Private Lives

One thing leads to another. A Talent to Amuse, the seventieth birthday tribute to Noël Coward lately issued on CD—contains a snippet from Act I of Private Lives (1930), played in this instance by the youthful Susannah York and Richard Briers, but originally conceived as a vehicle for Coward himself and his great muse Gertrude Lawrence. It is so good that I have since then tracked down and devoured the whole play. The writing is, of course, brilliant—consistently clever and funny throughout—but encased in the substructure is a rich vein of defiance. “It doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous,” declares Elyot. “It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous!” retorts Amanda with feeling. There is a presumption throughout that all four characters’ social credentials are impeccable. At one point in Act II Amanda refers to performing a “Court curtsey,” so we may assume that she has had occasion to deploy it. On the other hand, Amanda knows that the specter of a second divorce will put them in a “Hell of a mess socially.” There is not the merest hint at the Great War, although we may assume that Elyot and Victor are easily old enough to have fought in it and survived. In other words, there is much here of interest to anyone in search of an essentially Edwardian frame of mind, just as it surely exists in comparable novels by P. G. Wodehouse, Vita Sackville-West, and the work of any number of artists (visual or not) steering a parallel course through the 1920s and beyond. True, Amanda and Elyot profess absolutely no faith in anything. They do not believe in Heaven or Hell, merely, as Amanda puts it, “in being kind to everyone, giving money to old beggar-women, and being as gay as possible.” Even here, however, one detects an echo of much earlier but no less shockingly anti-Victorian frivolities, just as one may see the pompous veneers of Art Deco and fads such as silk dressing-gowns, nightclubs, golf, cocktails, and the gramophone all deriving much nourishment from a root system firmly embedded in the Edwardian decade. Coward himself, after all, served his dramatic apprenticeship to Sir Charles Hawtrey. Two other tiny but telling flecks of detail strengthen this impression and they concern diamonds and flamingoes.

In Act II, warming up to one of their bitter rows, Elyot quizzes Amanda about one of her male friends. “You took presents from him,” he accuses. “Presents? Only a trivial little brooch,” she replies defensively. “I remember it well,” Elyot continues: “Bristling with diamonds in the worst possible taste.” “Not at all. It was very pretty. I still have it and I wear it often,” says Amanda with a hint of provocation. There are a few clues in the play as to whose taste is the more reliable, Elyot’s or Amanda’s. Elyot made sure he saw the Taj Mahal in the moonlight. Amanda always suspected that it might look like a biscuit box. Nevertheless, the question in the mind of this middle-aged art museum curator, so recently and thoroughly immersed in the study of Edwardian diamonds, is this: What might a little brooch, ca. 1930, trivial or not, that is “bristling with diamonds in the worst possible taste” actually look like—one, moreover, that Amanda describes as “very pretty”? Was the lapse in taste somehow connected to the number and concentration of the stones, or in their cutting, setting, size, or even colour—fancy pink, perhaps, or intense fancy yellow, or even blue? Or is the problem located nearer to the form of the jewel, some perch-dwelling parrot, for example, or a spray of fuchsias, a miniature pineapple, or something equally vulgar? Not perhaps an issue to lose sleep over, but it is intriguing, because in the design and manufacture of precious jewels one detects one of the most striking curves of stylistic and market continuity extending from ca. 1905 to ca. 1925 and beyond, as if the Great War had simply never happened. This is one of the most interesting aspects of our exhibition, now barely seven weeks away—Heavens!—in which we have plotted several other such curves, all of which appear to defy many of the more conventional, currently accepted rules of Modernism in art and design.

