running fox and cinquefoil Pig English North American parents have noticed their children talking with an English accent-‘tomato' instead of ‘toe-may-toe' and so on-and using words such as ‘telly' and ‘biscuits'; it's called the Peppa Pig effect, after the world's second-most popular kids' cartoon Boys about town A few weeks ago it was Gainsborough's Blue Boy; now, it's Sir Thomas Lawrence's Red Boy that has been saved for the nation, with the National Gallery committing to pay £9.3m for the painting Homeowners Some 4.6m properties-21% of UK homes-have increased in value this past year by more…

FOUR bronze tortoises stolen from Kingston Lacy in Dorset nearly 30 years ago have finally ambled home, where they are now on display. Created in 1853 by Marochetti—the Italian sculptor responsible for the Trafalgar Square lions—they were commissioned by Egyptologist William John Bankes, as part of a set of 16 to support four Verona marble urns. He even dropped off one of his beloved pet tortoises in the artist’s Paris studio for casting. They remained in the grounds of Kingston Lacy for 140 years until 1992, when a gardener spotted the theft. ‘Hope had faded over the years of recovering the stolen bronzes, so I was astonished this spring to be contacted by Tim Knox, director of the Royal Collection and a former head curator at the National Trust, to…

MY creepy-crawly numbers are increasing in leaps and bounds. Not mowing a major part of the garden grass since May has made a huge difference. Although the summer cut to encourage wildflowers has finished and many of the bees have transferred to the lavender and the buddleia, I’m still some way from learning how to distinguish between the different types, at least that fraction of the more than 250 UK species that have settled in my patch. The profusion of hovering insects and butterflies lifts the heart, but sadly contrasts with the sterility of the fields over the road where they still think that bombing insects out of existence is the way forward. ‘When it comes to Beatrix Potter, I’m on Mr McGregor’s side’ Mind you, I have to confess…

‘This blew my mind, standing in front of it. It is a phenomenally beautiful painting. Have you ever seen a cluster of glasses on a sideboard more perfectly painted? Have you ever felt the cool breeze of a fan so clearly or the plasticky leaf of a house plant more plainly? You know that sofa is sticky and those wall tiles are cool. It’s a visceral painting, a painting full of feeling. When I noticed the title, I felt the feeling. The chanting of Breonna Taylor’s name after she was shot in her own apartment in Kentucky. The line in the Bible is “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”. What comfort, but such beauty’ John McEwen comments on Blessed are those who mourn JENNIFER PACKER was…

Michael Powell (1905–90) was the Kent-born son of a hotelier on the French Riviera who honed his directorial skills in second features in the 1930s, having initially worked with Rex Ingram, a director of silent spectaculars. Emeric Pressburger (1902–88) was a Hungarian writer of screenplays in Germany in the 1930s before the political atmosphere hotted up, causing him to flee and eventually arrive in London. Here, he first teamed up with Powell on the atmospheric, John Buchan-esque thriller The Spy In Black (1939), starring Conrad Veidt. Pressburger became Powell's favourite screenwriter and, from 1943 to 1955, 13 films attributed production, writing and direction to the pair (although Powell was essentially the director, drawing on his partner's creative input). They were often controversial. Winston Churchill tried to ban The Life and…

STUNG by nettles? Rub the rash with a dock leaf. Who doesn’t know that? And it appears it was always so. The Anglo-Saxon chronicles of the late 9th century recorded it. In 1386, in Troilus and Creseyde, Chaucer quoted an ancient charm to be recited as the leaf was applied: ‘Netle in, dokke out.’ Folk practice and herbal advice down the centuries confirmed the idea and it was surely no coincidence that nettle and dock so often grew in close proximity. The efficacy of the dock leaf in countering the chemicals released by Urtica dioica may be dismissed by modern pharmacology (the rubbing action may be what matters most), but generations have sworn by it. Relief from nettle stings was only part of a wider medicinal bounty apparently offered by…

Asali ‘There are many luxury leather brands on the market, but Asali is the only one inspired by and created for aviation professionals' HAVING spotted a market for beautifully made leather products, Mindy Arora set up Asali (which means ‘genuine’ in Hindi) when faced with the recurring dilemma of what to buy her husband, a fighter pilot, for his birthday. Attending endless airshows with him, the founder noticed that the aviation merchandise on offer was not up to scratch for those with an eye for high-end pieces. Now, Asali makes buttery-soft leather weekend bags, wash bags, briefcases and more, all inspired by aviation. Although targeting men, I think they would all look equally stylish on a woman’s arm. A percentage of sales go to Royal Airforce charities. For keen pilots,…

JUST as the country-house market seemed to be coming off the boil, three small manor houses, each set in gardens of distinction in a prime South of England location, have suddenly burst onto the scene. Paul Finnegan of Savills (07967 555513) is handling the sale of historic, Grade I-listed Rymans in the parish of Appledram, West Sussex, a picturesque coastal area three miles south-west of Chichester, bounded to the west by the main channel of Chichester Harbour, to the north by the River Lavant and to the south by a stream that runs into the harbour below Birdham Mill. He quotes a guide price of £4.5 million for Rymans, described by Pevsner as ‘a delightful small 15th-century manor house’, which takes its name from William Ryman, a prominent merchant and…

ONE would never guess from the street that there would be so much to discover in the garden behind Colebrook House, a Grade II-listed, 17th-century Cotswold-stone building. It would be charming, of course (the village of Blockley was the setting for the ‘Father Brown’ series), with a narrow stream, the Cole Brook, running prettily along the leafy front garden before disappearing in a sudden rush into the ground. But no one ever anticipates the size of the garden nor the series of surprises that await behind the high walls. Gardens are the result of a combination of influences, the most important of which are its location and its owners. In this case, both have united to produce many delightful and entirely unexpected effects, the first being the new Italian-influenced walled…

BARBARA HEPWORTH was born into a sepia world before feminism was invented. As a would-be artist, she faced far greater hurdles than her male coevals and especially the sculptor Henry Moore, with whom she was compared throughout her life. However, she held on to her ambition, explaining herself in essays, manifestos and a propagandising A Pictorial Autobiography, which laid down boundaries for what future audiences could know or write about her. In middle age, she emerged into the limelight as an awkward pioneer in the history of modern art, whose signature pierced forms and expressive, dynamic public sculptures had found a new, global audience. All this was achieved at some personal cost and by ferocious determination and control, both in her lifetime and posthumously. The measures that Hepworth took ensured…

IN one of his final columns (November 23, 1989) my predecessor Frank Davis admitted: ‘I am no racegoer, and never have been. I expect that is why I am so often bored by the many fine pictures by which Munnings made his name and his fortune.’ However, he added: ‘What I do admire beyond measure is Munnings’s early work, in which he shows himself not merely skilful, but completely at home at country fairs and with country people.’ It was a watercolour of a Norfolk horse fair that had sparked his enthusiasm, as well as that of bidders, when it sold that year for £38,500 at Lawrence of Crewkerne, Somerset. In fact, when the early work was not early, but brand new, it did not always find favour with the…