IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

LEADERS OF NATIONAL LIFE

Sir Hugh Casson

Interviewed by Cathy Courtney

C408/16

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British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C408/16/01-24 Playback no: F1084 – F1093; F1156 – F1161; F1878 – F1881; F2837 – F2838; F6797

Collection title: Leaders of National Life

Interviewee’s surname: Casson Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forename: Hugh Sex: Male

Occupation: Architect Date and place of birth: 1910 - 1999

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation:

Dates of recording: 1990.02.13, 1990.02.16, 1990.02.19, 1990.03.13, 1990.04.19, 1990.05.11, 1990.05.22, 1990.08.28, 1990.07.31, 1990.08.07, 1991.05.22, 1991.06.03, 1991.06.18, 1991.07.13 Location of interview: Interviewer's home, National Sound Archive and Interviewee's home

Name of interviewer: Cathy Courtney

Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Type of tape: TDK 60

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance:

Interviewer’s comments:

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 1

F1084 Side A

First interview with Hugh Casson - February 13th, 1990.

All right, now tell me ...

Are we on? Are we on?

Yes. Tell me where you were born. And into what sort of family.

Yes. I was born in London in 1910. My father was in the Indian Civil Service, and my mother met him when she went out with what used to be called "The Fishing Fleet". These were daughters who were sent out to pick up husbands in the Services, or in the colonies generally, and sometimes they brought back husbands, and sometimes they didn't. And my mother fell in love, not surprisingly, with my father, who was an extremely entertaining and funny, and clever man, who had been a ... a scholar at Cambridge, and had intended to be an astronomer, but the family had fallen on rather hard financial times, because my grandfather was a banker, or bank manager, rather, who'd suddenly become passionate about organ building, and he'd founded a small firm for building small organs, rather in advance of the Japanese ones which we get now, specially for use with missionaries in corrugated iron churches in the middle of Africa.

Why was he building for them, particularly?

And he got into ... what?

Why was he building for them, particularly?

Why was he building for them, particularly?

Well, they wanted small organs of high quality, and up to now there were only harmoniums. So he invented, in fact, a particular sort of portable organ, which was bought in large numbers. Funnily enough, in the country houses of Wales, where he was brought up, they used to play hymns after dinner, in peoples' houses, on the organ instead of the piano. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 2

Anyway, the trouble was, dealing with missionary societies, they always thought you were doing it for nothing, and so, gradually the firm folded. And my father was told that he couldn't become an astronomer because there wasn't enough money around, and so he applied for the Indian Civil Service, which was the senior service in those days. You had to be, have a first class degree to get into it - which was in the last decade of the 19th century. And the interesting thing was that, when he went to say goodbye to the Secretary of State for India, who said personally goodbye to every officer leaving for service in India and Burma, he said, "You realise, of course, that this is a job with a maximum of 15 years. Because your task when you get there, is to hand India back to the Indians, and the sooner you do it, the better. Goodbye, and good luck”. I was always rather surprised at learning this. So was my father, I may say! He thought he'd got a job for life! But anyway, my mother went out with her father, my grandfather, and her father was a barrister, practicing in India and Burma, and he had one, two, three, four daughters, who were of marriageable age ... when I was born ... and they all married into the, into the services. I mean, in those days, the Empire was an enormous reservoir into which every middle-class child plunged. It was either the Army, or the Navy or the Indian Survey, or the Kenya Rifles, or the Persian Customs, or the Egyptian Civil Service. There were hundreds of jobs for young, active, interested, and pretty clever people, because they were very much on their own. I mean, at the age of 28, you'd have an area the size of Wales to deal with, not only with settling boundary disputes, but organizing tax collections, organizing canal building, or railway extensions. You were, in fact, sort of a one-man Cabinet when you were out there. He adored it. He was most of his life in Burma, and he learnt Burmese, of course, and adored the Burmese people, who are very lazy, and very jolly. They're lazy because the food drops off the trees, more or less, so they don't have to work. Most of the work was done by Chinese. And he was out there when I was born, in 1910. And what was nice, I think, when he married my mother, or got engaged to her, and she was sent home to, to tell the family and everything, he gave her a return ticket back, from London ...to Burma, to London. Because, he said, a lot of girls get engaged, they go home again, and they go out again, hopefully, and then, by the time they get there, they think, "Do I really want to?" and then haven't the nerve to go back. And so don't have very happy lives, so he gave her a return ticket. So he said, "If you look down from the promenade deck of the P&O and think it will be absolutely terrible', stay on board and go home and no offence."

