Around and around

I have just returned from a stay with a pal of forty years and more, a far more well-read and sociable cove than me. It was a fascinating experience as I knew it would be.

I’ve rarely read much purely for pleasure, which he does on practically a daily basis and I admire him for it.

Instead I have mostly read to acquire knowledge either under obligation (e.g. as at school) or because I was researching something. By instinct and inclination I regard myself as a doer rather than a thinker. It’s why I shied away from parties and social gatherings – somehow regarding them as something that anyone can do at anytime – whilst  in the scheme of things (for me) they amounted to little more than potentially wasted time.

Taking my cue from the time British decathlete legend Daley Thompson, upon being asked “Why on earth are you training on Christmas Day?” replied “Because Jürgen [Hingsen, Thompson’s long-time challenger for gold medals] won’t be …” I figured that life was too short to spend relaxing when there was the slightest chance you could be achieving something somewhere else.

I’ve remarked before upon my ‘one chapter in the textbook ahead of the rest’ theory – the syndrome whereby – in the land of the blind – the one-eyed man is king.

For about a decade I spent my spare time researching and writing a factual set in the Edwardian era. Inevitably I spend a great deal of time reading around my subject’s life and times, including incidents he was involved in and the people he met and spent time with. As a result, without any conscious intention to this end, I gradually acquired a significant well of general knowledge about some of the personalities of the time.

The extent to which in those days the great and good of British ‘society’ – or rather the Establishment, the movers and shakers, the titans of industry, commerce and politics – were aware of each other and moved in similar circles was remarkable.

The population of the United Kingdom passed 41 million for the first time in 1911 [compared to today’s rising 66 million] but – with there being far fewer national newspapers and means of communication then – the sense of ‘community’ among the general population was probably not much different to 2018’s fast-moving blizzard of internet communication and ‘real time’ social media exchanges.

My book-writing experience has left me with a minnow-sized and unwarranted reputation as being a minor expert upon some areas of Edwardian society to the extent that sometimes – not as often as once was the case – I am consulted by learned institutions, journalists and members of the public for help with issues or questions relating to it. This amuses me because I’m acutely aware (even if others are not) that my supposed expertise is very much of the ‘one chapter in the textbook ahead’ type referred to earlier in this piece.

At the same time, whenever I see an article upon – for example, Edwardian sport or leading personalities – I always take the trouble to read it, as much as anything else to discover if it adds to my sum of knowledge, or provides a new insight, or even takes a markedly different point of view to mine as to how things were then and why.

Overnight, as I flicked through the UK’s national newspaper websites, I happened to come across two pieces relevant to my ‘era of special knowledge’ and I provide links to them to today for the possible interest of Rust readers.

One of the great themes of the 19^th Century fin de siècle period in Britain was that characterised by a degree of soul-searching over – on the one hand – the views of historians such as MaCaulay and Lord Acton, who regarded Great Britain and its position in the world as the absolute high-water mark of human civilisation whilst also being mindful of the historical fact that all great empires eventually crumble and – on the other – the artistic Aesthetic movement and the supposed’ decadences of Oscar Wilde, the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and similar figures which some influential people felt were symptoms if not indeed potential likely causes of the ‘beginning of said end’.

In which context, here’s a link to a fascinating piece by Kevin Childs that appears today upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT

My second example stems from the sad news of the death of John Julius Norwich at the age of 88.

Two of the famous upper class ‘intellectual sets’ within British society during the period 1890 to 1914 period were The Souls and The Coterie – whose members sometimes referred to themselves ‘The Corrupt Coterie’ – the latter essentially compromised of the children of the latter and their friends.

The Souls gradually grew out of gatherings – often at weekends at great country houses – of leading politicians and society members. A list of their members conveys their prominence: Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour, Margot Asquith, Hugo and Mary Charteris (Lord and Lady Elcho), the Wyndham and Lyttelton families, Harry and Nina Cust, Lord and Lady Desborough … to name but a few. Some of the ladies conducted ‘affairs’ (real or platonic) as a group whilst they collectively discussed the great issues of the time, political and artistic.

The Coterie’s most notorious leading lights were the Lady Diana Manners (youngest daughter of the 8^th Duke of Rutland, though her real father was in fact Harry Cust of the aforementioned Souls), regarded as one of the great beauties of the age … Raymond Asquith, son of the sometime Prime Minister H.H. Asquith; Julian and Billy Grenfell, the former the war poet, sons of Lord and Lady Desborough; Patrick  Shaw-Stewart (another war poet); and Edward Horner, all five of them killed in WW1 … and such Maurice Baring, Nancy Cunard and Duff Cooper the politician. Duff Cooper, practically the last man standing, then married Lady Diana Manners and later, after WW2, they became Viscount and Viscountess Norwich, albeit Lady Diana was known to all as Lady Diana Cooper to her dying day.

When I worked in television I occasionally Lady Diana Cooper – still a striking lady at the age of 90-plus when she was sometimes to be seen in the company of Nigel Ryan, former editor of ITN News and then Director of Programmes at Thames Television.

Here’s a link to the obituary of her son John Julius Norwich by Isabel Togoh that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN