A Salty Man Passing St. Paul's on Thursday of last
week, I thought of James Bone. Nowhere in London is there such a magnificent mass of Portland stone, and no one has celebrated this chalky, fossily, magical material more vividly, or with a sharper understanding of the qualities which endear it even to Londoners who could not tell it by name from concrete, than James Bone. What does the old man think, I wondered, about the cleaning of St. Paul's and the consequent clearing away of the chiaroscuro of dead-white and lamp-black which long weathering has laid over its surfaces? Would he wish to see St. Paul's as Wren's masons had left it, or would he protest testily against the violation of time's part in the creation of that monumental visual effect which stands for London more eloquently still than other older or younger masterpieces of architecture? Leave it alone, I guessed he would say in that clipped Glasgow voice of his. But James Bone, CH, a legend to more than one generation of Guardian men, was already long past thoughts of Port- land stone and its care, and the news came next day that he was dead at the age of ninety. I had so often, over sixteen or seventeen years, seen and heard him make positively last appear- ances in London that I found it hard to believe that there would be no more. He was a fine, sharp, salty man who had somehow learned to distil the very essence of London into his writings, which will certainly be rediscovered with delight in due course by younger people over whose heads the anecdotes of the obituaries have passed like a distant droning from the past.
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