If she had gone home, what would she have gone back to?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 3

What would she have gone back to? She'd have gone to live with her parents who, in those days, were living near Folkestone. My mother's father was reasonably well off, he'd been a lawyer, and my father's parents had both died pretty well, pretty early on in life. I'd never met either of them. And they were both large families of brothers and sisters. And my father's eldest brother, Lewis Casson, wanted to be an actor, but there was no money in that. So he had to become an electrical engineer. Two of them became electrical engineers. They went to the Imperial College of Science. He eventually, of course, became an actor, and a very successful producer/director, and married Sybil Thorndike, the actress, to whom they were, they were a devoted and very sort of old-fashioned married couple. She'd been ... every year, she used to go to America with Ben Greet's traveling company, doing a different play every night, getting into the train the next morning, going on to the next town. And as men are always weaker than women, the men were always falling ill from exhaustion. So she was quite accustomed to playing either Catherine of Aragon or Henry VIII. It depended who was there that night. So she was a, she was a very sparkling girl, and she wanted to be a professional pianist, but she'd hurt her wrist, so she turned to acting.

Were she and Lewis part of your childhood, or not?

Yes, they were. Actually, I didn't really meet them until I was about seven, because they lived in London, and like all sort of, Anglo-Indian children, my sister and I - she was one year older than I was - lived with aunts, or governesses, or temporary aunts, who, not real aunts, but appointed aunts, or with grandparents. And so you spent your time in a different house every holidays from school. We went to lots of schools because we were always moving around. I went to a little convent where I got a prize for drawing a daffodil, when I was about five, I remember. My first prize for drawing. And we had a very happy childhood, really, because I was, by nature, I hope not effusive, but friendly. My sister was much more shy, and I hope I wasn't ingratiating, but I can't think of a nice word for either of those things, except "friendly".

Do you know much about your father's actual childhood?

Nothing really.

Did he grow up in Wales? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 4

He grew up in Wales. He was born on the peninsula of Portmeirion. The house belonged to a vague relation, in fact. And the house where he was born was subsequently bought by Bertrand Russell, many many many years later. And he had, he had vague relations kicking about in North Wales, because my, his father, had been a banker and a lawyer in Portmadoc, before he ventured off into organ building. So, there we were, middle-class.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Did you get the impression that your father had had a happy childhood?

Yes. I think they did. There were three brothers, and one sister. And the sister became the first woman doctor to graduate at Bristol University. This is when they were sent out into the world because money wasn't there any more. She became a doctor. One of the boys was killed in the War. Lewis became the actor, and my father went into the Civil Service.

Do you think the fact that his father had lost a lot of money affected your father?

I think it made him thrifty, to the extent that it would be totally inconceivable for him to go and have lunch in a dining car on a train. Inconceivable. And as children, we'd eat out of paper bags, sandwiches out of paper bags. Humiliated to you know, when you're a child, eating in public, being looked at by other people, is misery. He would never take a taxi till he ... well, he died when he was 93, and up to the time he was 80, he would never take a taxi unless he was carrying a suitcase. And nor would my Uncle Lewis. And when they were both very very celebrated, you'd see them in Shaftesbury Avenue at 11 o'clock at night, waiting for a 14 bus to take them back to Kings Road. I mean, inconceivable, even when they were in their sixties.

Lewis and Sybil?

Mmmm. Or seventies

And how has that aspect of your father affected you?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 5

I'm thrifty too, probably mean, I suspect, in that I came down from Edinburgh last night, a six hour journey, and there was a restaurant car. I mean, I wouldn't have dreamt, not because I didn't, didn't want the food or anything, it's just that I would, I would, regard it as, as ... ostentatious' really. Not my scene. And one has humiliations of that kind as a child, that if you're, I think every child has them. If you go to a rather smart hotel where waiters are changing empty plates over and over again, not doing anything, expecting you to order crab mousse, and cold salmon, or something, and they'd ask for scrambled egg or something you see, you'd cringe because of the waiter's face, because the waiters are the most humiliating of all professionals. Not humiliating to themselves, but humiliating to you. They pick you out and murder you if they want to.

So did you do similar things to your own children, if you've got the same habits?

I hope not. I mean we ... we were, as I say, we were middle-class, with sort of, Austin Seven sort of cars, and hardly ever went abroad.

Are we talking about your childhood, or your children’s childhood?