As for the flamingoes, we also learn in Act II that travel throughout the empire did nothing to diminish the pain of Elyot’s divorce from Amanda. “I saw such beautiful things,” he says wistfully lying next to her on the sofa: “Moonlight shining on old temples; strange barbaric dances in jungle villages; scarlet flamingoes flying over deep, deep blue water—breathlessly, love, and completely unexciting because you weren’t there to see them with me.” “Take me, please,” she gushes, “take me at once. Let’s make up for lost time.” “Next week?” he suggests. “Tomorrow,” she urges. “Done!” And for emphasis Amanda adds: “I must see those dear flamingoes.” So the ne plus ultra of Edwardian aestheticism, with its strong, even insistent art nouveau prompt, our old friend the sinuous flamingo, glides over the waters and right into the heart of the mental and emotional décor of Coward’s scene almost as if nothing had disturbed it over the previous twenty years. It might almost be a direct paraphrase of Edwin Austin Abbey’s bizarre painting here at Yale. How interesting! I wonder if Noël Coward ever met Syd Long. In this respect at least, quite apart from the obvious, they had much in common.

Violet

Future scholars of the better florists of Edwardian London may well be indebted to Violet W. Stevenson, whose Successful Flower Marketing and The Encyclopaedia of Floristry, though published respectively in 1952 and 1954 by W. H. Collingridge Limited and Transatlantic Arts Incorporated, appear to codify many practices that must have been firmly established fifty years earlier. Miss Stevenson’s style is brisk, sensible, and businesslike. Aesthetic judgments are cautious but firm, her emphases generally technical: for instance, one is struck by the elaborateness and sheer number of fiddly processes of wiring, indeed the enormous quantity of wire that went into every arrangement and bouquet—nine different gauges in various lengths, on reels, and in coils used for many different purposes such as strengthening stems, straightening leaves, and preventing blooms from disintegrating prematurely. All of this is reminiscent of the ostrich-feather industry, which was similarly wire dependent. Miss Stevenson’s business was obviously geared towards furnishing “shower bouquets” for weddings as opposed to presentations at Court, though the finished articles themselves must have been pretty much identical, a froth of blooms and wispy ferns that could easily descend as far as the hem, if not farther. By the 1950s tuberoses had gone out of fashion, presumably absorbed by the booming postwar fragrance industry, though wartime austerities must surely have played their part. The article on gladioli is somewhat surprising, commending as it does their usefulness in creating enormous corsage ornaments, as well as structuring bouquets and sheaves around them. Imagine the size of a corsage ornament consisting of a couple of thrusting glads. No doubt this fashion was the target of Barry Humphries’s 1955 creation of Mrs. Everage. “It should not be assumed,” writes Miss Stevenson, “that grasses are only permissible in Victorian floristry. Modern designs lend themselves quite well to certain varieties of grass, not the quaking grass of our grandmothers but the bolder, water-grass, eryanthus, wheat and barley. Most of these are obtainable from the [horticultural] sundriesman in their natural colours, bleached or dyed.” According to the OED, quaking grass, n., is “any of various grasses of the genus Briza, having broad, flattened spikelets dangling on slender stalks which tremble in the breeze; esp. (more fully common quaking grass) B. media, which is widely distributed in Eurasia,” and was therefore, of course, ideal for the sort of tremulous shower bouquets that we have seen in considerable abundance at the glittering evening Courts of King Edward and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace.

As one might expect, Miss Stevenson’s mini-dissertation on color rewards close inspection. “The development of colour consciousness,” she writes, “and the true appreciation of colour harmony is an essential qualification for the would-be successful florist,” and their under-development, by implication, almost a guarantee of failure. “There is often so little regard to the suitability of certain colour combinations that far too many floral designs appear to have been assembled with little or no thought of colour harmony...It is not enough to say that the hue of one flower never clashes with another unless you embrace the whole subject and go on to add, when sufficient green is present in stem and foliage to act as a buffer between each colour and the next. No florist can afford to disregard the value of green. It is an important ingredient in floral colour harmonies.” Miss Stevenson does tend to state identical points twice in neighboring sentences, for emphasis. She goes on to recite the standard line on primaries, secondaries, and complimentaries in the color spectrum; the distinctions between hue and tone, shade and tint, pure and “broken” colors, and between contrasting and analogous two- and three-color harmonies. She warns against unfortunate stridency or the jarring effect of ill-conceived adjacencies, and suggests ingenious methods of re-introducing softness and/or pallor. Here, I think, we may identify the point at which Miss Stevenson diverges from her Edwardian predecessors, for not long ago we observed that for them no color combination was too riotous, no effect of texture too assertive or forceful, and no shape or assemblage disproportionate in scale, on the contrary. Wisely, however, Miss Stevenson advises against coronet and veil ornaments composed of lilies, daisies, or daffodils (!), recommending instead “waxy, white flowers, such as stephanotis, gardenias, or camellias, that have about them a slight air of luxury.” And it is back to luxury that this curiously neglected branch of London commerce invariably leads us.

