AND THE LARKS THEY SANG MELODIOUS

AND THE LARKS THEY SANG MELODIOUS…

Actually Not Melodious

The first reason that you notice ring-necked parakeets in London is the raucous din they make, and so it was on Monday (St.Mark’s Day) when I saw my first parakeets on Westbourne Green. I was just going round the end of the church and there was this terrific squawking in the trees by the footbridge. I knew at once what it was, but it took a moment to break into my consciousness (I was full of cold and had been in bed half the day). I looked up, and there they were, at least four of them, and because the trees are not very tall, they were clearly visible. I’ve been expecting them for at least eight years, so it was a moment of triumph as well as surprise. Not that I actually want them here, but they are such a west London peculiarity that it was always curious that they hadn’t got here, as my regular readers will be aware. To be fair, I’m not at all sure that they’ve settled, because I haven’t spotted them since, but this cold is still restricting my movements a bit. I remember when I first saw them in India it was the vivid green of their plumage that I noticed, but that was against the backdrop of the red sandstone of the gates of Agra Fort; in London their colour is surprisingly inconspicuous as long as they stick to the trees, which they mostly do.

The Quick Brown Fox

Remarked on a particularly scruffy fox by Latimer Road Tube Station the other day, to which my companion remarked, “Well, it’s a Ladbroke Grove fox!” but today I had one just as scruffy in my garden, at lunchtime. Someone should point out to them that they’re supposed to be nocturnal. This one turned tail on seeing me and jumped over the fence (not the lazy dog). I should perhaps record that one morning a few weeks ago I found a youngish fox curled up very comfortably in Timmy (the outside cat)’s hutch; I gave him the opportunity to leave, which he did. I was concerned about Timmy for the next twenty-four hours, but he reappeared, with no new injuries.  In the past Casimir has chased a fox out of the garden, but I didn’t want him to know about this one in Timmy’s hutch, because it would undoubtedly have defended itself if it was cornered, which would have been very bad news.

Little Venice

It was a dear old friend, Victor Pettitt, who introduced me to the novels of Anthony Powell back in the days of my youth. At that point Victor and his wife Margaret were living, like my mother and me, in an Essex village, but before that they had been in a flat in St.Mary’s Mansions, and subsequently they moved to a flat in Wymering Mansions (off Elgin Avenue). They had first fetched up in Little Venice in the sixties, when it was still quite scruffy and bohemian, and not so very different from what Powell had depicted from the forties, when he used it as the stamping-ground of  his character X.Trapnel (who shared some of the characteristics of the novelist Julian Maclaren Ross).. Victor and Margaret had both trained at Central School of Art, and told stories of the Chelsea Arts Club, but they both ended up working as travel couriers. They were pals of Len Deighton, and he put his name to a curious travel guide that they published in 1968, which sadly did not reproduce Victor’s marvellous maps. We gave Victor a fine send-off back in November.

We had a gala screening of “The Day of the Jackal” at St.Mary Mags last week, with Edward Fox graciously answering questions afterwards about making the film with Fred Zinneman, and people asked how we arranged this, but the answer was simply that Edward Fox is a local resident. He and Joanna David (Mrs Fox) have been in Little Venice for forty years or so, and Joanna said to me, “Of course Fred Zinneman lived in Little Venice too. Blomfield Road.” That does give a flavour of the slightly “arty” nature of the area back then. Of course the patron of our appeal, Lord Norwich, is the doyen of Little Venice, having been here since the early sixties, and no stranger himself to the bohemian. Nowadays, the bigger places in Little Venice house the likes of Michael Flatley, and the odd rock star, but mostly it’s quite staid, whereas a generation ago it seems to have attracted less wealthy but more arty types. 

When in Rome…

An example of cultural assimilation spotted the other day, at the Mozart Estate; a lady in hijab, with a toddler in a buggy. The toddler was wearing a superman outfit, and eating chips and tomato sauce.

NO MORE HEROES ANY MORE

NO MORE HEROES ANY MORE

UP HILL AND DOWN VALE

We are beginning to do as Westminster City Council wants, and call the area Maida Hill. They scrupulously refer to the public space at what used to be called Prince of Wales Junction (and is still so called by TFL) as the Maida Hill Piazza, and there is an excellent facility next to it which is called Maida Hill Place, so it’s beginning to catch on. The Royal Mail used to call the area Maida Hill, when nobody else did, because their delivery office in Lanhill Road (just behind St.Peter’s) was called the Maida Hill Delivery Office. Needless to say, that was closed a couple of years ago and has been sold off for housing. Apparently, before it was generally called Prince of Wales, the junction was called Sixways, which was reasonable, as six roads did converge there until the Piazza was created.