I'm talking about my time. So, and I suppose that our level of society didn't go abroad much because it was too slow and too long. School holidays, I mean, if you wanted to go to Egypt, for instance, it would take about three weeks each way. And so children never went out to see their parents, and parents didn't come often home to see their children. Travel was very very slow, and extremely expensive. And my parents, of course, had enough of travel, because every two years they came home, and they'd usually stop off in Italy or France or somewhere on the way back, to get a couple of weeks, skiing, or whatever it was they were wanting to do. We hardly ever went abroad as children. We had, I had two skiing holidays when I was about 16, 17. And we went in a horde of cousins.

Do you have any memories through your father, of his mother?

None. He didn't speak of her very often. She was, she was apparently, extremely sweet-tempered, and, as indeed, was my other granny. But, sadly, I never met her. But they seem to have been a very close, warm family, and no rows.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 6

And what were your memories of Lewis, when you were seven, when you met him?

Well, Lewis and Sybil came to see me when I was at my first prep school. I was sent to boarding school when I was about seven and a half, in a house near Folkestone, a big Georgian house, which even then I recognised as very handsome, in a park. About 90 little boys. And we didn't have many visitors, because, with our parents being in the Orient, so Sybil and Lewis came down to see us, in an old open touring car, called a Maxwell, with a spare wheel on the running board. And they were very hardy, Sybil and Lewis. Never put the hood up, or ... they liked rain lashing their faces, and they were both great walkers, and, and they were... About that time, they bought a house on the shore of Romney Marsh, on the sea. And, anyway, they came down to the school and took me out, and I was allowed to steer the Maxwell from Dover to Canterbury, on a Sunday afternoon. Can you imagine? I mean, I'd never touched, hardly ever been in a car. And then I saw them off and on, from then on. When I was about 12, Sybil was in St. Joan at a theatre called The Regent opposite St. Pancras, and a fantastic success. And I used to be allowed to go and sit in the wings and watch the ...

What was that like?

That was wonderful. Very romantic. And I can remember going to see her in Henry VIII at the old Empire, in Leicester Square, before it became a cinema. So they were very, they were very good to me, because they had busy lives, and they had four children of their own. Two boys who went into the Navy. And two girls, one became a pianist, and the other became an actress.

And were you close to their children? Were they your age?

Yes. We liked them very much. We got on very well. But the Naval ones, of course, were away from home nearly always. But we had hordes and hordes of cousins, because all my aunts, and uncles, had all got married, and all got children. And they were always very traditional. I mean, the youngest, or the least ambitious boy, would go into the Church, and ones who were not intellectual went into the Army, or the Navy. And a few went into business. But the people who went into business, banking, or whatever, usually went to Hong Kong, or Cairo, or some place, because it was easier to get jobs there, and responsibility and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 7 experience. And they all lived in houses which had one or two servants, and usually a gardener, because they didn't often, always take their wives with them. So there ... and always somebody on leave, so you'd go off. We were all in the Home Counties. Never budged north of Watford, ever. They were all Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Cornwall. Occasional holidays in North Wales when my father came home, because he loved it. Every Easter he used to take us camping in North Wales. And had to climb every peak, as children, in a week.

Just the two of you?

Well, my father, my sister and I, because ... my mother liked camping but she didn't like scrambling up.

Did you like it?

Ish! I think, I think one likes the, but the trouble with Wales is that, there's such a lot of rain, that it was, it was never sort of very ... as alluring as it would have been in the South of France, perhaps.

Were you doing it for him, more than anything?

Yes. That's exactly what we were doing. But my father and my mother, had both done ... spent a lot of their professional lives camping, going around Burma or India, and setting up tents, and trying cases, and that sort of thing. And they got very fond of it. My mother loved it.

Was your mother just accompanying your father?

Yes.

Or did she do something as well?

Yes

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 8

What was your mother like?

She was small, and very pretty. I'm told she was rather sexy, but I ... didn't sort of consider that issue at all. But I believe she was constantly falling in love with people, and having subalterns gazing at her through the venetian blinds, and that sort of thing. Anyway, she was very attractive, and frightfully amusing. I had two very amusing parents, which was very helpful.

And when you went off on these Welsh climbing tours with your father, were you close to him? Or was he somebody you were slightly in awe of?

No, I was never in awe of him, I don't think. I don't think ... he was a very gentle and, and helpful parent, I think. And he did, he did spank me once only. I remember in our house in Rangoon, I'd thrown my sister's toy down the stairs, and he took me into his bedroom, and sat down, and gave me a spank. And by luck, the bed collapsed, and so, so did the beating! It finished it. So I only had the two strokes. And that was the only time he ever spanked me

So, did he discipline you in other ways?