Florists, finally.

If presentation at Court furnished the most socially advantageous and lucrative branch of the Edwardian retail flower trade, its bread-and-butter were weddings, funerals, and the theater. I suspect that middle-level retailers throughout the empire were rather more closely wedded to the latter than has hitherto been fully grasped. In Perth, Western Australia, for example, considerable excitement was aroused by the Anderson Theatrical Company’s touring production of The Mariners of England at the Theatre Royal, a dramatic reconstruction, correct in every detail, of the Battle of Trafalgar on the deck of H.M.S. Victory, for which “the box plan will be on view at Miss Fitts’s florist shop, next to the theatre, to-day” (The West Australian, Monday, October 26, 1903, page 4). We can safely assume that Miss Fitts did not make the Theatre Royal’s box plan available to any and all inquirers as a selfless gesture of charity. Nor was the proximate location of her premises in any way accidental. There is of course the almost defining model, here, of the Covent Garden flower markets and their proximity since at least the eighteenth century to the Royal Opera House and many other West End theaters. Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) rises from the bedrock afforded by the bottom end of the trade, and, of course, flower-sellers such as Eliza Doolittle were the brutalized foot-soldiers of a huge retail army at the head of which stood in command Edward Goodyear of The Royal Arcade, Albemarle Street—armed with his royal warrant as supplier of flowers to the Court. That army has been well covered through the second half of the twentieth century by social historians, but we still know almost nothing about the generals or their structure of command. And this partly explains why I have become so interested lately.

From the other direction, that of the stage door, we have amusing evidence of the deployment of upper-end floral tributes for hard-nosed publicity purposes. As before, that evidence needs to be weighed carefully because of a measure of thankfully unabashed mockery with which it was presented and packaged for the press. The following article circulated widely throughout Australia in 1909:

“Stagecraft Economy”

A lecturer, talking of economy, cited the case of a leading lady as told to him by her manager. The manager one Monday night entered a leading lady’s dressing-room with a huge bouquet in his hand. “The florist just sent this over, with the bill,” he murmured behind his hand. “I’ll have it—er—thrown on at the end of the trial scene, eh?” “No, don’t throw it on,” said the leading lady. “Let an usher hand it up. I want to use it all this week.” [Launceston Examiner (Tasmania), Wednesday, August 18, 1909, page 7; the Queenslander (Brisbane), Saturday, July 24, 1909, page 47; the North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times (Tasmania), Saturday, August 7, 1909, page 2, and the Capricornian (Rockhampton, Queensland), Saturday, August 21, 1909, page 8.]

