Yale’s Harkness Tower is, by my estimate, the finest tower in the United States and its designer, James Gamble Rogers, one of the best American architects of his day. JGR is in the Pantheon of his craft, though not quite as highly appreciated as Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue or Ralph Adams Cram.

Harkness Tower is a monument to verticality: from the ground up at each and every stage you expect it could end right there in completeness and beauty — but then it goes another stage higher. Rogers was inspired by the “Boston Stump” of St Botolph’s Church in Lincolnshire but he took that form and creatively expanded and elaborated upon it.

The tower rises 216 feet — one foot for every year Yale existed by the time of its construction.

Yalies – “Elis” – are inveterate founders of drinking clubs which, in order to cultivate a deliberate air of inscrutable mystery, they call “secret societies”, even though many of them are (thankfully) nothing which might rightly be called such.

It was years ago on one of my occasional stays in New Haven for some convivial merriment organised by just such a cabal that my old friend A.B. and I were passing Harkness Tower and I was expounding upon its beauty.

“You know, of course,” A.B. alleged, “it has a secret chapel in it.” I had no such knowledge, and pressed for more information. “Well it’s not quite a chapel, but it feels like one. The university almost never lets anyone use it.”

Universities never do. Once a university has anything, they do their best to stop people using it. (Anyone at Edinburgh University: just try throwing an event in the Raeburn Room in Old College and find out.) (more…)

There is a wonderful glimpse of the old days in the memoirs of the late Lord Waddington (1929-2017).

David Waddington was a Lancashire man who became a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Government Chief Whip, Home Secretary, peer of the realm, and eventually Governor of Bermuda. (In that final role, he was the last of the big dogs — all the ones since have been civil servants.)

The old British constitution — before New Labour’s ill-judged reforms — had a lithe efficiency in those days aptly reflected in quite how few people were employed by the highest court in the realm — and how unfussedly they were officed:

I had only been in the House for two days when I received a telephone call from the clerk of my Manchester chambers asking me if later in the week I was prepared to sit as a deputy County Court judge somewhere in London. This would allow my colleague Bob Hardy, who had contracted with the Lord Chancellor’s Department, to sit as a judge on that day, to take over a brief of mine, a libel action in Leeds.

At the eleventh hour someone pointed out that if I were to sit, my career as an MP would come to an abrupt end because as a result of the House of Commons Disqualification Act I would have disqualified myself from membership of the House, thereby precipitating another by-election. I was then begged by Bob to go and explain to the lady in the Lord Chancellor’s Department why he could not sit and why I had turned out to be an inappropriate replacement.

I set off and, after journeying along many corridors and ascending and descending many staircases, I eventually found a little old lady sitting alone in a tiny office at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the House of Lords.

I apologised for troubling her and she said: ‘I can assure you it is no trouble. In fact I am delighted to see you. I have been in this office for thirty-five years and you are the first person who has ever visited me.’

Old Kinderhook is most famous for being the birthplace of the “Red Fox”, Martin van Buren — sometime inhabitant of London and later President of the United States.

He remains the only President who was not a native English speaker, and he spoke with a thick Dutch accent until the end of his days.

If legend is to be believed (and no evidence has been presented compelling us to do otherwise) the town is also the origin of the word “okay” or “O.K.” — for the “Old Kinderhook” clubs that sprung up to support van Buren’s bid for the White House.

Like many towns up and down the Hudson valley, Kinderhook had its own newspaper — originally named the Kinderhook Herald but which later took up the idiosyncratic name of Rough Notes.

As befits the newspaper of record of an old Dutch settlement, its banner bore the motto Een=dracht maakt macht, a Dutch translation of the old Latin motto of the Seven Provinces that means “Unity makes strength”.

These old and highly localised newspapers were once the chief source of information for people in the surrounding districts and one is pleasantly delighted by the sheer variety of the contents.

In addition to news, agricultural reports, poetry, and the moral and religious column there are reports of the meetings of Congress in Washington and the legislature in Albany, trials for murder, amusing notices from other newspapers in the New World, and news of battles and great events worldwide.

Thanks to the excellent New York State Historic Newspapers online archive you can virtually flip through the pages of this and numerous other periodicals.

Among the lesser-known fleets that have, at some point, sailed at least some of the seven seas was the Royal East African Navy (1953-1962).