No, I don't think so. I don't remember him ... I really saw so little of him in the sort of disciplinary time of my life. You see, he came home, I suppose, when I was about 12, which would be 1920s. Retired because, after the War, when we hadn't seen them for five years, after the War, he'd, he'd had, he'd been in the local gunnery outfit in Burma, coastal defences, and he had got very deaf. And as he used to say, he didn't mind justice being blind, but he didn't think it ought to be deaf as well! So he retired, and came home ... and went back to his old love, which was physics and mathematics, and got a job as a lecturer at Southampton University.

Let's just go back to you being born. You told me once you weren't a very strong child. What happened then?

Well, I wasn't strong, because, I mean, I think, the sort of family saga, that is, I was rescued by my Aunt Jocelyn, who thought I looked on the verge of disaster, and she took me away Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 9 from my mother. She said, "I'm going to pull him round." Which she did, apparently. I've no memory of that, but anyway ...

How long did she keep you for?

I don't know. I suppose a couple of weeks or something.

And then what?

But all the aunts, you see, they'd be always interchanging, "Do you mind taking the baby for a week?" or something, you know, because there was always this extraordinary, among the middle-classes, of the early parts of this century, they were always helping other people out, and escorting children back from here or, you see, if you came up to London, and had to cross London, at the age of nine, from, say, Paddington to Waterloo, in those days, it was inconceivable that you would do that on your own, and so there were always aunts who came to your rescue, and would take you across, and maybe take you to a pantomime on the way. And if the aunts failed, there was an outfit called "Universal Aunts", that I believe still exists, which were spinsters or widows you could hire to escort children from one place to another, or take them to Madame Tussaud's, or exercise your dogs, or go and buy you 15 yards of cambric lace. I mean, they were upper class, or middle, they were rather sort of faded daughters of, of ... who'd never sort of made lives of their own, and lived vicariously.

But after your Aunt Jocelyn had saved you from whatever, you then were sent out to your parents. What happened?

No. We never went out again. We came back from Burma.

Hang on, you hadn't got to Burma yet.

We went out, we went out when I was about one.

Who did you go with then?

I went out with my mother. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-A Page 10

So she came back to get you?

And she, she came back to ... she took us out.

So then what happened to you between the two ...

And then she sent us back. When War broke out, the Government said, "All children ... all English children, will go back to England. And mothers can stay with their husbands or go back with the children. It's up to them." So my mother decided to stay with my father, for the duration, which they didn't think was going to be very long, of course, in the optimistic days. And we came home with a nanny.

Tell me about the years when you were out there.

I remember very little about them. Very very little. We had a big house in Rangoon, and a big garden, and lots of servants. And ponies for my mother and father to ride. It was a sort of ... life you read about in the, the Edwardian Empire.

Tell me some of it.

The great excitement, I think was, if ever they had a Government House garden party, or something, the Duke of Connaught, or somebody came out for an official visit, and then there was a sort of durbar or a dance. And I remember when the Prince of Wales came out, I wasn't there, but I remember she telling me that all the wives were allowed five minutes each with the Prince of Wales. He sat in a corner of the drawing room, and every wife was brought up and sat down and had to talk to them for five minutes. And then the next one was led up.

Were you 1eading a life that was quite separate from your parents in a way; at that point?

Absolutely. Till really, till I was about 12.

End of F1084 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 11

F1084 Side B

And certain things which were helpful. I think it made you, it made you get quickly involved in any society that you were pushed into. It might have been a family of cousins you didn't like very much, for instance. Or you might be staying with a… in lodgings, with a rather cross governess, or something. And you had to pick up, you had to pick up the habits and flavour of the life you went into. It was exactly like school. I mean, as we were always changing school, you know, when you go to school, you, you assume a role pretty quickly, either that you're a clot, or a, or an amusing thick-headed butt, or you're a star at games, or you're a swot, or ... and it may not have been your genuine role, but it was one you kept to, because it was a protective device.

So did you think that if you didn't make some sort of effort, you weren't going to have a place anywhere?

I suppose that was really what it was, I think. I, I was hopeless at games, and disliked all games intensely, because I was too timid. Everything seemed to be extremely painful, whether it was cricket or football, gym, anything. The balls were hard, and the floor was hard, and the people shouted at you, and I hated it all. I was quite clever, or appeared clever, because I had a very very good memory, and most education, in those days was ... certainly examinations, was memory, and if you remembered the answers, you didn't have to understand them, you just remembered them. So I got on quite well at ... and I finished up as head of my prep school.