Hilarious? No doubt, but let us consider a number of ugly implications. The cynicism with which manager and leading lady are here shown to collude is further exaggerated by the fact that she was playing role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and that the plan was vulgarly to exploit their bouquet at the end of Act IV, scene i, the famous trial scene—as unworthy a lapse of taste, because it anticipates by almost two whole acts the end of the play and therefore upstages the rest of the cast, as the great size and expensiveness of the bouquet, which, in turn, underlies her determination to keep and recycle it... for a whole week. So the leading lady is extravagant but mean, vain but shrewd, evidently talented and successful enough to play Portia but certainly not above craving more and better cheap publicity—while, at the same time, confident that lowly front-of-house staff will gladly follow her orders, and collaborate with the deception. She is also as greedy for extravagant blooms as she is evidently unappreciative of their beauty; how do we presume they will look at the end of that busy long week? Leaving all that aside, there are two other important flecks of detail. In filling their order for this mendacious bouquet, which will masquerade as the tribute paid by a member of the lady’s adoring public, the florists were evidently not content to supply their flowers on account, but delivered them with the bill—in other words a vague but pointed insinuation that the leading lady and her furtive management (speaking behind his hand) might not be entirely reliable customers, and therefore not in possession of unclouded respectability. If there were any doubt about that, consider the source of the story: the manager himself, ungallantly and disloyally revealing his leading lady in a most unflattering light. There is, finally, the further implication that the basis upon which the manager enjoyed unfettered access to her dressing-room was at best unsavory. None of this could have been lost on an Edwardian reader alert to social nuance, and it is further telling that the joke was especially uproarious to an Australian public that was well accustomed to various comparable sneers being directed squarely at them from the heart of the imperial capital—as indeed, incredibly, very occasionally they still are. And now I must take out the rubbish.

Further florists

As I have indicated previously, most information about the better florists operating profitably in Edwardian London and elsewhere is usually contained in trivializing shreds of humorous gossip in the press—little more than column filler, as in the following example, but with a surprising capacity to endure. As is indicated by the by-line, this article originated in the New York Herald, and made its first subsequent appearance in the Ann Arbor Argus on Tuesday, January 1, 1895 (page 4), a suitably chucklesome bon-bon for New Year’s Day observances in the frigid Midwest. Seven years later it was still doing the rounds in Australian newspapers, appearing word-for-condescending-word in that organ of Western District hauteur, for example, the Portland Guardian (Monday, June 30, 1902):

“Bouquets and Circumspection”

That any man can step into a florist’s and order a bouquet for any lady is no longer possible in New York. There is a florist, and a very exclusive one, who refuses all orders that do not seem just “conventional,” to be very polite about it. An elderly man unknown to the florist was refused a bouquet to be sent to a schoolgirl, and a young sport’s greenback was handed back to him when he ordered a box of flowers for a beautiful society leader whom he had admired in her Victoria—New York Herald.

First let us now begin to identify some patterns. The “fashionable florist” and the “West End Florist Girl,” as we have seen, both laid particular emphasis on the stratagems of “old men,” and certain vaguely questionable habits of the young, such the “coster chap” with the impertinently flamboyant buttonhole that so vexed the latter. These are beginning to look suspiciously like tropes. Second, there is the transatlantic dimension. Should we assume that society florists in Edwardian London provided the template for florists aspiring to exclusiveness in New York? Maybe, maybe not. Third, and most intriguingly, let us consider an ethical problem that lies at the core of the joke. Assuming in this case that the source of information can only have been the exclusive New York florist him- or herself—and incidentally that question of gender is an increasingly intriguing one—how hid the florist know that the Miss so-and-so for whom he tried to purchase the bouquet was an inviolable schoolgirl unless the creepy old man readily disclosed it in the first place? It seems unlikely that the florist had the time or resources with which to conduct discreet on-the-spot inquiries. And how did the florist know that the young sport’s acquaintanceship with the beautiful society leader was based solely on admiring her impertinently from afar, and in public, if he had not freely admitted as much? (A “victoria” was an open horsedrawn carriage.) This would suggest that both would-be customers regarded the florist as pretty accommodating, but that the florist’s claim to exclusiveness was at this date strongly wedded to the concept of strict propriety. I doubt if the loose morals on one side and the aspiration to respectability on the other were purely American qualities. No doubt the better London florists attempted to navigate similarly shark-infested waters.

