Loads of Queens

Louis Vuitton in Bond Street celebrates the Royal Wedding.

On the jukebox this weekend

Happy Molly-days!

Molly Parkin. Icon.

Dare to dream

"The most dazzling exponent of the High Victorian Dream. Pugin conceived that dream; Rossetti and Burne-Jones painted it; Tennyson sang its glories; Ruskin and Morris formulated its philosophy; but only Burges built it."
Mordaunt Crook

William Burges may or may not have been gay (he certainly never married, and his dilettante friends in the High Victorian era were quite a fey lot - Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and the like). He definitely was not renowned for his good looks (Gwendolen, Lady Bute called him "Dear Burges, ugly Burges who designed such lovely things").

But my dears, what an exercise in campery were his architectural designs!

He designed the most outrageously over-the-top castle in Cardiff for the richest man in Britain in the 1860s, the Marquis of Bute, and not content with that built another - Castell Coch - just up the road!


Cardiff Castle Clock Tower

Cardiff Castle is considered to be one of the finest examples of the Gothic Medievalist style (outside the Palace of Westminster) so favoured in the mid-Victorian era. Not a pillar nor a beam, a nook or a cranny, was spared the sumptuous, often gilded, detail that Burges specialised in. Reflecting a variety of exotic fantasies - Arabesque, Germanic, feudal French and Old English - parts of the castle were deliberately designed to invoke places that both the Marquess and Burges had visited on their travels.


The Arab Room


The Great Fireplace

Castell Coch, an entirely Medieval construct with its galleries around the central courtyard, provided the Butes with a fairytale "feudal country estate", when in fact their land and estates were built largely on the back of the far more pedestrian coal industry. Surprisingly, the family never used it for much more than a few months, and the Marquis himself never visited it after its completion.


Castell Coch

Not content with building just for his patrons (who also included Lord Carrington, the Marquess of Ripon and Sir John Heathcoat-Amory), Burges built his own house - which he dubbed the "Palace of the Arts" - The Tower House in Kensington. Another exercise in faux-medievalism, this dramatic residence also provided him with an opportunity to design and create more elaborate furniture, metalwork, glass and decoration to suit his own peculiar world - famously described as that of "an opium-addicted bachelor Gothicist who dressed in medieval costume."


The Tower House

Burges died prematurely in 1881, aged just 53. Some concluded his opium habit may have been a contributory factor. In hindsight, it was probably just as well he didn't live to see the volte-face that hit the late and post-Victorian period, when fanciful Gothic architecture and designs such as his began to be scorned (even despised) by the "back-to-basics" fanatics of the Arts and Crafts movement, and by the proponents of the new industrial "modern" taste.

Read more about William Burges

Oh, those Venetians!

The moment Night with dusky mantle covers
The skies (and the more duskily the better)
The Time - less liked by husbands than by lovers -
Begins, and Prudery flings aside her fetter,
And Gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers.
Giggling with all the Gallants who beset her;
And there are Songs, and quavers, roaring, humming,
Guitars, and every other sort of strumming.
Lord Byron, "Beppo" (describing the Carnevale di Venezia)

In an essay titled Homosexuality in Venice in the time of Lord Byron, Jack Gumpert Wasserman offers six reasons for the popularity of Venice with homosexual men - of which the "first, and certainly foremost was the absence of all criminal and civil laws proscribing sodomy. It is worth emphasizing again that homosexuality was still a capital offence in England."


"Tita"

One of Byron's servants was Giovanni Battista Falcieri, known as "Tita," a muscular young gondolier he had acquired in Venice. He was Byron's personal attendant and chasseur, attending his lordship in his equestrian and swimming exercises.

From Sketches of Some Distinguished Anglo-Indians By William Laurie [presumably Tita appears in this book because he eventually worked for the India Office]:

He appeared to enjoy the reminisces of their swimming excursions very much, when his lordship and he would go out at night-time, each with a light in one hand, elevated over their heads, while they swam with the other...They had swam some two or three miles when his lordship turned to "Tita" to ask him if he felt disposed to go farther, which he was quite willing to do.

Lord Byron

Venetian gondoliers were well known for selling their sexual services. Apparently Tita had sex (for "broad silver pieces") with one of Byron's guests, William Bankes, who as a young man had initiated Byron into the gay world at Cambridge.

Campness personified, he is further described by Laurie thus:

Falcieri was accustomed to speak with pride on the richness of his uniform - a cocked hat with a plume of feathers; scarlet coat, richly embroidered with gold lace; pantaloons, also similarly embroidered; Hessian boots, with tassels; sword and sash completed his equipment when out on special occasions with his lordship.

Byron apparently died holding Tita's hand...

Read more about Byron's gay affairs

In a footnote to this story, "Tita" was recommended by friends of the late Lord Byron to none other than the family of Benjamin Disraeli, latterly Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, and became a servant in his household. He even accompanied the great man on his diplomatic missions to Albania and the Adriatic.

