Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  Before long, he has developed a daily routine around Piccadilly: morning coffee at Fortnum’s, tea at the Ritz, dinner at Wilton’s. A pivotal figure in Swinging London, he lives the life of a Regency dandy. ‘There’s a timelessness here,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t really surprise me to find the streets crowded with carriages.’

  Albany has long possessed an almost collegiate feel, standoffish yet distantly familiar, with a suggestion of louche goings-on behind closed doors. Lord Byron once lived here, and so too did Edgar Lustgarten.104 The first act of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is thought to be based in B1, while the fictitious gentleman burglar Raffles also lives in Albany. Marmion Savage in The Bachelor of the Albany (1848) describes it, not inaccurately, as ‘the hospital for incurable oddities, the home of homeless gentlemen’.

  When Stamp moves in, he finds that another set is occupied by the leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, a solitary bachelor, guarded and prickly, the complete opposite of swinging.

  Heath took over F2 in 1963, on a seven-year lease at £670 a year, following the death of Clifford Bax, the brother of the composer Arnold. He was then aged forty-seven. Employing the interior designer Jo Pattrick, he set about redecorating it in a style described by his official biographer as ‘assertively modern yet classically restrained’, with cream walls, orange curtains, a chocolate carpet, and black leather Scandinavian armchairs. The walls are decorated with prints of uniformed soldiers, two landscapes by Winston Churchill (presented to him by the artist) and a lithograph by Picasso. On the mantelpiece stands a variety of white porcelain horses from the Spanish Riding School. Photographs of Heath with the Queen, Khrushchev and the Pope are on display on a special shelf. A Steinway grand piano105 dominates the drawing room.

  One day, the stiff, awkward, virginal leader of the opposition takes the unusual step of inviting his relaxed, fashionable, sexually charged neighbour to lunch. A few days later, Stamp describes their three-hour meeting to his friend, the author John Fowles, who duly records it in his diary:

  ‘He could have learnt a lot, but he just couldn’t get the groove, didn’t seem to hear what I said.’ Apparently Heath said that Wilson106 frightened him and hurt him in the House. Terry’s remedy was this: ‘OK, you’re sitting on the Opposition Front Bench, old Wilson gets up. As soon as he starts annoying you, you just think, This morning Harold got up at Number Ten, he went downstairs to the kitchen, got out the best tea, warmed the pot, did it all perfect, took it upstairs to the old woman, thinking, Maybe this is it, this time, she’ll open her arms and we’ll have a lovely screw. Instead of which the old bag just says, Oh gawd, and turns over and goes to sleep again. You just think, It’s not me he’s trying to hurt, it’s his missus or whatever. All I got to do is work out what it is in Wilson’s life that makes him have to hurt me. Then I can handle him.’

  Fowles asks Stamp whether Edward Heath has taken this advice to heart.107

  ‘He didn’t understand,’ complains Stamp. ‘He’s forgotten how to listen.’

  EDWARD HEATH

  SINGS TO

  WALTER SICKERT

  Hauteville, St Peters, Kent

  December 1934

  The eighteen-year-old Edward Heath has always been known to his family (though never beyond it) as Teddy. It is a nickname which belies his character. He is aloof, unsmiling and exceptionally diligent, so much so that his doting parents sometimes urge young Teddy to work a little less and play a little more. Not long ago, when his mother entered his room to suggest he might be working too hard, he snapped back: ‘Mother, sometimes I think you don’t WANT me to get on!’

  Born and brought up in Broadstairs in Kent, he attends St Peters Primary School until the age of ten, then gains a scholarship to Chatham House, the fee-paying county grammar school in Ramsgate, three miles down the coast. Though never an outstanding pupil – in classes of thirty, he tends to hover somewhere between fifth and sixteenth – he is a hard worker. He is always immaculately dressed, his hair neat and tidy. But he is not matey, and never joins a gang.108

  He rises to become a conscientious – some would say over-conscientious – prefect. ‘He was very down on kids who had their hands in their trouser pockets, or weren’t behaving well in the street in their school cap and blazer,’ notes one of his teachers.