The rest of the world has heard of Maida Vale, and I like to be perverse by explaining that we are called Maida Hill because we are downhill from Maida Vale, which usually ends discussion. But the real story? Actually Maida Hill pre-dates Maida Vale. In modern urban areas slopes which were significant in the days of horsedrawn transport are often barely perceptible, and so it is with this one. If you travel north from Marble Arch on Edgware Road (the A5, Roman Watling Street) you go gradually uphill (we cyclists notice these things more clearly) until you go over a crest, and then descend a sharp slope, at the bottom of which Maida Vale tube station is signposted. There is then only the gentlest rise until you reach the Marriott Hotel, where Kilburn High Road begins, at what was Kilburn Bridge, the bridge over the Kilburn stream, and a very ancient boundary (now between Westminster and Brent). It is that first crest on the road, which would actually look quite pronounced if there were no buildings, that is properly Maida Hill. Running underneath it, crossing beneath the road at right angles is the Maida Hill Tunnel, through which the Regent’s Canal passes on its way from Paddington to Limehouse. It makes perfect sense that Maida Vale is the gentle valley into which you descend having climbed Maida Hill.

NO MORE HEROES

Maida Hill got its name from a pub which stood pretty much on the summit, the Hero of Maida. Now that was named after General Sir John Stuart, who commanded a small British force that won the first victory on land over the forces of Napoleonic France, in July1806. Maida is in the far south of Italy, and this was part of a campaign to keep the French out of Sicily and assist the Calabrian resistance. The battle was a genuine victory, over a significant (if low-grade) French force (the remains of a division) but it had no real long term value. Nevertheless, it became an important propaganda tool, as undermining the myth of French invincibility, and so at the time it was quite famous. Stuart was given the title Count of Maida by the grateful King of the Two Sicilies (whose kingdom he was defending).

The pub is said to have opened in 1809 and it stood at 435-7 Edgware Road, though the present building is clearly not that old, but mid-Victorian. The license is said to have been in the same family for the whole of its existence. It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that it was rebuilt in the grand Victorian style. It is now a dermatological clinic, and you can spot it easily, because there is still a proper pub sign on the roadside.

I’ve been re-reading Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels, “A Dance To The Music of Time”, which I first read when I was a sixth-former, and The Hero of Maida features in two of the novels, thinly disguised as The Hero of Acre. Since one of the climactic moments of the whole sequence occurs on the banks of the canal, a few minutes’ walk away, the identification is obvious. The events Powell describes are set in 1947, and he gives a fascinating picture of how seedy the area was at the time; if you want to check it out, it’s in “Books Do Furnish A Room” (though the Hero also features in a magnificent setpiece at the start of “Temporary Kings” as well).

NO MORE NEELDS

The Neeld Arms on the corner of Harrow Road and Marylands Road is, as I’ve said before, being redeveloped as flats. The other day, thanks to the generosity of kind parishioners, I went to the “Age of Giorgione” exhibition at the Royal Academy, (well worth seeing, by the way, not much Giorgione, but lots of nice pictures) and in the catalogue happened to spot a reference to the Neeld family. A picture in the last room of the show, a painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes, by a follower of Giorgione called Giovanni Cariani, was first catalogued by the great art historian Bernard Berenson a hundred years ago at Grittleton House, near Chippenham, in the collection of Sir Audley Neeld Bt. It’s a striking picture (Judith as Venetian courtesan) but it sent me back to the Neelds.

Technically they weren’t actually landowners, but they leased an estate here and developed it. The actual landowners were the Dean and Chapter of Westminster (the Abbey of St.Peter) and that’s why the area was called St.Peter’s Park. The one who actually took the lease in 1821 was Joseph Neeld, a lawyer who acquired the interest in it from his great uncle, Philip Rundell, a successful goldsmith, who had lived at Westbourne Farm. Rundell’s sister had married a Mr Goldney, and when Rundell died, Neeld bought the manor of Grittleton with his inheritance. He was one of the last MPs for the notorious rotten borough of Gatton (one elector, two MPs) and then MP for Chippenham in the reformed House of Commons for more than 20 years. It was Joseph Neeld’s brother and heir, Sir John, who started developing the estate in the 1860s. They also had a plot of land further up the Harrow Road, where you can find Grittleton Avenue and Chippenham Avenue on the Tokyngton Estate, but they can have got no great return from that as it wasn’t built on in the Neeld era. The St.Peter’s Park estate went up gradually over the 1870s and 1880s, and early photos of St.Peter’s Church reveal that the church was built before the neighbouring houses (which was remarkable). The estate stretched from Formosa Street up to Fernhead Road , which was apparently called Neeld Road at one time. St.Peter’s Park was the customary name for this area well into the twentieth century, as there is a War Memorial tablet commemorating the men of Queen’s Park and St.Peter’s Park who were killed in the Great War, which is now in the Beethoven Centre (in Queen’s Park).             

