English house
Gavin Stamp
The English House Hermann Muthesius; Trans. Janet Seligman, Ed. Dennis Sharp (Crosby Lockwood Staples £50) We — the English, that is — have been waiting for this translation ever since the three volumes of Das Englische Haus were first published in Berlin in 1904-05. Call it modesty or philistinism, it is sadly typical of our national indifference to our architectural achievements that this classic study of one of the great, and internationally admired, periods of British architecture — the domestic revival of the late 19th century, with Norman Shaw, Philip Webb, Voysey and Lutyens — should remain a closed book to us for so long. Now it is open, with a fine translation which preserves both the Germanic flavour and the perceptiveness of the original (although 'architectonic' is not a word we often use), and it is clear that Muthesius created the now conventional historiography of the period. Pevsner (who, of course, could read the original) followed Muthesius in admiring the `Free Style', condemning the return to Classicism by Shaw and others, and appreciating the importance of Mackintosh (whose essential preciousness Muthesius clearly saw).
Hermann Muthesius, it should be explained, was a sort of 'cultural spy' attached to the German Embassy in London from 1896 to 1903. By studying British architecture he hoped to help improve design back home at a time when Imperial Germany was determined to become top nation in all aspects of life. However, Muthesius was more than that; he was an architect with a particular sympathy for England and English architecture and he became close friends with several British architects. One of them, W.R. Lethaby, recalled in 1915 — not an auspicious moment for praise of any Hun — how Muthesius 'became the historian (in German) of the English free architecture. All the architects who at that time did any' building were investigated, sorted, tabulated, and, I must say, understood,' Muthesius's life and writings (he wrote other books on British architecture) serve to demonstrate the close links between Britain and Germany in the 19th century and emphasise the tragedy of the Great War.
It is an extraordinarily thorough and comprehensive book, and it is not just about architecture. The English House is — now — a work of social history, for it tells us about methods of building, renting and land tenure, the duties of servants, and what a middle-class family did with its income and how the home was structured.
Muthesius, like many foreigners, was fas cinated by English conventions and had 'the impression that England is beginning to suffer from a certain hardening of the arteries. She resembles an old man, who, though still sprightly, prefers to take things quietly, wants no more changes and would leave things as they are, because he fears that any deviation from habit would upset him.'
Many of Muthesius's observations seem topical today, not least his belief in the artistic and social importance of house ownership and his fear of urban, tenement life. 'England', he wrote, 'is the only advanced country in which the majority of the population still live in houses, a custom that has survived all the political, social and economic changes that Euro pean civilisation has undergone in the past 150 years. Whereas on the continent these changes caused mass migration into the cities, where people became imprisoned in giant multi-storeyed barrack-like blocks, in England .. . they barely touched the inborn love of country life; on the contrary, the necessity of working in the city appeared to strengthen it.' Muthesius real ised that 'The Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house;' he also noted the other side of the coin, that 'the Anglo-Saxon race has been denied the gift of building cities', and that the flight to the suburbs (which he also studied) 'is the reason for the desolate monotony of English cities that every continental has felt ...
the absence of inviting places where a drink and a rest may be had.' The terrible irony is that, since the book was first pub lished, our national housing policy has largely ignored the achievements of Muthesius's heroes and, instead, adopted Continental theories of the 1920s to give us the 'City of Towers.' Any interested reader who manages to afford the staggering price of this transla tion will not be pleased to find that parts of the original text have been omitted. It is simply not enough for the editor to say that the pre-1850 history of the English house has been covered elsewhere; I want to read what Muthesius thought of PaIladlanism and the Picturesque. Economies had to be made, we are told, so it seems foolish for the publishers to have gone to Inc expense of redrawing all the plans `vith English instead of German labels. The least we might expect for £50 would be annotated revisions in the light ni subsequent events and scholarship, but l have to report that the editor of the „.n.aoslation has done practically nothing. we are not told which houses have been deMolished since Muthesius wrote; picture captions like 'House at Cobham, Surrey, uy M.H. Baillie Scott' are repeated withnut further elaboration and, even in the w index, famous houses such as Shaw's (9tim's Dyke' and Lutyens's 'Deanery varclen' are still listed as 'House at Pinher, nr London' and 'House at Sonning, nr "xford' respectively. It is just not good enough. A few footnotes are given, telling us the ctiates of people we have heard of, like t'inthaby, but nothing more is added about ,ne more obscure designers who interested Athesius, A.N. Prentice, Walter Cave, or '4\ rnold Mitchell for example. Mr Sharp not corrected errors in the original be.Xt (e.g. F.L. Grigg's initials) and some of own footnotes are simply wrong — for pnstance, Walter Crane was not the first resident of the Art Workers Guild (he 't the third Master). ir 'Nevertheless, the appearance of the banslation of Muthesius's rightly famous 4)4 must be welcomed and I am very F,:id to have it. It is essential reading now err anyone interested in that glorious and .eative phase of British architecture.