Cousin Louie

Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein (12th August 1872 - 8th December 1956), a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, photographed by Cecil Beaton.

According to Angus Trumble, writing in The Paris Review:

“Cousin Louie,” as she was known, was the fourth child of Queen Victoria’s bad-tempered middle daughter, Princess Helena. Her book My Memories of Six Reigns is a fantastically weird combination of out-of-sequence table-rapping reminiscence; reverent reflection upon the burdens of monarchy, and innumerable flecks of interesting detail.

Louie’s Edwardian wedding to Prince Aribert of Anhalt was the bright idea of Cousin Willie, the Kaiser, but more accurately an example of his total lack of judgment. It seems the Prince was soon afterwards caught in flagrante with an attractive young male servant in, on, or more probably beside the marital bed, and, concluding from this that her marriage was no longer viable, Louie promptly undertook an extended tour of Canada and the United States. Returning to Britain she immersed herself in charitable and artistic work, set up a Girls’ Club in Bermondsey, kept an eye on her mother’s nursing homes, and lent modest support to the imperial trade in dried fruit. Wholly guileless, Princess Marie Louise is irresistible.

Princess Marie Louise on Wikipedia

"Lollipops! Bright shiny lollipops!"

The magnificently camp Robert Helpmann - dancer, choreographer, and actor - was born in South Australia on 9 April 1909.

In his eight decade career, he danced with Anna Pavlova during her Australian tour in 1926, was premier danseur with Sadler's Wells from 1933 to 1950, and worked with such notable legends of the ballet world as Frederick Ashton, Ninette de Valois, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.



From Ballet Magazine:

"I can do something with that face" - so Ninette de Valois famously said when she first saw Robert Helpmann. He had just arrived in London to join the Vic-Wells Ballet; he was 24, and in his native Australia he had already begun his career as an actor and dancer, including a tour with Pavlova's company as a student. With de Valois' support he became the company's leading male dancer, partnering Fonteyn as she grew to greatness in the classics, and choreographed a number of works in the 40s at least two of which earned a place in the repertoire. Most of all, he created unforgettable characters, both comic and dramatic, in many works by Ashton and de Valois. He had the priceless gift of being able to hold an audience, no matter what he was doing.

From the Helpmann Awards site:

When Sir Robert Helpmann died in Sydney on 28 September 1986 the curtain fell on a career so long, diverse and extraordinary that obituary writers hardly knew where to start. Into his 77 years he had packed more activity, met more challenges and excelled in more fields than any of his contemporaries, in Australia or overseas.

What was he? A dancer? A choreographer? A director of ballets, plays and operas? A stage, film and television actor? Even a singer? He was all these and much, much more: a theatrical chameleon, capable of adroitly adapting his prodigious knowledge, talent and enthusiasm to everything he tackled. Robert Helpmann was unique.

Mr Helpmann is perhaps best remembered by international audiences today for his visually stunning screen performances in the cult Powell-Pressburger classic The Red Shoes, as "Prince Tuan" in 55 Days At Peking, and, most of all for his portrayal of one of the most scary villains of all time, the Child-Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.



Many years after its 1948 premiere, an intrepid reporter asked Helpmann if the portrait in The Red Shoes of dancers' lives was an over-the-top exaggeration. He replied, "Oh, no, dear boy, it was quite understated." However, as choreographer in both the UK and his native Oz - he was artistic director of the Australian Ballet from 1965 to 1976 - among his numerous choreographic works are Comus, Elektra, Hamlet, Adam Zero, Miracle in the Gorbals and The Display.

His waspish personality was legend - he famously fell out with the other principal Queen of the Ballet Freddie Ashton, and their spats were the stuff of backstage gossip for years.

My favourite anecdote about Mr Helpmann has been related many times before...

During a ballet tour, Sir Robert Helpmann's company played a huge sports arena. The management gave Helpmann the referees' dressing room. Before the performance, the stage manager peeked in to give to Sir Robert his call and was amused to discover the star standing on a chair, perched atop a table, beneath the room's one and only light bulb. Holding a small mirror, Helpmann was applying intricate eye makeup. "Are you alright Sir Robert?" the stage manager asked. "Well yes, I suppose," he replied, "but heaven knows how the referees cope!"

Michael Benthall

From the GLBTQ site:

His flair for playing to the press and keeping his name before the public also brought him many other invitations, among them one to dance at Oxford University, where he met a 19-year-old undergraduate named Michael Benthall.

Helpmann noted at the time that Benthall had matinee idol looks and understood what he was talking about: this was the start of something big, a professional and personal partnership that would endure for thirty-six years until Benthall's death in 1974. Although their relationship was conducted in accordance with the rules of decorum and discretion of the time, they lived together and were recognized as a couple in their wide social circle.

A sadly-missed, and ground-breaking man.