THIS SPORTING LIFE

SPORTING LIFE…

England’s painful loss of the World T20 final to the West Indies, from a seemingly impregnable position, was extraordinary. Fascinating, though, that the great onslaught of four sixes to win the game came from one Carlos Brathwaite. That’s not a misprint, but a well-known Caribbean surname, at least in Barbados. Pleasingly, Carlos is indeed a Bajan, and no doubt there are people in West London who will claim him as kin. Last year I buried a dear old member of St.Peter’s called Joyce Braithwaite, but when she had been on the sick list, I had found my colleague Fr.Frank correcting her surname to “Brathwaite”; when challenged, he had told me, “She’s from Barbados, the surname is Brathwaite!” So, one day when I was taking her communion, I asked Joyce about it. Which was it? I asked. So she told me, “Back in Barbados, I was Brathwaite, but when I came to England they wrote it down as Braithwaite, so that’s what I’ve been. I don’t care!” I suspect she was less bothered because there had once been a Mr Brathwaite (long gone). This is a reminder of the time before surnames settled down, when spellings were much more free. The only Brathwaite in the Dictionary of National Biography is a seventeenth century poet, one Richard Brathwaite (apparently the author of the bit of verse which historians cite about the Puritan in Banbury who hanged his cat on Monday for killing a mouse on Sunday). I suspect that historians of Barbados would be able to tell us that some Brathwaite was a plantation owner in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, because of course that is where so many Caribbean surnames came from. Slaves were given the surname of their owner. Slave-names they're sometimes called. I’ve never met a Caribbean Everett, and I rather hope I don’t.

THE GRAND NATIONAL

One of the more irritating features of the lead-up to this year’s Grand National was the repeated assertion from seemingly intelligent people that this was the best field ever in the race. No. It. Wasn’t. I suppose you can say it was the field with the narrowest range of weights, and therefore was composed of 39 horses of a closer standard than ever before, and that the top weights were good horses, so the race was generally of quite a high standard. But the best? No. Certainly not. For one thing, that narrow range of quality is partly the result of restricting the number of runners to forty (sixty-six is the record) and also of lowering the top weight to 11 stone 10 pounds. I agree there were two good horses at the top of the handicap, in Many Clouds (past National winner, and Hennessy Gold Cup) and Silviniaco Conti (twice King George winner), and fair enough, Pineau de Re, past winner, didn’t get a run. But Pineau de Re didn’t get in because he’s no good; he never was. And frankly, a race won by a maiden, with a thirteen-year old in third, doesn’t actually look like the best ever (even if Rule The World was a very high-class maiden). Not the best ever, definitely. Not even the best in my lifetime: in that category I think I’d vote for 1973 or 1975.

Obviously 1973 was Crisp (won a Queen Mother Champion Chase, placed in a Gold Cup) and Red Rum (not yet a triple National winner), but the field also included a dual Gold Cup winner in L’Escargot (who finished third), and Gold Cup-placed and Hennessy-winning Spanish Steps (fourth) and a Whitbread winner in Grey Sombrero. Red Rum won in record time, as well. Arguably, though, 1975 was better, when L’Escargot beat Red Rum (by now a dual National winner, and winner of a Scottish National) with Spanish Steps third, and another former Gold Cup (and King George) winner The Dikler fifth. Also in the field that day were Royal Relief (Queen Mother Champion Chase) and April Seventh (Hennessy Gold Cup), not to mention future National and Scottish National winners in Rag Trade and Barona. So I think that’s a bit thicker in quality than last Saturday.

But in truth the best ever has to have been 1934, the year that Golden Miller won. Golden Miller won five Cheltenham Gold Cups, but hated Aintree. In 1934 he came to Aintree having already won three Gold Cups, the last a fortnight earlier, and he wasn’t even top weight! That was Gregalach, the winner in 1929 and second in 1931, who carried 12 stone 7 pounds. Also giving Golden Miller weight was the magnificent Thomond II, with whom he had regular duels, who had been second in the 1933 Gold Cup. Nor was Golden Miller favourite, that was the previous year’s runner-up, Really True. Also in the field were the 1932 winner Forbra, and Delaneige, fourth in 1933 after running third in the Gold Cup. Back in the thirties the jumping calendar was very different, and the National was so much more valuable than any other race that the best horses did tend to compete in a way they haven’t done in modern times. It’s hard to compare achievements, but that field looks very strong, and the best horses came home in front, in record time. It’s worth pointing out that the fences were a lot harder back then, tougher than in the 1970s, and a world away from today.

