2020 Talks

Three talks have been confirmed this year, with more in the pipeline.

NEW ADDITION: DECADENT LONDON at TREADWELLS BOOKSHOP
Thursday 20 February 7.30 pm: see their website for details. HERE

Thursday 27 February SECRET TUNNELS: FOLKLORE OF UNDERGROUND ENGLAND
Kensington Central Library Lecture Theatre  6.30-7.30 pm FREE. More information and book through Eventbrite here
Part of a mini Folklore Festival in which, amongst others, Christopher Josiffe should also be giving a talk.

Thursday 26 March WHISTLER: CHELSEA'S GREATEST ARTIST Chelsea Library 6.15-7.15 pm
More information and book through Eventbrite here FREE

Thursday 9 April DECADENT WESTMINSTER City of Westminster Archives Centre 10 St Anne's St, Westminster, SW1P 2DE (details to follow)  FREE

New Edition of Decadent London

The new revised and expanded edition of Decadent London has arrived from the printers and it looks and feels great. It is now over 400 pages in extent and includes a walk around 1890s London at the back.

Available for purchase now from The Big Cartel here

Treadwells bookshop, Bloomsbury, London here

Watkins in Cecil Court, London here

Gay's The Word, London here

More outlets to follow.

Review of the first edition from The Independent on Sunday here

Review of the first edition from The Open University here

Thursday 12 December 'Oscar and Friends' A free talk at Kensington Central Library with Nina Antonia and Darcy Sullivan here  Copies of Decadent London will be on sale at this talk for a substantial discount.

Very limited numbers of Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact available from Big Cartel here


DECADENT LONDON BY ANTONY CLAYTON, FOREWORD BY MAX DECHARNE

As the dawn of the twentieth century loomed, London was undergoing tremendous changes, establishing itself as the heart of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen. However, in the same decade that witnessed the celebrations of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee a diverse group of writers, artists and poets sought to subvert the oppressive cultural and moral atmosphere of the period. This was the city explored by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Frank Harris and Ernest Dowson, together with their less well-known compatriots Lionel Johnson, John Gray, John Davidson and the mysterious Count Stenbock.

Using a thematic approach, Decadent London recreates the artistic milieu of this turbulent time, described the most popular decadent destinations and provides concise biographical material on the central characters, many of whom became victims of their excessively louche lifestyles. Visit the raucous decadent pubs such as The Crown and The Cock, listen in at the Cheshire Cheese, where W B Yeats read his poems to the Rhymers' Club, enjoy the wit of Wilde and Whistler at the Cafe Royal and explore the idyllic artistic retreat of Bedford Parkin the suburbs. The book also describes the work produced by London's decadent writers and artists, particularly their contribution to the decade's most innovative periodicals The Yellow Book and The Savoy. It outlines the development of the burgeoning music hall scene beloved of many decadents, probes into the underworld of drug taking, pornography and prostitution and uncovers the occult pursuits of the Golden Dawn and the Great Beast Aleister Crowley.

THIS INFORMATIVE GLIMPSE INTO ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING PERIODS IN THE CAPITAL'S CULTURAL HISTORY HAS BEEN FULLY REVISED AND SUPPLEMENTED BY NEW MATERIAL.

More Ghostly Activity at Museum Station

This month's Fortean Times (December 2019) features an interesting article on Egyptology, mummies and curses (the Birth of the Egyptian Gothic by Maria J Perez Cuervo). Inevitably the 'Unlucky Mummy' at the British Museum has to be included - also mentioned is the alleged secret tunnel from that institution to the closed Museum station (see previous posts on this blog).

However, another strand is added to the story: the author notes about the 'priestess of Amen-Ra' haunting the tube station: 'Its malignant influence was supposed to have caused the stations's closure: the authorities were merely trying to protect Londoners from it.' I think this is the first time that the closure of the station has been attributed to the presence of the ghost, rather than the fact that it was superfluous, given the recently-opened interchange with the Central at nearby Holborn.

By another coincidence, my recent bedtime reading has been The Platform Edge, Uncanny Tales of the Railways (British Library, 2019), bought on a visit to the excellent National Railway Museum in York. Amongst the usual mixed bag of quality such a collection offers, one finds The Last Train by Michael Vincent, an obscure author - this may be his only published short story, in The London Mystery Selection 1964.