The origins of the force are from before the Second World War: Kenya’s Royal Naval Volunteer Reserver had been raised in 1933, Zanzibar’s in 1938, and Tanganyika’s in 1939.

During the war and on a purely ad hoc basis, these were combined with other locally raised Royal Navy forces in the region in 1942 as the East African Naval Force. The EANF was given a statutory basis in 1950, and received the royal dignity and title of ‘navy’ in coronation year of 1953.

Headquartered in Kilindini, Mombasa, the post-war REAN was administered through the East African High Commission, a loose meeting of the governors of the colonies of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda which administered railways, ports, postal services, and the telephone and telegraph network.

The Royal Navy guarded its White Ensign jealously, and was not keen on local colonial maritime forces using it.

Ships of the East African Naval Force were granted temporary permission to fly the White Ensign for the duration of the war under specific conditions, but this privilege ended when victory came.

Precedent would suggest a naval force like this fly a blue ensign instead, defaced with the badge of the colony, but the joint nature of this particular fleet precluded that.

As such, it was decided to devise a badge combining the emblems of Kenya (red lion), Uganda (crane), Tanganyika (giraffe), and Zanzibar (dhow) together into a single badge.

This particular example of the East African blue naval ensign flew from HMEAS Mvita and today rests in the collections of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.

Style, of course, was an essential element of ornamentalism, and another cool late practitioner of the 1950s or 1960s was the British Adviser to the Sultan of Mukalla, on the southern coast of Arabia. The title of Adviser was a euphemism. He really ran the place. The Mukalla governing council actually met in his house, and when I stayed there for a time myself, I sometimes used to walk into his drawing-room to find all its members, in their white gallabiyahs, sitting and arguing there on the sofas, sometimes very solemnly, sometimes laughing their heads off, sometimes banging the floor with their sticks or shouting imprecations at the Adviser – who, since he spoke perfect idiomatic Arabic, gave as good as he got.

His administrative style was not in the least authoritarian, or even paternalistic. In fact it was rather bohemian. If he wanted some coffee during those meetings he gave a piercing blast on a silver whistle; this didn’t seem to have any cataclysmic effect, but sooner or later a servant would shamble in with a pot on a silver dish, and as he served the Adviser he would give me a sly collusive smile, amounting almost to a wink.

Every afternoon the Adviser went for a long walk along the sands of the Indian Ocean, followed at a respectful distance by his driver in his somewhat ramshackle Land Rover. At a fast steady pace he would stride along, sometimes swerving to avoid a string of camels, or people digging holes for crabs, or small boys throwing sand at each other, or old men sitting on their haunches chewing. He had a word for them all, and they replied cheerfully in kind, or giggled, and as he disappeared into the distance, his car chugging hopefully along behind, he used to seem to me a summation of all I liked about the British Empire in its last years – for all its faults, generally kind, generally straight, well-intentioned, a bit too pleased with itself perhaps, a bit too slow to recognize realities, a bit lacking in the old splendour, but diligent, courageous and often rather funny.

And yes, there’s one last ingredient of the imperial ornamentalism that I haven’t touched upon – its humour. For my escapist tastes, humour was a saving grace of the British Empire, and I’d liked to end this resolutely escapist essay with a little cameo to illustrate it. The last of the great imperial adventures was the first ascent of Mount Everest, the top of the world, by a British expedition in 1953. This really was an exploit of empire. The climbing team included two New Zealanders, a Gurkha officer, a former officer of the Black Watch, a former Indian Army engineer, one or two Welshmen, from the final colony, and a Sherpa citizen of that archetypical imperial buffer state, Nepal. I went along to write about it for that old broadsheet of Empire, the London Times.

The most glamorous star of the adventure turned out to be the Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, who actually reached the summit with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary. When we all got back to London we were treated to a very grand banquet by the British Government – the old imperial government. I found myself sitting next to the majordomo of the occasion, a delightful old-school courtier, while opposite me sat Tenzing, out of Asia for the very first time in his life, who could not then read or write, but who looked marvellous.

The old gentleman turned to me halfway through the meal and said he hoped I was enjoying the claret – what the British call red Bordeaux wine. He said it was the last of its vintage in the government cellars, and was probably the last anywhere in the world. Well, I was terribly impressed, of course, and I looked across at Tenzing – who most certainly was enjoying the claret. It was probably the first time he’d ever tasted any wine. The lackeys were filling and refilling his glass, and he was radiant with pride and pleasure. He was a marvellously confident and exotic figure – a prophetic figure, actually.

