The Traveller’s Club is in Pall Mall, which runs parallel to Piccadilly Street. It is the finest of the buildings designed by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Parliament, on the model of Florence’s Raffaellite Palazzo Pandolfini.
Located between the Athenaeum and the Reform Club, its inner side facing the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, it was built between 1826 and 1832. Founded in 1819 at the suggestion of the foreign minister, Castlereagh, the Traveller’s was created as a meeting place for those who had travelled abroad, their foreign friends, and diplomats stationed in the capital.
The wooden handrail running from the ground floor to the library is a gift from the prince of Tallyrand; the marble adorning the library’s central ceiling are a reproduction (the originals being in the British Museum) of the friezes at the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, the booty from an excavation campaign by C. Rockerell, founding member of the club. Every Christmas the Queen Mother gives her annual luncheon here, her favourite room in London. Opposite the library is the coffee room, used for breakfast, lunch and dinner: the central table is for those members who prefer the company of other diners to eating alone.
It was out of these informal chats that the Traveller’s Tales (Castlereagh Press) came a few years ago: this is a collection of travel tales and life experiences by members of the club.
The best English travel writers are among its members, from Wilfred Thesiger to Simon Winchester to Colin Thubron. That extraordinary writer James Morris was also a member; to him some unforgettable books are owed, veritable biographies of cities and nations, on Venice, Hong Kong, and Spain. Years ago James changed sex and now calls himself Jan Morris. Because membership in the club is strictly limited to men, she had to resign. In Graham Greene’s novels there is always some diplomat, journalist or adventurer who arrives at or leaves from the Traveller’s, which is almost a certification of a certain idea of Britannia.
Fifty years earlier, or a bit more, Jules Verne, in his Five Weeks in a Balloon, offered his hero, Samuel Fergusson, a booth at the Traveller’s: “The size of the servings was in proportion to the diner’s importance, and the sturgeon that presented itself so handsomely on the table was barely smaller than Samuel himself.”
The members’ list often featured abbreviations next to the names indicating military decorations, noble orders, and civilian awards that seem like charades or tongue-twisters: KG, GCB, OBE, MC, CMG, KCVO. There are one thousand two hundred members in all (quorum ego, unworthily and leaving aside Groucho Marx’s maxim: “I’d never want to join a club that would have me as a member”), and thanks to them the Traveller’s is a sort of concentration of the anti-modern charm, anachronistic and dusty yet scintillating, that the remains of the British Empire continue to exude.
And so this is the perfect place to start on a journey as bizarre as it is sentimental, filled with echoes and memories, whose geographic co-ordinates float on the sea of history like flotsam and jetsam. This former continental and colonial power, Blair’s England, like Thatcher’s yesterday and before her Wilson’s, and Heath’s, and Douglas Home’s, is, politically speaking, a corpse in good health, bound by a double thread in a subject relationship with the United States, which is isolationist more by habit than by choice, condemned to play a role that is no longer its own. If you’re looking for the world of tomorrow, it’s not across the English Channel that you should go but across the ocean; if you want to see the triumph’s of economics and efficiency, it is to the German heart of Europe that you should look. England is the preterit tense, struggling and remote. Not far from the Traveller’s, at Lincoln in Fields, the residence of Sir John Soane, the architect-prince of pre-Victorian England, is home to the most incredible museum-home that one could ever see (only the Vittoriale surpasses it in lucid madness, but there there was the hand of a political genius who was celebrating himself, while here there is an ingenious scholar who sought to combine beauty and research). Up and down its vertical 400 square meters, which Soane gutted, remodelled, and combined into a visionary succession of wings and hiding places, crypts and corridors, stairways and passageways, there are three thousand Greek and Roman bronzes, Egyptian jewels, Chinese ceramics, and Medieval terracottas competing with one another. Ten days before he died on January 20, 1837, he set a bronze winged Victory in front of the watercolour he had painted of his wife’s mausoleum. He felt he was leaving, but he knew he would have left a sign of victory. Eighteen thirty-seven was also the year in which Sir Henry Fane, then-commander of the British forces in India, made an official visit to Lahore as the guest of Ranjiit Singh, maharajah of the Punjab. “The robes and jewels of the rajah were as superb as could be conceived. The prime minister’s son, the reigning prince’s favourite, was a mass of gems: neck, arms and legs covered in diadems, bracelets, rings of pearls, diamonds, rubies, one atop the other, so thick that it was impossible to distinguish one thing from another.” This was how his nephew, Henry Edward Fane, his field adjutant, described the encounter. Preparations were underway for the wedding of Singh’s son; the gardens were in flower, the fountains were gushing, the dignitaries’ horses were finely caparisoned in gold. A dazzled Emily Eden, sister of the governor general of India, Lord Auchland, told her friends in London, “Compared to what we see here, European magnificence is a wretched thing.” The hall in which the golden throne sat was covered in carpets; the columns marking the entranceway were covered in tapestries woven with precious stones. Fascination with the barbarous and refined splendour of the Indian Subcontinent began then, and it is no accident that Queen Victoria took the throne in that year.
Within twenty years the Crown had taken the place of the East Indian Company in directly governing India, and in 1876 Victoria became its empress and, as Davide Cannadine notes in his just-published work Ornamentalism (Penguin), India was to be changed into the mirror and model of a hierarchical, aristocratic and feudal society outside of time, where the British upper class took refuge as democratic modernity, the masses, parties, the proletariat, the working class and the petty bourgeoisie began to shake the foundations of the social and political system in the homeland.