The author of the ugly piece about “The West End Florist Girl,” meanwhile, (The London Journal, March 11, 1911, page 468) concluded by reluctantly making “his way out of the sweet-scented realm into the land of noise and bustle, motor smells and grimy smoke,” a valuable reminder of the ubiquity of the motor car, and its deleterious effect upon central London. Yet even this was an issue that the better florists were called upon to alleviate, if any of the following grounds for disapproval, expressed in 1909 by the Scotsman, actually existed:

“Well-Perfumed Motor Cars”

The ultra-fashionable, wasteful woman of “society” is most particular just now (says the ‘Scotsman’) about having a supply of flowers for her motor car. The idea is to leave a standing order with a florist to send a big bunch of roses, or violets, or even orchids, to the garage every morning, where the posies are placed in receptacles inside the car. There they are when the machine is brought around to the house, and the interior of the [Demi-] tonneau [a Cadillac motor car] is by that time nicely perfumed. Besides, the flowers make the car look very nice indeed. A fresh bunch may be placed in the car in the afternoon, and again in the evening, to perfume the car for madame’s progress to the theatre. [Launceston Examiner, Saturday, March 20, 1909, page 2, and Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, Saturday, April 3, 1909, page 7.]

Obviously the point here is to mock wasteful Madame, but it would be hard to do so if there were not some plausible premise. And, now, I think, it is time to seek more scraps of information about the better London florists in the fruitful realm of the theater...

The florists again

In chapter 20 of Moths (1880), the curious novel by “Ouida,” the self-styled Marie Louise de la Ramée, a great singer, Monsieur de Corrèze, presents “to the Princess Zouroff, an English girl who has been sacrificed to a barbarously rich Russian, a special memento...: ‘He brought her a great bouquet of Alpine roses, and in the midst of the roses was the rare dark-blue Wolfinia Carinthiana [sic] which grows upon the slops [sic] of the Gärtnerkögel [sic], and nowhere else in the world, they say.’” (Notes and Queries, June 26, 1937, p. 459.) Wulfenia carinthiaca was indeed native to the slopes of the Gartnerkofel, close to what is now the Austrian border with Italy, but by 1880 it obviously also formed part of the vast smorgasbord of ingredients at the disposal of the better London florists—though Ouida herself by then lived at Bellosguardo, above Florence. As far as I can tell from my researches, which have been hampered by the fact that I can locate not a single history of society fleuristes operating in any market or era, late Victorian and Edwardian practitioners were prepared to insert absolutely anything into “shower and châtelaine” floral bouquets (for presentation at Court) so long as they were (a) large, (b) rare, and therefore (c) incredibly expensive. In the case of various species of red-hot-poker (Kniphofia) the more adventurous were obviously prepared to set to one side the basic principle of beauty, the better to create what strikes me as a more than vaguely menacing effect. Imagine coming face to face with a lady armed with a large bouquet composed of Strelitzia reginae and red-hot-pokers.

Those of my readers who have stayed with me up to this point will understand why I am curious to hear directly from the society fleuristes of London during the Edwardian era, for their voices have fallen almost completely silent, if ever they were heard at all. However, two rare utterances will get us started. Both were printed in the gossip pages of The London Journal, and although separated by more than a decade each sheds a little light on the florist’s workroom and salon.

The first is a “Chat with a Fashionable Florist” (Vol. 29, No. 756, June 11, 1898, page 526).

On my books I have scores of people whom I supply daily throughout the season with the most exquisite flowers within reach…I supply many young aristocrats every morning with choice buttonholes, the price of which amounts to twenty shillings a week, for you must remember that the flowers are often rare. Strangely enough, I rank many old men amongst my best customers, and they are more particular than anyone as regards their buttonholes. Of course numbers of sprays are ordered by young men for their sweethearts, and even ancient dandies express their sentiment in this tasteful manner.