My particular beef about the Grand National is that the race has been fundamentally altered by making the course easier, in the interest of safety. Ironically more horses were killed after the safety modifications, because making the fences easier meant that the horses went faster, and as so often, speed kills. There have also been more collisions, because there is no longer a clear easy way and a difficult way to approach the fences. The spectacle remains the same, forty horses jumping slightly outlandish obstacles, but because jumping is no longer the most important factor, the race has become much more open, and much more ordinary. Prior to the modifications of the last few years you could normally narrow down the possible winners to a short list of good jumpers who were genuine stayers.

What am I to say about the Grand National and animal cruelty? Well, I am sickened by the sight of a horse being killed, but it doesn’t only happen there. And the fact is that the horses race and jump because it is in their nature; inasmuch as it isn’t anthropomorphising, it is plain that (at least some) horses jump because they enjoy it. You only had to watch Hadrian’s Approach on Saturday, who had decanted his jockey at the first fence but carried on, having a whale of a time, jumping the fences when he could have run round them, to see the truth of that. So banning horse racing is not so obviously good for horses’ welfare, when they enjoy it. And if it didn’t exist, would the horses exist? No, plainly not. Is existence better than non-existence? Yes, manifestly. But, obviously, humans have a grave responsibility for the way we treat other sentient creatures which are under our control. I don’t think though, that we need say that it’s immoral to use animals for something as trivial as sport. Not least because those animals have a good life as their object, unlike those farm animals whose death is their object. We don’t have to eat meat, we choose to, and so I don’t think we can be too pious about animals in sport.      

FIXING A HOLE

FIXING A HOLE  (WHERE THERE ISN’T ONE)

Astonishingly, Elgin Avenue is being resurfaced, which is causing vast congestion. I suppose we should have spotted the parking suspension notices which would have informed us, but we didn’t, so it came as a surprise this morning. No-one seems to have had any notice; certainly we didn’t. I should have felt pretty foolish (and very angry) if I’d organised a funeral for any time in the next three days. The thing that causes me real bafflement is that Elgin Avenue is very far from being the worst-surfaced road in the neighbourhood; that accolade belongs to Kilburn Park Road, in my view. There were a couple of potholes on that stretch of Elgin Avenue, but they were easily avoided, and shallow, so I don’t really see the problem. Given that builders are putting up speculative flats on the old sorting office site in Lanhill Road it wasn’t brilliant timing, as they now have to reverse their concrete mixers and long flatbed trucks out onto Chippenham Road, as Elgin Avenue is shut to them. Result: chaos.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

One of the things that struck me when Helen died was how kind people were to me; not so much members of the congregations, of whom it might have been reasonably expected, but people I hardly knew. I had occasion to go to Maida Hill Market a few days after it happened and was stopped by several people saying how sorry they were. Two of the classes at St.Peter’s School all made me cards and sent them over, and then when I went back into school, two months later, I was astonished to be greeted by a nine-year old who said, “Hello, Father Henry. I’m sorry for your loss.” He wasn’t the only one. And now, six months on, I had a local chancer come to the door, asking for help (which I rather ungraciously gave) who, as we parted said, “I was really sorry to hear of what happened to you.” It had never occurred to me that someone like that (terrible phrase) would have even heard about Helen’s death, let alone paid any attention. A humbling moment.

HANDS FREE

Spotted at the bus stop the other day: a young woman in hijab, whose neon-pink headscarf was pulled really tight, and into which was tucked her phone. She was chatting away animatedly while busy with both hands. Very smart. 

LOCAL EDUCATION AUTHORITIES

The present government wants to “free” schools from local authority “bureaucracy and interference”. Observe the story from Edinburgh, where schools built under a private finance initiative are found to be structurally unsafe. Who is acting? The local authority. Who else would act? Who else could possibly sort out such a situation? Nevertheless, the government thinks that is unhelpful interference. We might observe that the authority should never have been seduced by the PFI model in the first place, but that is where we are. The response will obviously be that of course the Department for Education would sort out anything like that, but do we really think that a Whitehall civil servant will necessarily do that job more efficiently or expeditiously than a civil servant closer to the action (who may actually have a personal stake in the outcome, and will certainly have a personal stake in the community)?