A mere handful of pages long, it tells the tale of a tube train driver on the Central line. As it explains: 'between Holborn and Tottenham Court Road, there's a ghost station. It used to be the old Museum stop, but they closed it and blocked it up. If you watch carefully out of the window you can still see the walls and the exits and bits of the platform. All deserted and no lights.'

The shaking driver tells a workmate: 'Tonight I was on the up. Came through Holborn about half ten. I stopped normal like, and while I was waiting for the bell, I thought I saw lights ahead, A sort of glow. Well, I knew it couldn't be Tottenham Court Road, because it doesn't show from Holborn. I got the bell and started off, very slowly, even though I had the clear. Then I saw it was Museum, just like it was before the war. All lit up, and people ... lots of people on the platform waiting. Gave me a terrible shock. I just accelerated straight through with my eyes closed and pulled into Tottenham Court. I got through to the guard on the handset ... and asked him, careful like, if he'd seen anything unusual back down the line. And he said he hadn't. And that's it ...'

One night his colleague agrees to come with him on the last train and also sees the brightly lit platform with passengers in 'funny looking old fashioned clothes', but they don't tell anyone as the driver is due to retire shortly. On the next occasion the driver tells his workmate that he intends to stop at Museum to see what happens ... and he is never heard of again.

Crowley and Maclaren-Ross

I can't seem to avoid the Great Beast at the moment. After watching The Third Man last weekend and a documentary on Graham Greene that formed part of the extras, I decided to reread 'Excursions in Greeneland' Julian Maclaren-Ross' account of meeting Graham Greene to discuss the adaptation of one of his books, when the great writer lived on Clapham Common (I used to drink in The Windmill pub which sounds like the one they visit to get a takeout of beer). Having enjoyed that, I decided to reread the rest of  Memoirs of the Forties, a classic eyewitness record of the characters of Soho and Fitozrovia including Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly, Nina Hammett, Anthony Carson (Peter Brooke), the Two Roberts, John Minton etc - many of whom are the subjects of posts on this blog.

One reminiscence I'd forgotten was his brief meeting with Picasso at a party at Feliks Topolski's studio, in which he amusingly portrays the excruciating dilemma of what do you say to the world's greatest living painter? Maclaren-Ross decides on an attempt at flattery by describing the hideous 'cubist' -style advertising on display on the London Underground at that period, poorly imitating the Master's work, but it doesn't seem to come across as he had wished.

It is during this party that he also runs into novelist, biographer and man of letters Arthur Calder-Marshall. (My comments in square brackets). 'Ara his wife was not with him that night, and he'd been hot on the track of Aleister Crowley, then still alive, whom he'd never met but wanted to write a book about. I didn't know Crowley either, but I told Calder-Marshall of what Joan Graham-Murray had recently recounted of his final semi-respectable phase.

'Joan, a friend of Louis Wilkinson alias Marlow, Crowley's literary executor who afterward scattered his ashes on the wind [Wilkinson read at the funeral in Brighton, but did not scatter the ashes, the fate of which has been subject to conflicting accounts], had gone to stay with Wilkinson in the country, taking with her a copy of my short story collection The Nine Men of Soho. Crowley, also there as a guest [this has to be Netherwood], had idly glanced through this, and saying he'd like to see what the young men were up to nowadays, asked Joan's permission to borrow it. When he returned the book she saw that the margins had been scribbled over with rather petulant old-world comments, such as: 'Yes, yes, all very well, but why doesn't he tell us what the girl's background is?! Who are her people?!! and so on [this seems characteristic].

'He also asked Joan if she knew me, she said yes, and Crowley then said testily: 'Well next time you see him, tell him to be more precise about his characters' origins. He seems to ignore all the traditional social values that make up the fabric of our civilisation,' which, since I'd always understood Crowley's mission as Worst Man in the World was to tear this fabric down, amused me quite a lot. But then maybe all diabolists are conservative at heart, or where would be the fun?

'Calder-Marshall, amused as well but slightly frowning since this didn't equate with his idea of Crowley either, asked me if I thought the story true. I answered that I'd seen the annotated copy myself [it would be interesting to know what happened to that copy, seems to have disappeared] and had offered to give Joan another in exchange, to which she had replied with the best-known line of Shaw's Eliza ['Not bloody likely']. Memoirs of the Forties (Alan Ross, 1965, 212-214)
Later, back at Maclaren-Ross' flat Calder-Marshall storms out after MR shouts at his girlfriend, calling him: 'A bad man, worse than Crowley!'