The Dame

I knew Dame Elisabeth Murdoch not well, but slightly. When I was no more than an extremely callow undergraduate, barely aged seventeen (1982), I served for a bit on the committee of the friends of the library of the National Gallery of Victoria, of which Dame Elisabeth was naturally president. She was exceedingly kind to me then. Later, when I worked at Government House in Melbourne, Dame Elisabeth was—I do not think that this is an exaggeration—a favorite luncheon guest of Dr. McCaughey, whom she obviously worshipped. She was usually seated to the Governor’s left, and always responded to this compliment, even as she approached the age of eighty, with disarming girlishness—a quality I gather otherwise she strictly rationed. Just before she died my mother filled a vacant spot in a regular four who played bridge at Cruden Farm. This was, I think, the last social engagement Mum ever fulfilled and it was clearly too much for her—though she thoroughly enjoyed those intense afternoon rubbers, and was only mildly critical of Dame Elisabeth’s chicken sandwiches. The late and much lamented Jack and Elizabeth Kennedy, who were dear old friends of my parents, took a kindly interest in all the affairs of Dame Elisabeth; they shared a passion for the meticulous cultivation and cross-pollination by hand of violently colored zinnias. I have a feeling that Jack was Dame Elisabeth’s accountant. The Dame was patron of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, where Mum wound bobbins with Nancye Cain and many other volunteers. The Dame was also interested in the welfare of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, where occasionally I bumped into her in the early 1990s. So the connections were many and varied. As Rupert Murdoch pointed out in his tribute last week in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dame Elisabeth’s life ran parallel with, and for almost the whole extent of, that of the Commonwealth of Australia thus far. I gather she was also popular at the Palace. May she rest in peace.

As we get older I suppose that point about many and varied connections becomes truer of life itself. Looking back over the past year’s blogging, I am struck by the number and variety of regretful reminiscences of the fallen that I have felt compelled to scatter like rose petals among more frivolous musings about art, scarlet heels, and other ephemera—Ronald Searle, John Gage, Dame Joan Sutherland, Pope Shenouda III, the King of Tonga, Margaret Whitlam, Peter Steele, Jean McCaughey, Richard Warren, and, now, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. No doubt this is symptomatic of advancing years. Yet I am no obituarist. In fact, notwithstanding the restorative hours before dawn that I often spend devouring two whole pots of tea in my bloggy haze, I have been busier this year than at any time in the past ten. Our huge book and exhibition are essentially finished, and merely await the arrival of the crates. We open on February 27. I should say that Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century has been, is, and will probably remain, the central episode of my working life, and I am mighty proud of it. Please do come and see the show. I suspect the blog has kept me sane, though not as much as my wonderful Lyolik. And now I must go to New York for Christmas.

Chicken sandwiches

Which reminds me, in its heyday, the Regency Room on the top floor of Georges in Collins Street, Melbourne, served the best, moistest, freshest, tenderest, most exquisitely seasoned chicken sandwiches that I have ever had the good fortune to sample regularly for lunch or afternoon tea—in the company of my old friends Helen Bird and Kelly Read, to whom I shall be ever grateful for introducing me to them. Obviously, in some quite tangible way, Georges’s chicken sandwiches, now forever vanished, were then a still living relic of the Edwardian diet. Yet they were not too fat, not too thin; there were not too many chopped spring onions, nor too few; not too much mayonnaise, nor too little; the filling was pleasingly al dente, but not too lumpy, nor indeed chopped into a sort of slimy oblivion. Was there not a hint of tarragon also, as well as a welcome suggestion of chopped parsley—for texture? Meanwhile, the solid architecture afforded by the thinly sliced wholemeal bread was equally distinguished, not the tasteless, starchy, sugar-laden, industrially-manufactured foamy white rubbish one is so often obliged to endure here in America, but rather a bread of distinction, freshly baked, and with that hint of chewy, gluten-y resistance that actually improves the loaf through the course of those crucial first twenty-four hours. Also, by the way, it contained an appropriate amount of salt—a point upon which my late mother insisted—a vital ingredient, in harmlessly small quantities, that was yet to be targeted by the healthy-heart fundamentalists. In other words, Georges’s chicken sandwich was exactly right, a sandwich of genius, the Koh-i-noor, the Cotopaxi, the Rembrandt, the Concorde of chicken sandwiches. Who, I wonder, was responsible for the Georges chicken sandwich? Could she still be alive? How I miss her artistry, skill, dedication, and how often I have attempted—and failed—to recreate the whole effect in the mad, desperate privacy of my own kitchen, here in New Haven, Conn.