If you do not keep all of that in mind, Osborne House, the summer residence that Victoria and Prince Albert built on the Isle of Wight, seems little more than bizarre. Otherwise what sense does the Durbar Room make, this banquet hall takes its name from an Indian word indicating a place for state receptions and their ceremonies; does its architecture recall the palaces of Lahore? The dazzlingly white coffered ceiling, all stucco, inlay and teak frames, the images of Ganesh, the elephant god of fortune, the peacock sculpted above the fireplace which alone required 500 hours of labour, the embroidered carpets from Agra…. And how to explain the Durban Corridor, with portraits and busts of the maharajah Duleeb Singh, his nephew Ranjiit, the collection of profiles of Indian dignitaries, military officers, artisans, even servants like Abdul Karim who was Victoria’s personal secretary, taught her Hindi, was called master (Mushi) and described to his empress what she had never seen, because Victoria was never to set foot in that land. The Isle of Wight is a couple of hours by train and hydrofoil from London, facing the tip of Hampshire. It takes the same amount of time to get to Blenheim, in Oxfordshire. While the former incarnates the very essence of the empire as the residence of the one who gave her name to an era, the Victorian era, the latter harks back to its most avid supporter and praise-singer, who also dug its grave, unwittingly, of course, but not for that less blameless. Winston Churchilll was born at Blenheim, and anyone visiting the castle can see his room and a small museum dedicated to him. He married at Blenheim; it was his ideal residence, and for a brief span of years he was even heir to the duchy. If his cousin Charles, known as Sunny, had died without leaving an heir, the title would have passed to him. Thus when Sunny introduced Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American heiress he had decided to marry for her money, to his mother, the old duchess got right to the point: “Your first duty is to have a child, a boy, because it would be intolerable to see that pretentious Winston become duke. Are you pregnant already?” Consuelo was beautiful, and Sargent’s painting immortalising her in one of the halls of state of the castle shows it: the swanlike neck, the haughty bearing, a touch of melancholy. She is even more beautiful in the portrait done years later by Boldini, now at the Metropolitan Museum.
The Italian painter was known as a Don Juan, and, in her autobiography, The Glitter and the Gold (George Mann), she recalls him as a sort of satyr: “Ah, la divina, la divina!” he would exclaim enraptured as he painted her. After several sittings, Consuelo wanted her son Ivor as subject and as protection, so Boldini had to start over. He resolved the matter by having the little one recline on one side, his hands resting on his mother’s lap. “I looked like an Indian deity, with no less than three arms going out at different angles.” The 55-meter-long Blenheim library, the false cupola vaults decorated in stucco by Isaac Mansfield, with cream and gold marquetry, still preserves Winston Churchill’s manuscripts relating to his father’s biography and the four volumes of Marlborough, His Life and Tomes, which focus on the life and works of the man who gave rise to the fame and glory of the lineage, that John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, a grand lord and leader of the wars of succession in the 18th century. Everything at Blenheim signs the praises of the first Duke of Marlborough.
When Consuelo Vanderbilt made her entrance at the residence which, thanks to her money, was returned to its former splendour in the early 1900’s, the immense atrium virtually paralysed her: “It was so high that I had to crane my neck to see the painting of the Great Duke, in Roman garb and driving a chariot. He was surrounded by clouds, and I understood that he was hurrying, there in the celestial spheres, to reach Julius Caesar and Charlemagne. Even Napoleon, I thought, could not have imagined such an apotheosis.” Consuelo so detested Blenheim, her husband and the entire Churchill line that rage clouded her vision and memory. In fact, the duke is on foot, kneeling before Britannia, who is seated on a chariot that looks like a throne, and is intent on explaining to her the military plan for the battle that was to make him famous. The painting is by James Thornill and dates from 1716.
Blenheim today is a piece of history and a wonderland. It is home to the world’s largest maze, with hedges in the shapes of trumpets, flags and cannonballs; the Italian garden and the geometric gardens spread out around the theme of the Bernini’s Fountain of the River Allegories, a small-scale model of his masterpiece in Piazza Navona. Since 1986, a foundation established with 1.5 million pounds has been in charge of collecting funds for its maintenance. Each year on August 13, the anniversary of the battle of Blenheim, the standard bearing the French fleurs-de-lys is offered to the queen as a symbolic contract. Relics and memories in stone, dreams of grandeur, secular cathedrals erected to support an idea, a nation, a lifestyle.
And yet, as ending to this journey which began between the walls of a 19th-century club and continued among ghosts of glories past and evocations eternal, perhaps nothing equals in evocative power the spartan simplicity of Clouds Hill, the other face that made possible the pomp, the crowns, the plumes, the power and wealth of the Imperial age, where Colonel Lawrence choose to live and was chosen in death. Set amid the oaks and rhododendrons of Dorset, Lawrence’s house is small but refined, a reflex image of its owner. Everything is simple but never plain: informally elegant. In his wandering and discontent existence, Clouds Hill remained a bewitching place for Lawrence: he wrote his books and saw to his translations there.
Everything there speaks of him. A few hundred meters away, a rock recalls the fatal accident. His tomb is in the nearby city of Moreton; at Wareham, in the small Saxon church of St. Martin, is the sculpture that Eric Kennington, the illustrator of the Seven Pillars, dedicated to him. Dressed as a prince of Mecca, with a camel saddle as cushion and sandals on his feet, the sword with its gilt haft, alongside his head a Greek anthology, Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, a volume of English poetry. It looks like the statue of Guidarello Guidarelli, a warrior boy. At his funeral, the finest epitaph as pronounced by George Ambrose Loody, the last great official of the Colonies: “He was one of those rare beings who seem to belong to the morning of the world. He would have liked his end. An impetuous race, a sudden exit.”
I forgot to mention: Lawrence was part of the Traveller’s Club.