Who is this speaking? There are some clues. “On my books,” “young aristocrats,” “many old men,” “sweethearts,” “ancient dandies,” and, of course, being more than willing to discuss money—these point to a solidly middle-class proprietor, alert to the advantages of publicity, where the shrewdest high-end florist would almost certainly avoid any such disclosures to the press, in the interests of discretion. There is also a sense in which the speaker builds a head of steam:

I remember receiving an order from an old gentleman, who must have reached the allotted span of three score years and ten, to supply a young and pretty titled lady with a spray every morning she happened to be in the metropolis. The flowers were always sent according to the injunctions given, and just as regularly returned, the lady evidently not appreciating the attentions of the old beau. This state of things was duly reported to the gentleman, but without the slightest hesitation he instructed us to continue delivering the flowers, together with an occasional bouquet, which we did until the lady came personally to request us to desist. I have had many cases similar to this. Men frequently order flowers to be sent to ladies—beautiful, of course—with whom they are not acquainted, and the recipients often come round to ascertain the name of the donor, or to say that no more flowers are to be sent to them from such and such a person.

The phrase “three score years and ten” suggests to me that our florist was then middle aged, and that distinct air of advertorial—combined with gossip that, in Edwardian terms, verges on the positively risqué—suggest to me that we are dealing with, at best, a second-tier retailer, maybe a garrulous bachelor (though this is not entirely clear), but evidently also relatively successful, probably occupying premises in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, or Kensington.

The second piece (“The West End Florist Girl,” March 11, 1911, page 468) is far more detailed and interesting. It is a condescending account of a conversation between the writer and the “pretty young lady” who sold him his buttonhole.

The fair florist seemed inclined to take a pessimistic view of things in general, and did not display that enthusiasm for her business which he had imagined so pleasant an occupation would inspire.

“It is certainly not the most charming work in the world,” she said, “though I believe lots of girls envy us florists’ assistants, believing that we have a very easy time of it. There are so many drawbacks in the business, you see. In the first place, our hands are constantly in water, and that makes them red and hard. Then, again, the thin wires which we have to use cut our fingers terribly, and if you look at my hands you will see the marks now.

“Yes, we are fairly well remunerated; but the hours are rather long in most West End shops. We are supposed to be here at eight a.m., when we get the shop ready for the day, make up the ‘display’ board for the window, and so on. We get half an hour for lunch, and ten minutes for tea, finishing work as a rule at eight or half-past, though, of course, at busy times—say at the height of the season, when weddings and balls are in full swing—we are often here till midnight.

“We get some curious customers sometimes, of course. What shop doesn’t? Old ladies are the most annoying. We have any amount of them in here during the week, and the amount of cut flowers which they expect, say, for half a crown or three shillings is simply past comprehension.  You would hardly believe how grasping some of them are. One old lady, though, proved a notable exception, for she made very large purchases, and when she was leaving she insisted on my accepting half a sovereign to reward me, as she said, for the attention I had shown her. Such customers are rare, however.

“A young coster chap [a street seller usually of fruit], who evidently had just come in for a stroke of luck, slouched in here this morning and asked for a buttonhole. He was not content with one flower, but had three separate buttonholes wired together and fastened in his coat. Then he left the place looking as conceited as a peacock.

“We have our regular people naturally. There is one old gentleman, a banker, I believe, who comes in here regularly every morning at ten o’clock for a bunch of violets, winter and summer, and we always have a bunch ready for him, no matter how scarce the flowers may be. Curiously enough he never speaks a word, either on entering or leaving. I do not think I know the sound of his voice. He walks in quietly, nods to us all, and calmly waits for the violets, whereupon he enters his motor and takes his departure. We send him a bill quarterly, to save him the trouble of paying every day.

The writer then proceeded to put a somewhat delicate question. He asked whether any of the young men customers ever tended in the direction of flirtation while ostensibly in the pursuit of buttonholes. The young lady answered, with asperity:

“No. Do you want to class us with barmaids or teashop girls?”

The writer humbly begged her pardon, and pleaded his want of experience in such matters.

“On the contrary,” she continued, “it sometimes quite astonishes me to see how reticent and almost nervous the majority of the gentlemen who come in here are. Many of them ask for their flowers in a whisper, as though they were in a church, and I may honestly affirm that nothing in this way of your suggestion ever occurs in this establishment. Of course,” she added, with an arch glance, “the other girls may have different opinions; but that is mine.