GOODWILL TO ALL  PEOPLE

On Good Friday the local churches get together, just after noon, to have a service on the piazza at Maida Hill Market. The service lasts half an hour or so, and has never in my experience involved more than about a hundred people. We have been doing it all the time I’ve been here, and I’m told it has been going for twenty years or more, certainly long before the junction became a piazza. Anyway, this year it went off rather well, despite using a really manky little keyboard of ours. We plugged in our microphone to the Italian lunch stall, and a decent atmosphere was generated. We were packing up when a local authority noise officer turned up, because someone had complained. I was rather bemused, and so, to be frank, was the noise officer when he saw our equipment. I concede that the weather was nice enough to have your windows open, but I doubt whether we were particularly audible over the traffic. The stallholders seemed perfectly relaxed about our being there, but I gather that there are liable to be complaints about all sorts of activity on the piazza. Very odd. What may one do on a public space? How much do people have the right to not be irritated, disturbed or offended? And how far does that right override the right of others to free expression and peaceful enjoyment of the public realm? The principle of live and let live seems to me to be essential for urban life, but others don’t seem to agree. Anyway, we forgive you for trying to disrupt our worship, and are sorry we disturbed you. We don’t promise not to do it again!   

BICYCLE RACE

BICYCLE RACE

The path through Kensington Gardens on which you are allowed to cycle from west to east (from the Broad Walk to the Serpentine Gallery) was closed for months. I kept on forgetting, and having to go down to Kensington Road and brave the traffic. Now it has re-opened, and I used it last week. I had supposed that major works had taken place, perhaps connected to the Mayor’s East-West Cycle Superhighway, which the Royal Parks resisted so strongly; but no. The changes were minor but annoying. Strips of cobbles had been inserted into the tarmac at intervals to make it uncomfortable for cyclists (not to mention people with buggies or wheelchairs). There are very few paths through the Park that cyclists are allowed to use, and it seems simply malicious to make that one actively uncongenial. I suppose someone perceives a conflict between cyclists and pedestrians and thinks therefore cyclists should be slowed down, but that is simply unjust, because the pedestrians can walk anywhere (including on the grass) whereas we cyclists are confined to one path. And frankly it’s likely not to work, because if there are people who cycle dangerously (which I have never seen there) then they are quite likely to use other paths with no cobbles, which will actually be worse for pedestrians.

BLAME BORIS

It’s amusing that everyone calls the “Santander Cycles” “Boris bikes”, because although they weren’t his idea (but Ken’s) his name has stuck, and now they are gradually moving from being regarded as a helpful asset to being a bloody nuisance. Not necessarily what the great self-promoter wants to be associated with. The trouble is that there are now so many that they are causing congestion, and in west London at any rate they are mostly ridden by tourists, who are a menace. Last week in the Park I encountered a group of 12 visitors trying to ride all together, some barely able to ride at all. Almost all tourists are used to being on the wrong side of the road, and so are inherently at risk on UK streets, and many of the ones I see seem not to have ridden in years. They almost never go singly, and rarely with any sense of purpose, so if you do actually have to get somewhere (or just want to go at your own speed) they are a major frustration. Of course they’re a Good Thing, but don’t pretend they’re anything to do with lessening congestion, because they are now causing it.

LOCAL CELEBRITY

 

It was an unpleasant shock to see one of our primary schools on the television news last year, because Mohammed Emwazi, “Jehadi John”, was a former pupil of St.Mary Magdalene’s. Now each time there is a follow-up article they use his school photo. The Sunday Times Magazine recently did a big feature, with a second school photo as well as a picture of the school gates, and a general theme of trying to say how this pleasant little boy turned into a monster. For locals (most of whom don’t read the Sunday Times, to be fair) it’s not quite so bad, because of course the family never actually lived here, on the Estate, so it wasn’t actually us. This is one of the things you learn gradually about London, that there are very local loyalties, and the sense of belonging is often restricted to a very narrow area. So, given that the Emwazi family lived on the Mozart Estate (oh, two parishes away) it’s all rather foreign to us. As an illustration, one of my churchwardens has just moved back to her childhood home in what she calls Ladbroke Grove, and been welcomed back like the returning prodigal by people to whom she has clearly been effectively dead through years of living in Harrow Road. Perhaps they’re a mile apart. So, although it’s a source of discomfort for the school, the connection doesn’t seem to ring many bells locally. It was, after all, a long time ago, and there’s practically no-one left at the school who was connected with it at the time (maybe one of my fellow-governors), and in any case the population of the area has changed enormously. That’s the other thing we have to learn, that the “churn” of population in central London is vast and very rapid.