  His achievements are rife. He wins prizes for his piano playing, and conducts the school orchestra. He is secretary of the debating society – opposing, on different occasions, sweepstakes, Sunday cinemas and co-education – and keeps the score for the first cricket XI. He never steps out of line, or breaks a school rule. In the school nativity play, he is given the part of the Archangel Gabriel.

  In the summer of 1934, he sits the scholarship exam for Balliol College, Oxford. At his interview, he says that his ambition is to be a professional politician, the only time the Tutor for Admissions has ever heard such a reply from a schoolboy. With poor marks in French and in the general paper, he fails to get in, but decides to stay on at school in order to try again next year.

  A keen bicyclist, young Teddy often cycles past a large house in the village of St Peters, near Broadstairs. It used to be called Hopeville, but its new owner has renamed it Hauteville. Sometimes as he bicycles past, Teddy spies paintings hanging out to dry on a clothes line in the garden. Someone tells him that it is the home of the painter Walter Sickert.

  At the age of seventy-four, Walter Sickert is as frisky and freewheeling as young Teddy is dogged and dutiful. He recently flung himself into an affair with the twenty-seven-year-old Peggy Ashcroft, fresh from her success in Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic.109

  ‘As we get older, we get worse!’ he once said. It is an aphorism as fit for his accounting as for his love life. Famously spendthrift – he can never resist taxis, telegrams, clothes, leaseholds or bric-à-brac – Sickert has been on the verge of bankruptcy, owing well over £2,000 to landlords, art dealers, tradesmen and, not least, the Inland Revenue. Some of his friends suspect that, for him, impecunity is the badge of the true artist.

  A group of friends rode to his rescue by launching an appeal, raising £2,050; they then persuaded him to move from London to Kent. This was how he ended up in this large old red-brick house. It has a big garden with an orchard and outbuildings. Local rumour has it that as a child Queen Victoria was out donkey riding in Broadstairs when the animal bolted and carried her all the way to this very garden.

  Among the many improvements Sickert has made to the house are the conversion of the Georgian stable block into a studio and the erection of a hutch-like construction on the east side, where he hangs his paintings out to dry. There is nothing quite like an east wind for drying paint on canvas, he tells his students: it can cut the process down from a fortnight to twenty-four hours.

  Few people in the village know who on earth he is, though his flowing opera cloak, wide-brimmed hat and collarless shirt all serve to flame the suspicion that he might well be an artist. His friendliness further unnerves the inhabitants; he has even been known to invite total strangers into his house for tea and bananas. He is fond of children, and values their opinions. His garden borders on the playground of St Peters Primary School; Sickert sometimes places his canvases outside so that he can hear the comments of the pupils. He advises other artists to do the same. ‘Children always know.’ But, like many artists, he has periods of ennui, and there are times when he is gruff towards unexpected visitors.

  The eighteen-year-old Teddy Heath is a keen choral singer, and one December evening he leads a procession of carol singers up the gravel path to the front door of Hauteville with music sheets in hand. The group sing two carols and then wait expectantly outside the front door, collecting box at the ready.

  But no one emerges. ‘Neither pressing the bell nor using the knocker elicited any response,’ Heath recalls forty years later, ‘but eventually the curtain at the window was drawn aside and through the chink we saw a small, wizened, grey-bearded face.110 Almost immediately the cu
rtain slipped back again. We waited. Then the door, on a chain, was opened a fraction.

  ‘“Go away!” said Sickert, and we left.’

  On his death in 2005, Sir Edward Heath leaves virtually all of his £5.4 million fortune to ensure that his Salisbury home is open to the public.111 The only other twentieth-century British Prime Minister to achieve this distinction is Sir Winston Churchill.

  Among the pictures on display in the house is a study in brooding disappointment which Heath managed to pick up for £19 from the Leicester Gallery shortly after the Second World War, a signed etching called Ennui by Walter Sickert.

  WALTER SICKERT

  INSTRUCTS

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  11 Downing Street

  June 1927

  As Walter Sickert is reading his newspaper, a story catches his eye. It concerns someone he knew when she was a girl of sixteen, over a quarter of a century ago. Clementine Churchill, now married to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Winston Churchill, has, it seems, been knocked down by an omnibus while crossing the road in Knightsbridge.

  The two of them first met when Clementine, then aged fourteen, was holidaying in Dieppe in 1899. Sickert was a friend of her mother, and in the habit of dropping round. Clementine was instantly taken with this bohemian figure with his thick fair hair and piercing green eyes. ‘Clementine was deeply struck by him, and thought he was the most handsome and compelling man she had ever seen,’ writes her daughter Mary, eighty years later.

  Out on shopping errands for her mother, Clementine often bumped into Sickert at work in the streets. One day, she stopped to look at his new painting.

  ‘Do you like my work?’ he asked.

  Clementine paused for just a little too long.

  ‘... Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘What is it you don’t like?’

  Clementine paused again. ‘Well, Mr Sickert, you seem to see everything through dirty eyes.’

  Sickert asked her mother if Clementine could come to tea with him. She climbed the hill to his house in Neuville-lès-Dieppe and was let in by his housekeeper and mistress, the doughty Madame Villain. Sickert was out, so Clementine waited in his bedroom, which she considered ‘very dirty’. ‘I was profoundly shocked and thought, “Perhaps Mother can find Mr Sickert a better housekeeper.”’ When Sickert failed to materialise, she made herself useful by tidying the room. First she made the bed, then swept the floor. Next she picked up the skeleton of a herring from a plate and flung it out of the window, before washing the plate and putting it away.

  At this point, Sickert entered. ‘Where’s my herring?’ he barked.

  ‘I threw it away.’

  ‘You interfering wretch! I was just going to paint it! And where, pray, is the handsome plate it was sitting on?’

  ‘I have washed it and put it on the shelf.’

  But Sickert forgave her, and that winter engraved a portrait of her on her hockey stick with a red-hot poker. Two years later, in Paris, he entertained her for a whole day, introducing her to Camille Pissarro and taking her round the Luxembourg Gallery. During lunch, she asked him who was the greatest living painter. He looked astonished, and replied, ‘I am, of course.’

  Twenty-six years later, Sickert goes to visit the invalid Clementine at Number 11 Downing Street. She introduces him to her husband; the two men hit it off straight away. Churchill is an enthusiastic painter, ever keen to improve. But he is also impatient. Sickert encourages him to slow down, advising him to work from drawings and under-paintings rather than plunging headlong into ‘a riot of colour’, which is Churchill’s usual method.

  In return, the Chancellor of the Exchequer advises the feckless painter on sound financial management. Alas, it goes in one ear and out the other. Sickert has no head for sums, or any inclination for restraint.112

  Over the summer, the Churchills regularly invite Sickert to Chartwell. He arrives in bright red socks, and entertains his hosts after dinner with a selection of music-hall songs. During the day, Churchill sits in the sun, transfixed by his canvas, while Sickert spends most of his time inside the house with the curtains drawn, reading novels. Every now and then, he ventures outside in his opera hat. Churchill begs him to divulge the secret of how to ‘transfer the marvellous greens and purples’ he can see all around him onto the canvas, but Sickert long ago gave up any interest in painting en plein air.

  Some suggest that Sickert has a corrupting influence on Churchill, as he teaches him the advantages of painting from photographs rather than real life. But Churchill thinks differently. ‘I am really thrilled by the field he is opening to me,’ he writes to Clementine. ‘I see my way to paint far better pictures than I ever thought possible before. He is really giving me a new lease of life as a painter.’

  Churchill buys himself a ‘beautiful camera’, and then takes Sickert’s process one stage further, acquiring a projector, too, and tracing the photographic image straight onto the canvas, pioneering a method later taken up by artists like Andy Warhol and David Hockney.