“Do we have to serve an apprenticeship to the business? Oh, yes. That is quite indispensible. I myself was apprenticed for six months to a suburban florist, where I learned the rudiments of the work. Then I became what is called an ‘improver,’ that is to say, I gave my services gratuitously, after which I was promoted to the position of third hand, then second, and now,” she concluded with a smile, “I am a first hand, and no higher rank can be mine until I satisfy the dream of my life, which is—”

“What?” queried the writer.

“To have a shop of my own.”

The writer assured the fair damsel that when this event came off he would be the first to patronize the new establishment, and then reluctantly took his way out of the sweet-scented realm into the land of noise and bustle, motor smells and grimy smoke.

As journalism, of course, this is cloying rubbish, apparently trivial and certainly determined to be trivializing, but for any social historian or chronicler of the luxury goods business it is gold dust. Here we have valuable hints at how a society florist really operated in Edwardian London. There were at least three ranks of “shop-girls” with sufficiently specialist skills as to require basic training. There must have been plenty of unskilled labor also: porters and errand boys, someone to light the fires, sweep the workroom floor, and naturally at least one person in charge who dealt with the agents and suppliers at the wholesale end. A working knowledge of botany might have been useful up to a point, if only to avoid combinations that were then regarded as mutually destructive, for example roses and mignonettes, or roses and carnations—apparently each was believed to cause the other to wilt—or to isolate certain flowers such as violets and pansies that lasted far longer on their own, or similarly to extend the life of daffodils and jonquils by adding plenty of fresh green leaves. (Notes and Queries, March 22, 1913, p. 231.) Yet, in a far broader sense, this young woman represents the aspirational dimension of the Edwardian lower middle class. Our florist was almost painfully aware of nuances of rank. She was contemptuous of vulgar counter-jumping. She laid claim to respectability. She was realistic about the hardship of manual work, yet quite aware of the value of her skills, and of money in general. She was quite possibly also equipped with basic accounting skills (because of the gentleman banker’s quarterly bill). Above all she was possessed of the ambition to open her own shop. All of this is good to know, and to parse with care. But what about her proprietor, who might well have been mortified (as indeed the young woman would have been shocked) to discover that her conversation had been scribbled down, filed as copy, and the identity of an all too readily identifiable customer unwittingly disclosed in one of the lesser weeklies? What, after all, did the gentleman do with his daily supply of violets? They were almost certainly not intended for the chief cashier at his bank. The young woman managed to disclose her own identity, too, and with considerable pride, as the first hand. Could this disaster have cost them the gentleman banker’s account, or even lost her her job?

The Coronation

Last month in London I snatched up a DVD, newly issued to mark the Diamond Jubilee, of the J. Arthur Rank Organization’s cinematic record of The Queen’s coronation, narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, in startling Technicolor. It has taken me a little while to make time to sit down and watch the whole thing. Having been for so many months immured in the Edwardian age, it is astounding to grasp how much closer in mood and complexion to that compact moment than one might otherwise imagine was the London of Coronation day, 1953, at least in the form devised by J. Arthur Rank. Many things stand out: the sumptuous spectacle of such a concentration of diamond jewellery—the Queen Mother’s crown without its arches; the Duchess of Devonshire’s sensational tiara; the prominence, indeed assertiveness, of the Church of England bishops’ role in the coronation rite; the grayness and total absence of what we usually call “diversity” through the huge crowds on the streets of London; the residues of empire (mostly in the form of contingents of colonial and dominion troops, and their respective prime ministers); the skill with which so many great officers of state routinely walked backwards down steps, many with trains (though H.R.H. The Duke of Gloucester had a slight wobble); the careful distinction in scale and design between the coronets worn by different ranks of peers and peeresses; the alien hairdressing—in the relatively few instances of guests in the Abbey who can have availed themselves of hairdressers at all; the fact that so many dignitaries, not just Queen Sālote of Tonga and the Sultan of Kelantan, traveled through the pouring rain in open landaus; the leanness of the English physique in 1953, the product of a decade and a half of food rationing. And there, at the center of the whole thing, is that young woman of twenty-seven—subscribing to an oath of almost inconceivable gravity, and evidently absorbing the impact of prayers such as “Receive this kingly Sword, brought now from the Altar of God, and delivered to you by the hands of us the Bishops and servants of God, though unworthy. With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order: that doing these things you may be glorious in all virtue; and so faithfully serve our Lord Jesus Christ in this life, that you may reign for ever with him in the life which is to come. Amen.” How, I wonder, would you feel having that one lobbed at you in front of an audience of millions, and by a fairly starchy Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher? Only one person knows the answer to that.

