WOWH (Women of West Hampstead)

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness. 

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Although she is not featured in the film, it is worth mentioning, by way of a postscript, the prominent socialist and feminist Dame Margaret Postgate Cole who lived at 7 Parsifal Road, West Hampstead from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. She established the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda in 1930 and the New Fabian Research Bureau the following year. She was also a champion of comprehensive education. She produced a large body of work on politics, economics and Labour history and her autobiography, Growing up into Revolution, is considered a beautifully written classic of the genre.

Portrait of Margaret Cole by Australian artist and feminist Stella Bowen
who was an official war artist during World War II. NPG. Circa 1944-5

In 1918, she married G. D. H. Cole, who was regarded as the most influential socialist thinker of the period. Margaret consistently pursued married women’s right to work and equal pay and wanted to find ways of making married women’s role compatible with a successful career. With her husband she wrote twenty-nine detective novels.

The Coles at home (possibly in Parsifal Road), 1938
Photo by Howard Coster. NPG

Margaret Cole is also famous for writing, in November 1915, the one of the first anti-war poems from a woman’s perspective.

‘The Falling Leaves’

Today, as I rode by,

I saw the brown leaves dropping from their tree

In a still afternoon,

When no wind whirled them whistling to the sky,

But thickly, silently,

They fell, like snowflakes wiping out the noon;

And wandered slowly thence

For thinking of a gallant multitude

Which now all withering lay,

Slain by no wind of age or pestilence,

But in their beauty strewed

Like snowflakes falling on the Flemish clay.

ABSTRACTION

Photo by EP

I walked through the alleys up to Hampstead proper this afternoon, retracing the footsteps of the old poets and painters I like to think. I took a picture of the Admiral’s House, painted at least twice by Constable, but I was wondering about abstraction and trying to compose in my head a limerick about it; I got as far as ‘critics’ criteria’ to rhyme with ‘inferior’ and, turning from the last alley into Heath Street, was faced by a new gallery with a Miro in the window.

Photos by EP

I cased the joint then went down the hill to the art shop and bought some materials …

        Is the science of Art quite exact?

        And where would that place the Abstract?

        I think I would fall

        Having no rules at all

        Or is it just courage I’ve lacked

        I’ve bought me a grained piece of wood

        A few dabs of paint would look good

        I might stop the traffic

        Turning non-pictographic – 

        All abstract – if only I could!

Photo by EP

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

A limerick to mark the fifth annual Women of the World Festival held at the Southbank Centre this past week (audio only):

Coming soon: a film celebrating West Hampstead’s special contribution to women’s suffrage.

The women’s advocacy paper Shafts, founded by
Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp of Westbere Road, West Hampstead

SPRING CLEANING

It may be a task that’s humdrum

This forcing the dirt to succumb

Who is it deplores

That I’m doing the chores?

When I’ve done them, the cleaner can come.

And I have to get rid of my clutter

Released from its weight – oh but what a

Joy it will be

When of dross I am free

My Spring will spread wide, glide and flutter. 

Photo by EP

SPRING

        If ever I saw blessing in the air

        I see it now in this still early day

        Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips

        Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Laurie Lee, ‘April Rise’

A little film to celebrate the arrival of Spring and St David’s Day just past:

Self-Portrait, c.1953

And speaking of St David’s Day: West Hampstead – where all roads sooner or later seem to lead – has had over the years a number of notable Welsh connections. I mention here just two. Sir John ‘Kyffin’ Williams, RA (1918-2006), widely regarded as the defining artist of Wales in the 20^th century, had lodgings and a studio in West Hampstead during his tenure as senior art master at Highgate School from 1944 to 1973.

Hampstead Heath

When Williams died, the Guardian said he ‘captured the imagination of the Welsh public. His dark, monumental landscapes of Snowdonia came to assume an iconic status and so too did the man, affectionately known simply as Kyffin.’ He was also an accomplished raconteur who wrote with panache about the people and places he had known. He felt a lifelong affinity with Van Gogh, not least because they were both epileptic.

Mount Snowdon from Nantlle

Photo by Olive Edis

The Welsh tenor Ben Davies (1858-1943) lived for many years at 33 Compayne Gardens, West Hampstead. He appeared with the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in 1883 created the role of Gringoire in Esmeralda by Arthur Goring Thomas (who tragically committed suicide at West Hampstead Station in 1892). He was chosen by Arthur Sullivan to create the title role of Ivanhoe in 1891. Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘As to Mr Ben Davies, the robust and eupeptic Ivanhoe, who sets to with the mailed Bois Guilbert at Templestowe in a comfortable immensikoff of the period, and gets beaten because he is obviously some three stone over his proper fighting weight, his obstreperous self-satisfaction put everybody into good humour.’

