Fundament al
Sir: All reviewers of Lord Carrington's autobiography have noted the relish with which he describes how the Third Baron horsewhipped a journalist on the steps of the Conservative Club for what he had written about his late father, but without revealing what had caused such offence. The answer is to be found in J. Mordaunt Crook's life of William Burges (John Mur- ray, 1981), the architect who built for the Second Baron at Gayhurst, Buckingham- shire, an extraordinary circular lavatory block for his servants, topped with a sculpture of Cerberus, a three-headed dog with red glass eyes. Carrington was obses- sed with plumbing and, in 1869, Grenville Murray revealed that he had been known in clubland as 'a maniac, who believed that an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon, and used to discharge [his] legisla- tive and judicial functions . . standing'. Surely the fact that this public figure, politician and Lord Lieutenant of Bucking- hamshire 'persistently refused, during the whole of his uneventful life, to sit whenev- er it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand up or lie down' was as legitimate a subject of journalistic com- ment as are the precise details of the present Baron Carrington's own public career.
Gavin Stamp
$t Chad's Street, London WC1
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