The Piccadilly goat

In a broadcast that went to air on Sunday, December 29, 1935, Max Beerbohm reminisced about the streets of Edwardian London. The original broadcast survives in a rare gramophone recording in the Historic Sound Recordings collection of the Sterling Memorial Library here at Yale, and I have lately listened to the whole thing. Here is a sampling:

Mayfair and Westminster and St. James’s were grand, of course, very urban, in a proudly unostentatious way...They were places of leisure—of leesure, one might almost have said in the old-fashioned way. And, very urban though they were, they were not incongruous with rusticity. St. James’s Park seemed a natural appendage to St. James’s Street; and the two milkmaids who milked two cows there, and sold the milk, did not seem strangely romantic. The Green Park seemed not out of keeping with the houses of Piccadilly. Nor did the Piccadilly goat strike one as more than a little odd in Piccadilly.

I don’t know much about him, though I often saw him and liked him so much. He lived in a large mews in a side street, opposite to Gloucester House, the home of the venerable Duke of Cambridge. At about ten o’clock in the morning he would come treading forth with a delicately clumsy gait down the side-street—come very slowly, as though not quite sure there mightn’t be some grass for him to nibble at between the paving-stones. Then he would pause at the corner of Piccadilly and flop down against the railings of the nearest house. He would remain there till luncheon-time and return in the early afternoon. He was a large, handsome creature, with great intelligence in his amber eyes. He never slept. He was always interested in the passing scene. I think nothing escaped him. I wish he could have written his memoirs when he finally retired. He had seen, day by day, much that was worth seeing.

He had seen a constant procession of the best-built vehicles in the world, drawn by very beautifully bred and beautifully groomed and beautifully harnessed horses, and containing very ornate people. Vehicles of the most diverse kinds. High-swung barouches, with immense armorial bearings on their panels, driven by fat white-wigged coachmen, and having powdered footmen up behind them; seigniorial phaetons; daring tandems; discreet little broughams, brown or yellow; flippant high dog-carts; low but flippant Ralli-carts; very frivolous private hansoms shaming the more serious public ones. And all these vehicles went by with a cheerful briskness; there was hardly ever a block for them in the traffic. And their occupants were very visible and were looking their best. The occupants of those low-roofed machines which are so pitifully blocked nowadays all along Piccadilly may, for aught one knows, be looking their best. But they aren’t on view. The students of humanity must be content to observe the pedestrians. These, I fear, would pain my old friend the goat…

All memory is suspect. Much more so is any form of nostalgia carefully calibrated for widespread public consumption. Yet Max Beerbohm’s blasé, somewhat self-conscious goat’s-eye view effectively retrieved part of the mood and much of the appearance of Edwardian Piccadilly, in particular its free-flowing traffic, while nodding respectfully toward the purely private accommodations of Queen Victoria’s elderly Hanoverian first cousin. (Field Marshal H.R.H. The Duke of Cambridge, K.G., K.T., K.P., P.C., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.C.H., G.C.I.E., G.C.V.O., died on March 17, 1904.) Note, above all, Beerbohm’s entirely unsympathetic attitude towards the motor car, such a pitiful substitute for high-swung barouches.