With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale …
John Betjeman, ‘Advent
1955’
These photos of the last two dates on our tour, Scarborough and Barcelona, tell their own contrasting story in light.
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| Photo by EP |
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| Photo by EP |
On my return to London, having recovered from a well-timed cold, I took myself to the the National Gallery by Tube to see Rembrandt: The Late Works. On the homeward journey these were just some of the Santa Clauses I saw making their way up the escalator to Trafalgar Square. Two brave ones ran up the stairs.
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| Photo by EP |
The hotel at which I stayed in Scarborough had once been owned by Charles Laughton’s brother (Scarborough was Laughton’s birthplace, and Edith Sitwell’s no less!). And there’s a connection between this seaside resort, Rembrandt and West Hampstead. The surrealist artist John Armstrong lived in a room near Fortune Green, NW6 in the early 1920s. In 1936, the year I was born, he was the designer for the Alexander Korda film Rembrandt, with Laughton in the title role. The same year he created a mural for Tom Laughton’s Royal Hotel in Scarborough.
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| L. One of Armstrong’s costume designs for Rembrandt. R. Laughton as Rembrandt |
Furthermore, in 1936, Charles Laughton opened the Odeon Cinema in Scarborough – for years now the home of Ayckbourn’s theatre-in-the-round, the Stephen Joseph.
It has a studio theatre where My Perfect Mind played, fashioned from the dress circle of the Art Deco cinema.
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