Charm is not enough
Hugh Massingberd
HUGH CASSON by Jose Manser Viking £25, pp. 398 C harm', pronounces Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, 'is the great English blight . . . It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love, it kills art.' By all accounts (particularly this chatty, highly subjective biography), Sir Hugh Cas- son, architect, President of the Royal Academy, Professor of Environmental Design at the Royal College of Art, friend and adviser to the royal family, prolific diarist and doodler, was a positive bundle of charm in his trendy Mao or Nehru jackets. Jose Manser explains that the legendary Casson charm was consciously developed to enable him to survive as a child of the Raj (his father was in the Indian Civil Ser- vice) stuck with relations in England. It also saw him through his time at East- bourne College, where the games-hating `Chappie' (as his family called him) was the only boy in the art department, or so he claimed. Nonetheless, he ingratiated him- self with the hearties at St John's College, Cambridge by coxing the college boat, while also making influential contacts through his secretaryship of the University Architectural Society. Having made a name for himself as a fluent architectural journal- ist, Casson became a junior partner of the architect Kit Nicholson; one of their most amusing commissions was the surrealist redecoration of Edward James's house at Monkton, originally designed by Lutyens.
`You think you're invisible. Try being a middle-aged woman!' On the outbreak of the second world war Casson appears (as the military saw has it) `to have been hard of hearing when the bugle sounded', but eventually landed a job in camouflage. Manser is rather vague about his political views, save for telling us that he was 'a socialist voter' and once spoke for the Commonwealth party in Cheltenham.
The apotheosis of Casson's charm and diplomacy was achieved in the 1951 Festi- val of Britain. It is particularly instructive to read of the success of this 'tonic to the nation' in the light of the Dome debacle. Having achieved this remarkable triumph of organisation, though, Casson seemed to believe he could take on everything — and consequently spread himself far too thinly as he flitted hither and thither.
Although Manser occasionally twits her subject for mild xenophobia or male chau- vinism, and feels she needs to apologise for his devotion to the royal family CI know what Queenie likes,' Casson once told an assistant), she tends to be over-defensive about his reputation. At one stage she makes an astonishingly inept comparison between Lutyens and Casson, blithely ignoring the fact that one of Casson's black marks as President of the Royal Academy was his failure to house the great Lutyens exhibition there. She cannot even bring herself to spell out the name of Casson's most trenchant critic, Gavin Stamp. Occa- sionally she will mention that there was some criticism or other of Casson, but she will dismiss it shrilly as offensive, spiteful or whatever, and decline to set it out in any detail for the benefit of the reader. (A punter forking out a pony may well feel short-changed.) Manser merely makes herself look ridiculous by these rants. For example, she states that the comments in Private Eye about the Casson-Conder partnership's Ismaili Centre opposite the V & A were `bordering on racist in their venom, were disregarded at the time, and are now for- gotten'. By whom, one might ask?
Ultimately the trouble with being a `people-pleaser' is that you end up doing the opposite. The bruisers of modern art and architecture inevitably came to regard little Hughie Casson as a wishy-washy fuddy-duddy, a royal toady with a fatal facility for watercolours that were charac- terised by one critic as 'coloured farts' (nat- urally this crude but devastating comment is not mentioned by Manser). And the con- servationists, who had counted on Casson to show some backbone as an early mem- ber of both the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society, felt let down by his failure to halt the vandalism of Bath (where he advised the local authority) and by his hypocrisy in appearing as an expert witness in favour of 'development' in various cases. Charm, in short, is not enough, though I must say that I have a soft spot for Casson's Elephant House at London Zoo.
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