Spring, NW6
Photo by EP

ST DAVID'S DAY

Earth our precious planet

Light as gossamer, as strong as granite

Despite our violence and all our ills

Faithful Spring sends budding daffodils

For all our cleverness – we couldn’t plan it.  

Fortune Green, 1st March 2015
Photo by EP

A special film version, with additions, will shortly follow ...

GERALDINE MCEWAN, 1932-2015

Photo by Michael Ward, 1962

Of course Radio 4 emphasized that she was ‘best known’ for her Miss Marple on televsion, but seasoned theatregoers will remember Geraldine McEwan for her earlier bravura comic theatre performances. I missed a later one of these, her award-winning Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s The Way of the World in the Lyttelton Theatre, but I remember a clip of her big scene, shown at an awards ceremony, which seemed to extend her to new heights of physical clowning.

I also remember, years before that, a conversation in which we were bemoaning a punishing peak in the NT workload, beginning with a week on tour of eight performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen in which Geraldine had been playing Millamant in The Way of the World and ended the week with four performances as the lead (Raymonde Chandebise) in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, whilst rehearsing some cast changes. The Sunday was spent in an endless slow train down to London, and we were in costume by 10.30 on the Monday morning on the Old Vic stage, dress-rehearsing the precision machine work that French farce is. Geraldine was always cool and professional with the most gentle voice and manner, but she permitted herself to say quietly: ‘This relentless last week I’ve found myself resenting the sound of the audience’s laughter.’ But she was a master at eliciting it.

A Flea in Her Ear. L to R. Geraldine McEwan, John Stride,
Maggie Riley, EP, Graham Crowden (far right)
Photo by Zoe Dominic

Here are some passage recalling her days at the NT from my book ...

The National staged an experimental season at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, in which the NT’s resident expert in French farce and Restoration Comedy acting, as well as Jacobean tragedy, Geraldine McEwan, played a cockney lavatory attendant in Rites, a one-act play by Maureen Duffy loosely based on Euripides’ Bacchae, set in a ladies’ public convenience and commissioned and directed by Lady Olivier! I remember the comic effect as a solemn procession of stagehands carried on lavatory seats to set the scene.

* * * * * *

The three stars [of Armstrong’s Last Goodnight] – Stephens, Finney and Geraldine McEwan – were properly at the centre, and they all gave epic theatre grit and the ‘real drive’ of the kind that I have just read Jack Lambert admiring Brecht for, immediately after his death in 1956, ‘his ability to drive actors to real attack.’ There seemed to be an idea that in losing the ‘ham’ of the nineteenth century and embracing, if that is the word, the so-called ‘throwaway’ naturalism of the West End box-set play, English actors, with a few great exceptions, were in danger of being incapable of the kind of epic realism of the Berliner. But they didn’t need to be driven – the vast reaches of the Chichester stage and the even vaster reaches of that splayed auditorium, demand real drive, and the curious archaisms of Arden’s script begged to be spouted, not in poetic arches of theatrical rhetoric, but in direct hammer blows and with incisive scythe swipes and spitted out staccato, rapid-fire, accompanied often by physical swagger, or from Geraldine, diamond-sharp poise.

* * * * * *

Geraldine at a rehearsal one day of A Flea in Her Ear: a noisy bit in the last act where she was remonstrating with the hotel porter double, believing him to be her returned and inebriated husband (why were we rehearsing? We often were). Geraldine asked Maggie Riley and me, who were standing on either side of her and had a ‘no certainly not’ in concert together, to make it ‘a little bit untidy’. Her next thing was to do a steadying gesture to us, as in ‘I’ll deal with this’ walk down stage to her husband and say to the befuddled Hotel Porter very quietly: ‘Now we’ve had quite enough of this’. That night, the laugh on that simple line (always big) was more or less doubled. She always said that she had been at sea in the first rehearsals until Jacques Charon gave her some agitated off-stage dialogue to precede her first entrance. This cracked her problem setting the right pace and mood and was the key to her performance.

Rehearsing A Flea in Her Ear:
EP and Geraldine McEwan with director Jacques Charon
Photo by Chris Arthur

* * * * * *

Our brilliant Mrs Malaprop [in The Rivals] was Geraldine McEwan, her cut-glass Kensington with that curious bass undertow when she needed it (I can still hear her using it with angst for ‘This is hell’ in The Dance of Death), its occasional use abetted her in achieving the perfect comic delivery for the famous Malapropisms.