  Painting is Churchill’s most constant source of pleasure, his great escape from the pressures of office.113 ‘With his brushes and paint, he forgot everything, like a child does who has been given a box of paints,’ writes another of his tutors, the painter Paul Maz, adding, ‘Knowing that Winston painted only between crises, it was a refuge for him, and all I ever attempted was to simplify his method and reduce his means and insatiable appetite for colour. He would have eaten a tube of white, he loved the smell of it so.’

  Over the course of this summer, Churchill and Sickert paint portraits of each other. Churchill uses a photograph to paint a small, charming group portrait of himself, Sickert, Randolph Churchill, Diana Mitford and others, all sitting around the tea table at Chartwell. Sickert’s portrait of Churchill proves more controversial. When it is first shown at the Saville Gallery early in 1935, the Sunday Times declares it ‘the most brilliant portrait Mr Sickert has yet executed’. On the other hand, Clementine’s sister Nellie thinks it so unrealistic that she loses her self-control and attacks the manager of the gallery, who, not recognising her, retorts that he doesn’t suppose she has ever even seen Mr Churchill. At this point, reports one observer, ‘much fur flew’.

  Unaware of the fracas, Sickert presents Clementine with one of his studies for the portrait of her husband. At a later date, she somehow contrives to put her foot through it, and the painting is never seen again.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  BARGES IN ON

  LAURENCE OLIVIER

  St James’s Theatre, London SW1

  Summer 1951

  Winston Churchill has long been an admirer of Laurence Olivier, and is keen on two of his films in particular. When Lady Hamilton is released in 1941, he watches it over and over again – perhaps as many as a hundred times, according to one author. He also loves Henry V. ‘We saw the film of Henry V in Technicolor, with Laurence Olivier,’ writes his Private Secretary, Jock Colville, in his diary on November 25th 1944. ‘The P.M. went into ecstasies about it. To bed at 2.30.’

  He admires Olivier as a stage actor, too. During one lengthy speech in his performance of Richard III, Olivier grows aware of another voice speaking his lines. He looks out, and spots Mr Churchill in the fourth row, reciting all the lines in unison.

  The influence runs in both directions, though Olivier is inspired by Churchill in a less predictable way. On holiday in the South of France in 1949, he and his wife Vivien Leigh take up painting, having just read Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime.

  In 1951, the Oliviers are starring in Caesar and Cleopatra. During one performance, Olivier is informed that Churchill is in the audience. In the interval, Olivier is hovering about in his dressing room, wondering how his performance is going down with ‘the great man’, when the door swings open, and there he is. Olivier is too taken aback to say anything.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ says Churchill. ‘I was looking for a corner.’

  Olivier escorts Churchill back,
and points him in the right direction. At the same time, he makes sure there will be someone waiting to take him back to his seats in the auditorium.114

  Churchill goes about his business, returning in time for the second half. As he sits down, he jokes to Mary, ‘I was looking for Loo-Loo, and who do you think I ran into? Ju-Lu!’

  A few weeks later, the actor and the world statesman are introduced in more formal circumstances, when the Duchess of Buccleuch takes Churchill to see Antony and Cleopatra. Olivier is entranced. ‘Adoring him as of course we already did, we found his sweetly polite, unforced kindness, and the courteous generosity of his conversation an unforgettable example,’ he records in his convoluted prose. In his encounters with other politicians, Olivier, who prides himself on reading faces, has always found them furtive, with ‘a certain guardedness, obviously caused by a fear of being caught out ... only detectable in the slightly hooded look around the eyes’. But not Churchill.

  Over dinner, Olivier reminds Churchill of the time he joined in with Richard III, adding, ‘I can’t tell you how envious I am of such a wonderful memory.’

  ‘Oh, but you – so many myriads of words packed into your brain,’ replies Churchill. ‘It must be a great burden.’

  Olivier confesses that, three weeks after he has finished playing a part, he is unable to quote a single word from it.

  ‘Aaah,’ replies Churchill. ‘That must be a great mercy to you.’