Presently the old boy turned to me again. ‘Ah’, he said, ‘how very good it is to see that Mr Tenzing knows a decent claret when he has one.’

Sic transit gloria!

In the collections of the American Numismatic Society — formerly resident at Audubon Terrace but lately removed further south to Varick Street — there is a fine example of letters patent from the year 1786, signed by Governor George Clinton and validated by the Great Seal of the State of New York.

Letters patent are a form of open declaration by a sovereign or head of state, usually conferring the grant of an office, title, land, or rights. The most well-known patents are those covering the intellectual property of scientific inventions, issued by bodies like the United States Patent and Trademark Office or the UK’s Intellectual Property Office.

These particular letters patent deal with a land grant made to one Joshua Mersereau. From a family of Huguenot extraction, Mersereau studied at King’s College and ran a tavern on Staten Island. When America’s first civil war erupted in 1775, he joined the rebels and was commissioned a major in the “patriot” forces. He also represented his island’s coterminous County of Richmond in the rebel Provincial Congress that convened at Kingston.

Alongside other members of his family, Major Mersereau organised an effective spy ring that gathered useful operational intelligence on the movements of British and loyal American forces in the Hudson Valley, Staten Island, and neighbouring parts of New Jersey. It was likely for that contribution, as well as for his political influence more broadly, that this grant of land was made.

(more…)

The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

There’s a Dutch vibe to Cambridge that I rather like — but also a lingering Protestant Cromwellianism that I don’t. These two factors are not unconnected, and the highway that once was the North Sea is not so far away.

It is not a bad town. It’s like they took Oxford apart, put it back together again in not quite the same way, and added a lot of Regency infill. Oxford is more mediaeval, Georgian, and neo-mediaeval, whereas Cambridge is mediaeval, Tudor, and Regency.

The Cam is slower, quieter, and more peaceful than the Isis, which again gives it the quality of a Hollandic canal. I suspect the punting is better — or at least easier — here than at Oxford.

And of course it is rather more spacious than Oxford, which is hemmed in by geography in a way that Cambridge isn’t.

But it is also eerily quieter. A smart restaurant on a Thursday night was dead by half ten, and the staff refused our plaintive request for a second round of Tokay. (Protestantism.)

There is much talk these days of the nature of “high trust” societies and the many benefits which they bring, or once brought in the case of countries like Great Britain that, until relatively recently, fell into this category.

The young Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) was astounded when he exited the Underground station at Piccadilly Circus and saw a pile of newspapers and a box of coins and notes, with passers-by being trusted to pay for their own newspaper and calculate their own change. He determined that Singapore must emulate the high trust society that Britons had inherited.

In his excellent book, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793-1815, about the logistics of Britain’s fight against Old Boney, Roger Knight writes of how much trade and agriculture across Great Britain relied upon this trust.

Drovers, for example, would take on thousands of pounds worth of animals — pigs, cattle, etc. — from farmers to drive down to London en masse, not returning for weeks, and usually with little or no paper record.

Citing Bonser’s The Drovers: Who They Were and How They Went, An Epic of the English Countryside, Knight relays the following story:

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of trust was the tradition of dogs being sent home to Scotland or Wales from London on their own. One story involved a Welsh dog named Carlo who journeyed all the way back to Wales from Kent. His owner sold the pony that he had ridden on the outward journey, intending to go home by coach. He fastened the pony’s harness to the dog’s back and attached a note to it, addressed to each of the inns on the route they had followed, to request food and shelter for the dog, to be repaid on a subsequent journey. Carlo reached home in Wales alone in a week.

Even dogs benefited from a high-trust society.

In the collections of the New-York Historical Society there is a photograph deposited amidst the archives of the Seventh Regiment Gazette.

The scene is the Appleton Mess of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where Company B of the “Silk-Stocking Regiment” was celebrating its one-hundred-and-thirty-fourth birthday.

It was May 1940. The other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British troops were evacuating from Norway, sparking the debate in the House of Commons that would lead to Winston Churchill being appointed Prime Minister.

But on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, all was still peaceful and calm.

With a packed calendar of events, the social life of B Company was as much of a whirl as any other in the Seventh Regiment.