Which was your prep school?

This was the one in Kent, which was called Wootton Court, subsequently burned down, I think. And the Headmaster was a charming man who had been a master at Osborne Naval Cadet School in the Isle of Wight, and he'd had all the young royal princes there as little naval cadets, and, but the masters were a ... they were ex-officers. So it must have been about 19, half way through the War, about 1915, some of them had been wounded, or not done very well, and they were all rather odd. and nervous, and cross, and difficult.

And where were you mainly living at that point? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 12

Where was I living?

Mainly. I mean, was there one home that was more your base?

No, we never had, we never had a regular home. There were two sort of information points in this huge family. I mean, I had something over 30 first cousins, and there were two sort of information points, where news was exchanged, and tongues clicked, and gossip exchanged. One was a house in Godalming, which was Aunt Jocelyn's, and her husband, Cecil, had been in the Indian Civil Service too, and he'd just retired and he was writing quite successful novels for Jonathan Cape, sort of Somerset Maughamish novels about the Far East. And he used to play billiards with himself, in the house, which was called "Ellesmere". And we used to have family prayers, you know, the housemaids would come in, creaking belts, and crackling aprons, and kneel down with their faces buried in the dining room chairs. And church was only one, we only had to go to one service on Sundays.

Who, who?

And that was the big, that was the really home, I was ... she was my favourite aunt.

What was she like?

She was very ... gentle and, and she was extremely gentle, and simply adored children. I mean, even the most tiresome, hideous, sickly child, she ... she'd tend. And her children were, slightly reacted against this. They took the windows out of their bedrooms, because they said that windows were stuffy, so they liked rain blowing in, and I think she was very protective. I loved her. And the other was, was an old great aunt, called Victoria, and she was a wealthy old girl, and she lived near Portman Square, in a big terraced house, with three old maids to look after her, all of whom were in their late seventies and early eighties. And they lived in an attic, with cotton mats, and iron bedsteads - three of them. Which everybody did in those days. Even William Morris, I mean, in his famous house, the three maids lived in a, in a dormitory upstairs. But she was a sort of London representative of the family, you see, and there were enough spare rooms, and three maids, always. There was always somebody there. She was never, she never moved. She had been quite a distinguished old girl in her life. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 13

She'd never married. She used to tell us stories about being taken in to dinner by Disraeli, and who wore rings outside his gloves, which she said she thought was rather splashy. But she used, she was, age hit people very early in life in those days. I mean, by the time she was 60, she was sitting on the sofa in a mob cap, and hardly moving all day. Never went out. And meals brought up. And by one of these old ... creaking old girls.

Did you find that quite alarming?

Not a bit. She was very good ... very good value. And she had a lot of, or had had a lot of very amusing friends, so she was ... she was a sparky old girl. But we spent, actually, most of our time in the kitchen with the three servants, as children do. They can help, dice the potatoes, or give them bits of this, that and the other. And everybody in the family stayed there, so it was a sort of Crewe Junction.

And what was done with you when you were there?

What was done with them?

With you.

Well, you usually had to have an adult who was able to go out, and it was always an aunt or somebody else's relation who would, who would be there, and they'd take you to Madame Tussaud's, or, or whatever the attraction ... my attraction was Selfridges. Because it was very near, you could almost see it from the house, and it was much more exciting to me than, than the Victoria and Albert Museum. I mean, so I spent hours in Selfridges. Hours. And it was exciting really, because buses were rivals, and they, if they'd see you looking for a bus, they'd swoop into the kerb, and pick you up. One in the eye for the London General Omnibus Company, you know! And they were open-topped, of course. So, if you weren't ... if you weren't at this information point, near Portman Square, you were in Godalming, so between the ... Most of the time I was in Godalming, I'd act, my sister and I did have a governess, in fact.

What was she like?

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Well, she was called Miss Rope. She was all right. She sort of wore gloves, and marched us up to Charterhouse and back again, and my grandfather would sometimes come and hire an open Victoria, and drive up to Hindhead, but the hill was so steep you'd have to walk all the way up, because the horses were too tired to take all the children as well. So it wasn't much of a ride! But he rather fancied himself, I think, as a slightly dandy ... white waistcoat, and ... buttonhole, rather larky.

(BEGINNING OF SENTENCE CUT OFF)... mixture of being very secure and very bleak at the same time?

