Another day of absolute variety in London. Saint Michael Cornhill where we attended the first organ concert given there in eighteen months because of the lockdown. Bach’s Saint Anne’s Prelude and Fugue was particularly inspiring. Meeting a liveried company on their traditional annual city walk. Then a late lunch at one of our favourite pubs, the Crumpled Horn in Upminster, the last stop on the District Line. A walk past the local church of Saint Lawrence to the beautifully restored windmill with wild flowers abounding….All on perhaps London’s warmest summer day so far.
Yesterday, Evensong at London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral followed by a Bach recital on its grand organ: A high spot in the capital, now bathed in the truest of blue skies…
“England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; O raise us up, return to us again, And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power! “
Captain Mainwearing of the Walmington-on-Sea Home guard platoon was insistent that Britain should never be squashed under the tyranny of the Nazi jackboot. By the summer of 1940, however, the country very nearly was but the incredibly audacious bravery of the ‘few’ prevented Britain from falling into such a dismal fate.
Hitler’s ‘Operation Sea lion’ was poised to launch its fleet of landing craft against a beleaguered island. All that was needed was to gain mastery of air power. This is when the stately home of Bentley Priory near Harrow in London also gained its finest hour together with those ‘few’ who fought and won the Battle of Britain after the Battle of France had been lost.
The commander of RAF Fighter Command at the time of the Battle of Britain, Sir Hugh Dowding, was honoured for his efforts with a peerage, as Baron Dowding of Bentley Priory. Hauled out of retirement Dowding reorganised the RAF and turned it into a supreme fighting force. Ironically the Axis power had superior fighter planes with larger bullets, more guns and a longer firing time when compared with the Spitfire’s couple of minutes. The secret, as the UK pilots admitted, was to fire with the sun behind one and to wait until the very last moment when one was as close to the enemy as possible.
Bentley Priory has gone through various reincarnations since its founding as an Augustinian monastery in the early middle ages. It subsequently became a stately home with additions by that great architect Sir John Soane, a residence for Queen Adelaide widow of King William IV, a hotel, a girls’ school, the centre of RAF fighter command and now partly a museum celebrating its crucial role in World War II and an exclusive housing estate.
All these stages are well illustrated in the museum which is an example of how these marvellous mansions, so often close to destruction, may survive with initiative and investment.
We enjoyed the excellent and brilliantly explained exhibits including a 3-d film of Dowding’s time at the priory:
We delighted in the grand architecture which included Queen Adelaide’s accommodation:
We loved the well-kept Italian gardens with their floral displays and their background of the wilder parts of the priory park which is a site of special scientific interest.
I had normally thought that Stalingrad spelt the death-knell of the Reich that was to last a thousand years but I now realise it was the RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain that really shattered the Hitlerian delusion. How the ex-corporal could have carried on WWII by attacking the Soviets in 1941 while knowing that the UK still remained undefeated beats me and I am no military strategist!
Thank goodness, however, for that elementary tactical mistake! Would Europe have still been dominated by totalitarian governments in the East and in the West today? Would extermination camps have been set up in the UK as well? Would we have to start driving on the right? Would German have become the first language in British schools? Who knows. The Third Reich was so near to perfecting the first atomic bomb which would have definitely sealed the world’s fate; indeed, Bentley Priory continued its defence role until 2008 when operations were finally transferred to Northolt. That Cold War bunker still remains, now filled it, and if I was luckily not brought up in the dark days of the Second World War I still had to suffer the menace of my body melting in a nuclear attack.
Will we still have to suffer further man-made menaces today? What armageddon will come first? The increasing peril of global warming or the increasing threat from terrorist groups who now, for the first time in their history, have an air force and a huge armoury of weapons and materiel virtually abandoned like free gifts by the forces they fought against for so many decades? It doesn’t quite bear thinking does it? But neither did the threats that faced Britain in 1940. Then, however, there was a man who was truly able to face the storm and prepare for it; someone who, disillusioned and embittered, ended his career as a member of the Theosophical society and as a believer in fairies, Air Chief Marshall Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding GCB, GCVO, CMG.
Gunnersbury Park is one of West London’s magnificent set of mansions and palaces near the Thames which, besides offering sylvan settings and pure air, constituted, in the absence of decent roads, a major communication artery to the Capital’s centre. Placed in the London Borough of Hounslow Gunnersbury Park was purchased for the nation from the Rothschild family and opened to the public by Neville Chamberlain. He was then minister of health and subsequently became Prime Minister laconically leading the United Kingdom into war against Germany
Many regard Neville Chamberlain as the worst prime minister this country has ever had but at least he helped to give Londoners one of their finest open spaces. As Chamberlain said at its inauguration in 1926 ‘I rejoice that the people have come into the possession of so magnificent and historical park.”
We first came across this lovely park several years ago when it was a little neglected. In the last few years a major restoration project has been completed and the area with its Italian gardens, its lakelets and its water fowl is utterly enchanting.
Regrettably there is a species of sub-humanoids lurking in the streets of London who last year set fire to the park’s fine cafeteria, completed in 2018 by the famed restoration architect Rodney Melville. At least we enjoyed our tea there in 2018. Luckily the historic horse carriages stored in the adjoining building were saved in the nick of time by volunteers who placed their lives at some risk in doing so. Now it is planned to rebuild the cafeteria by next year,
There are various architectural eras associated with Gunnersbury house (which was closed on this visit) . In 1760 the house became the residence of Princess Amelia, George I I’s favourite daughter. Her planned marriage to the future Frederick the Great of Prussia (the dedicatee of J. S. Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’) was called off and Amelia spent a spinster’s life, though one filled with parties and political intrigues, at Gunnersbury, where she also had a charming ‘gothick’ bath house built for her private delectation:
The grounds were landscaped by William Kent (architect at Kensington Palace and Horse guards parade) and were eventually bought by merchant, financier art connoisseur and benefactor Nathan Mayer Rothchild in 1835. It was during this period that the elegant orangerie was built and the lakes were landscaped.
I was absolutely entranced by the care that has been taken over the restoration of this fine estate and thought sadly about how Bagni di Lucca could do with some similar injection of funds from government sources to bring itself up to its former aspirations.