“The members of the Second Company greeted the onrushing spring with a cocktail party and dance on the afternoon of February 11th,” the Gazette reported. “The time-stained rafters of the Veterans Room echoed back as melodious a medley of sweet, swing, and hot as these old ears have heard in many a year.”

“The spaghetti lovers are still meeting down at Tosca’s on Tuesdays,” the Gazette continued. “All members who drop in on this crowd are warned beforehand to eat fast and keep an eye on their plate. A darting fork awaits all unwatched portions and men have been known to sit down to a full dish of Italian cable only to arise half famished.”

Company B’s Entertainment Committee also found time for a Supper Dance at the end of March that year: “When Charley Botts heard ‘In The Mood’ he gathered up the jitterbugs and sent them scampering around in a breathless Big Apple, much to the delight of the wiser and unbruised amongst us who resisted his wiles.”

“Several of the more energetic members closed the evening by visiting that well-known late spot, the Kit-Kat Club, and are now offering mortgages on the family homestead to settle future bills.”

All the faces, the mode of dress — it’s a picture of a vanished New York, a year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Incidentally, December 7, 1941 was also the day Col. Cusack — aka ‘Uncle Matt’ — was baptised.)

On another level, it looks just like the Seventh Regiment Mess I knew from my childhood, when it was in the firm but welcoming hands of Linda MacGregor.

The building has been restored physically but since the military was kicked out it is a beautiful but lifeless hulk, preserved as if in formaldehyde and reduced to being a mere “venue”.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The threefold division of the world

[…]

One of the little tragedies of New York urbanism is that when Archer Milton Huntington was transforming a block of upper Manhattan into an acropolis of culture he failed to buy the entire block.

Huntington named his complex Audubon Terrace in honour of the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon whose home, Minniesland, overlooked the Hudson at the western end of the block. His failure to obtain Minniesland meant that the remainder of the block was snapped up by developers instead of incorporated into his campus.

In the 1910s, the speculators built apartment buildings that turned their rather rude and unadorned backs to Audubon Terrace, terminating the vista from Broadway. When you imagine the potential prospect all the way to the river, it is all the more tragic.

The crass posterior of these apartment blocks naturally dissatisfied the members of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, whose building sits on either side — and indeed beneath — the part of the terrace immediately adjacent to them.

McKim Mead & White had designed the first phase of the Academy’s handsome building facing on to West 155th Street, which opened in 1923, and Cass Gilbert was chosen to design the auditorium and pavilion which would complete the body’s portion of the site.

The Academy used the pavilion for art exhibitions and other events, with the terrace in between serving as a useful spot for springtime drinks parties for the academicians and their many guests.

The infelicitous nature of their neighbours clearly irritated the Academy, and in 1929 they had a conversation with Cass Gilbert about designing some sort of screen to satisfyingly terminate the vista down Audubon Terrace and block the view of the apartment buildings.

Gilbert sketched out a plan to build an arched screen connecting the pavilion to the main building across the terrace, topped off by a sculptural flourish.

There is a danger its scale may have overwhelmed the space, but that seems a preferable struggle to face when compared to the problem of the rude neighbours.

Events, as they so often do, intervened. The Wall Street Crash badly affected the American Academy’s finances, and Archer Huntington was forced to increase his already generous subsidy to the body even more just to make ends meet.

Gilbert’s final completion of Audubon Terrace was not to be.

The Academy was founded as a bastion of the old guard against the avante-garde, but in recent decades it has let its hair down a little, and leans more towards the modern than the traditional.

All the same, its current president is an English-public-school-and-Cambridge-educated philosopher from one of the most aristocratic families in Ghana, so it’s reassuring they’re keeping a bit of the old with the new.

The terrace is often used as a filming location for cinema and television, given the high quality of its architecture and the fact that it is visually not well-known even among New Yorkers, so can be deployed as a foreign setting.

The HBO programme ‘Boardwalk Empire’ used the American Academy’s terrace as an Italian port, using green screens (instead of a Cass Gilbert monumental arch) to transform the piazza.

Audubon Terrace and its surviving institutions — the expanding and renovating Hispanic Society, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza — are an intriguing hidden gem of upper Manhattan, well worth a visit.

I don’t imagine anything like Cass Gilbert’s screen will ever be built, but every time I drop in to this neck of the woods I can’t help but thinking there’s some unfinished business.

Instagram: @andcusack

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