Friendships by Mark Girouard, Wilmington Square Books, 192pp, £16.99
In 2011 Mark Girouard, the eminent architectural historian, published Enthusiasms, a series of essays on subjects that had intrigued him. These included his search for the identity of “Walter”, the Victorian sex enthusiast; the finances of Oscar Wilde in exile (far less straitened than Wilde put about); and a sceptical enquiry into the procreative activities of the Spanish dancer Pepita, supposedly the grandmother of Vita Sackville-West.
Enthusiasms, fascinating at every turn, also contained some essays on the author’s own family, remarkable alike in achievement and lineage. The Girouards were prominent in the administration and politics of Quebec from the early 18th century. Then, at the end of the 19th century, Percy Girouard, Mark’s grandfather, proved himself a stunningly brilliant railway engineer in Africa. His work in the Sudan earned lavish praise from Winston Churchill. In particular, his speedy construction of a line across the Nubian Desert in 1897 made possible Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman the following year. Subsequently Girouard directed military railways during the Boer War.
No doubt he had inherited his exceptional capability from his mother’s family, the Solomons, who throughout the 19th century proved themselves relentlessly capable as traders, administrators and politicians in St Helena and South Africa.
On the maternal side, Mark Girouard’s family was merely aristocratic. His mother was at once the daughter of the 6th Marquess of Waterford, the grand-daughter of the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne and, through her aunt’s marriage, the niece of the 9th Duke of Devonshire’s Duchess.
It was predictable, therefore, that now Girouard has followed up the success of Enthusiasms with a book entitled Friendships, he would not be greatly concerned with the workaday bourgeoisie. While Girouard is entirely innocent of snobbery, his antecedents and his career have naturally, if by no means exclusively, placed him in the company of talented and often well-connected academics, artists, writers and critics. His subjects include Jeremy Sandford, author of the television play Cathy Come Home, the artists Henry Lamb and John Piper, the architectural historian John Summerson and the architect Denys Lasdun. Among them, Mariga Guinness helped to set up the Irish Georgian Society; Marjorie Villiers ran the Harvill Press, which published Dr Zhivago, The Leopard and Joy Adamson’s Born Free; and Peter Ferriday and Peter Fleetwood-Smith were leading lights in the Victorian Society during the 1960s.
In a more bohemian category, we discover that Beatrice Stuart, Girouard’s landlady in Chelsea during the 1950s, had in her youth served as the model for the figure of Victory on top of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner.
There are also reminders that Mark Girouard (born in 1931) had been brought up a Catholic. Fr Dominic de Grunne, from an aristocratic Belgian family, arrived at Oxford as assistant chaplain in the 1950s, but proved more talented at dining and cooking than at converting undergraduates. Fr Gervase Mathew became a Byzantinist and an archaeologist, celebrated along with his brother David for an aversion to soap and water.
Altogether there are 30 pieces, and not a boring entry among them. Girouard’s technique is to reproduce a letter or a card from his subject, and then let his thoughts drift. None of the essays is longer than six pages. There has been no research – Girouard merely records the incidents and memories which have stuck in his mind. So he preserves the fascinating inconsequentialities of existence, so rarely reached by historians.
In its celebration of the curious and the particular, Friendships might suggest parallels with John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Girouard, however, never strays beyond personal recall, nor is he concerned with public life.
The reader is constantly entertained. For Girouard possesses the art, increasingly rare today, of writing clearly, simply and naturally, with wit and implication, but never with any affectation or strain.
He also provides an entertaining vignette of Gerald Wellesley, who unexpectedly became the 7th Duke of Wellington when his nephew was killed in action in 1943. “Gerry” enjoyed jokes, as long as they did not concern either the first Duke or the Order of the Garter.
Less concerned with the social proprieties was Ruby Milton. Her grandmother had been the mistress of a Glasgow greengrocer who earned a knighthood by selling rotten apples to the troops. This grandmother employed a maid who lived in a Catholic tenement block where the lavatories had heart-shaped seats which were removed in order to frame pictures of the Sacred Heart.
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