1118.11111ftionimailimmisimmoinsiammara posedly been robbed in the park. Her stepson was the great European diplomatist, Castlereagh, who wounded his Cabinet colleague Canning in a duel in 1809. Castlereagh succeeded to the Marquessate in 1821 but cut his throat the following year in the wake of hysteria caused by the discovery of the Honourable Percy Jocelyn, Bishop of Clogher, with a private soldier in the back room of an inn in the Haymarket; he told George IV and Wellington that he had been 'accused of the same crime' as the unfortunate Bishop. During the Congress of Vienna, a bystander noted that Castlereagh's halfbrother, later the 3rd Marquess, was 'guilty of an act of impudent familiarity' on a girl. 'To be precise,' explains Mr Hyde (somewhat primly for the author of A History of Pornography), 'he pinched her in a tender part of her body'. The 3rd Marquess was a fairly erratic character, fighting two duels; his second wife, Frances Anne (Disraeli's 'Marchioness of Deloraine' in Sybil) was widely believed to have been the mistress of Tsar Alexander II. 'Young Rapid' (the 4th Marquess), a keen fisherman, liked to tell the story of how the Free Trade MP, John Bright, who in spite of his Lancashire blood affected a kilt when fishing their joint Inverness-shire water, slipped off a rock and fell into a pool where he was gaffed by a Highland gillie and pulled out by the tail of his kilt. The 4th Marquess was certified and died in an institution at Hastings; his other half brothers apart from the 5th Marquess were Dolly, a violent lunatic who 'tossed his baby to the ceiling', and Ernest, who after forcing his way into the actresses' dressing room at Windsor Theatre, threw the manager down a flight of stairs where he was caught by the prompter. The 6th Marquess was also alleged to have thrown a baby about, this time on the floor, when he discovered that young Reginald was not his but his wife's brotherin-law Lord Helmsley's (the Londonderry family have certainly had their parental problems over the years). The enginedriving Reggie's mother was the beautiful Theresa (Victoria Sackville-West's 'Lady Roehampton' in The Edwardians) whom the Shah of Persia offered to buy on his visit to England in 1889. There was a legend that she left her ground-floor bedroom door open for the keeper and Reggie has even been attributed to the Prince of Wales. Although she sat in the 'King's Loose Box' at the Coronation, this was not a particularly happy occasion for the Marchioness; first, a cab driver shouted at her when she ordered him out of her way ('Go and fuck yourself, you and your fucking Coronation!') and then her tiara fell into the peeresses' lavatory at the Abbey — it had to be retrieved with forceps, the call for which caused some confusion as to the 46-year-old lady's condition.
The 6th Marquess had the unusual honour of being appointed Lord President of the Council at his own country house in Durham ('At the Court at Wynyard'). He was not fond of the pleasures of the table and when he was presiding, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, over a State Banquet at Dublin Castle, the Lord Mayor of Dublin complained to Lady Fingall:' "I don't call this a dinner at all," he said, "I call it a rush", and eyeing the ham disdainfully, "cheap too!" ' According to Lady Dcsborough, the 6th Marquess's heart was broken by the Home Rule Bill and he died in ,1915. His widow found walking in the open air at Wynyard 'the only thing one wants when one is really unhappy'.
The rest of The Londonderrys (well over half in fact) is devoted to the 7th Marquess, the politician and his hostess wife. The author feels that Lord Londonderry has been much maligned and that he should be 'worthily ranked with his ancestor Castlereagh' for preserving the nucleus of the RAF despite disarmament, setting up the committee which developed the discovery of radar and promoting the designs of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. There are some absorbing passages on the first World war (Lady Londonderry commanded the Women's Legion) and an important study of Irish politics, as well as an apologia for the Marquess's coal-owning activities (citing Lady Londonderry's left-wing friend Sean O'Casey), before the author's fascinating chapter on 'The Ramsay MacDonald Syndrome'.
Mr Hyde has had unrestricted access to the correspondence between poor old MacDonald and his 'pen pal' the Marchioness, and comes to the conclusion that they were almost certainly not lovers. A shared love of the Highlands was a great bond between them: MacDonald once described himself as 'your attendant gillie', But, as Baldwin told the 8th Marquess: 'Your Mother certainly provided a refuge for Ramsay for which your Father paid a high price'.
The book ends with the 7th Marquess's death in 1949 which is a pity as the last 30 years have yielded plenty of interesting material about the family. It seems, however, that the primary purpose of this book was to rehabilitate the reputation of the 7th Marquess, who took his rejection by Baldwin and his cousin Churchill (who never forgave him for his visits to Germany) very much to heart and, pathetically, felt his ancestors would be ashamed of him, The faithful Mr Hyde has made a worthy attempt at reassurance but perhaps, for all his bitterness, Londonderry, who really belonged to the 18th century, had learnt an eternal truth when he wrote at the end of his life: 'I really am not bothering about politics. I think all politicians are quite useless. I have been reading the histories of the last century and all the politicians were actually the most terrible liars, foreign affairs was a game and no one ever wrote a letter or a despatch without a tongue in his cheek. I now see why I failed to understand the very second-rate people I had to deal with
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