Such darling dodos
Hugh Massingberd
TO I I HUNG HALL: FAMILY LIFE AT TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY by Annie Tempest
Orion, £25, pp. 120, ISBN 0752841076
Laid up recently after a strenuous tour of English manor houses for a picturebook, I found Annie Tempest's delightful celebration of Tottering Hall the perfect tonic. This latest selection from her Tottering-By-Gently cartoon strip in Country Life is a sumptuous production in album format published in association with the O'Shea Gallery who handle Tempest's work. Accordingly, the colour reproduction of the drawings is of excellent quality and the book is a pleasure to handle.
Annie Tempest has been compared to Sir Osbert Lancaster, though her style and humour put me more in mind of Pont, whose gentle and affectionate satire of the English character adorned Punch in the 1930s, For example, her ingenious drawing of 'Daffy' Tottering leaning over beside the ironing board to feed the dog, Slobber, with one hand, while holding a grandchild and Hello! with the other hand and toeing a boiling saucepan on the Aga, is entitled THE FEMALE CHARACTER: a predilection for doing six things at once ...' I also particularly liked the other illustrations of this theme: 'A tendancy [Daffy's spelling is a bit wonky, as one might suspect from the glass in her hand] to steal five minutes rest after the children have grown up ...', and 'The ability to see facts from whichever angle suits them best' — the caption to a picture of a prostrate Daffy balancing the weighing machine on her upturned feet. Tempest's triptych of 'The Three Ages of Women: Horses Hormones ... Horticulture' deserves to become a classic.
The introductory potted history of Tottering Hall is full of deft jokes, in which Jeremy Musson, the admirable architectural editor of Country Life, appears to have had a hand. We learn that the family seat was originally adapted from a monastery endowed by Ranulf de Titterung, sword-bearer to the Count Odeur de Brie, and then transformed into a Palladian palace by 'Parsnip' Tottering fresh from his Grand Tour. The family fortunes were temporarily rescued by the 6th Viscount (`Spotted Dick') Tottering's marriage in 1894 to the custard heiress, Dysunity Blister, whose improvements appalled Jonquil Thimbleton-Finds at the National Trust in the 1940s: 'a nightmare of extravagant building ... all domed up with nowhere to go'.
Annie Tempest's beautifully observed drawings of Tottering's interior features — chimneypieces, furniture, portraits, porcelain and so forth — are works of art in themselves. They are executed with a bold line and an exuberant use of colour. Her eye for detail obviously owes much to her own upbringing at Broughton Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where the Tempests have held land since the 12th century. For instance, the Tottering coat of arms is almost identical to the Tempest coat, with its bend diagonally across the shield; six Wellington boots (vert), though, are substituted for the martlets and a parrot-like pair of secateurs replaces the griffin's head as the crest. Yet, as I discovered when I interviewed her forward-looking brother, Roger Tempest, a few years ago, the reality of the go-ahead atmosphere at Broughton (where previously redundant agricultural buildings on the estate have been enterprisingly converted into commercial offices) is far removed from the bufferish fantasy world of Dicky Tottering.
Similarly, although country-house life may be the backdrop for Annie Tempest's cartoons, the jokes, on the whole, have a universal appeal. Most of them relate to the common small change of family life and to Daffy's constant battle with the scales (`You can't expect me to be in perfect shape yet — I've just had a grandchild'), complete with flashes of her knicker elastic. My favourite cartoon is of Daffy, armed with a pitchfork and supported by her redoubtable cleaning lady, 'mucking out the Sunday papers'. Even when a slightly off-putting smug or snobbish tone does creep into the proceedings — as in the over-hearty shooting and 'pass the port' gags — Tottering Hall remains the ideal escape from the infinitely depressing tedium of the general election.
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