Well, it was certainly secure in the sense that the grownups treated us slightly as refugees, but we thought life was like that for everybody, because we knew hardly any children that weren't in the same boat. Everybody's parents seemed to us, in the middle-class days of the Empire, everybody's parents were abroad. And if they weren't in Government Service they were being bankers or businessmen, or rubber planters, or whatever it might be.

But if you were anxious about something, who would you go to?

I think, in a way, aunts are easier than mothers quite often, because you're one degree away from them, and I don't think uncles were as close as fathers, although some were. On the whole, you see, it was, if everybody's in the same boat, and life in every middle-class home was the same, and you took a bowl of soup down to the retired nanny down the road, once a week, or something, you were still in the days of ... of rather patronising charity, and you see, you went on those, and you learnt, I found, you learnt, looking back, I didn't realise at the time, you learnt to be at ease, as I say, I think, with almost everybody. You never, I mean, the people you didn't like, or people you did like, but you weren't dumbstruck at coming into a room full of people, because you were used to it.

But was there anyone who was always there in your life? I mean, did you just get used to having to be rather self-sufficient, in some ways?

Apart from my sister, you mean? No, because my granny and grandfather, though my father's parents died when I was very very young, and my mother's parents died when I was 12ish, I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 15 suppose, so there wasn't really anybody till, I was really, till I was about 13, 14, then my parents came home, and we settled into normal life.

Was your grandparent’s house the one by the sea?

Yes. That was a lovely great house. It was a wonderful great, the sort of house you see in Maidenhead, with a lot of white wriggly balconies, and gables and bay windows, geraniums. And the garden was a big tennis lawn in front, with a wall at the end. And that wall was the beach, and if you went down the steps from that wall, you were on ... on the beach. And that was wonderful, because, so I got devoted to that house, because I've always loved the sea. And you lie in bed at night, and the beam from Dungeness Lighthouse would sweep round your bedroom wall, which was very comforting. It has a sort of regular rhythm. And occasionally there'd be a wreck, or ... if you really wanted fun you'd go along to Folkestone harbour on a very rough day, and watch the cross-channel steamers leave and arrive, and the poor passengers hidden in clouds of spray. That was lovely. But then during the, before that, I was there a lot during the War, in Folkestone.

Were you really aware a war was going on? Did it mean anything?

Oh yes, we had air raids. And Aunt Victoria had a house there. She left London and came down to the coast, and we used to stay with her sometimes, about two miles away. We used to sleep under the piano, against the bombs.

Literally, under the pier?

Grand piano, was regarded as a Morrison Shelter.

Oh, the piano! I thought you said "under the pier".

Oh, under the piano. And I remember coming along in a bus from Folkestone to Hythe, and we were all told to get out, because the Fokkers were overhead. We all got out of the bus and there they were, stuttering and booming above us.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 16

They dropped quite a lot of bombs on Folkestone, and killed quite a few people. That was one of my first encounters with public blood, in fact, which I'd very seldom met. Because one of the bombs dropped on the church porch at Hythe, where I'd been christened, and my mother had been married. Killed the verger. And when we went to prison, to church ... when we went to church on Sunday, there were spots of blood all the way from the porch, down to the churchyard gate, Which we thought was very gruesome. And all the grave, gravestones, were at all angles, like a Stanley Spencer painting. So that was my, and I remember peace being signed, and I was also in a bus, going back to school. And I was the only passenger in the bus. It stopped and the driver and conductor didn't quite know what to do, whether to dance, or what.

How did they know it had been declared?

They knew it was going to be signed at 11 o'clock, or whatever it was. You remember? Guns firing.

And what did they do?

They didn't do very much. They drove on again after a bit.

And were you taught to be very patriotic?

Oh yes. I've still got notebooks somewhere.

And I wrote "Peace" in red, white and blue, across a double spread, and drew masses of Allied flags and things. Cheered Marshall Foch as he drove through Folkestone, in an open car, with Sir Philip Sassoon. And David Lloyd George, I squeaked too from on the pavement.

And were politics talked about around you, or not?

Not much, no. I mean, the end of the War, was just like the end of the last War, I suppose. It was a relief for those who'd survived it, mourning for those who hadn't. Our family was very lucky. We had, I think, only two or three in the whole family. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 17

Did seeing the bombs make you frightened of being hit yourself?

I don't think I ... I was really sophisticated enough to know what a bomb was really. I can't think why I wasn't frightened, because I was a most ludicrously, cowardly, all my life, and terribly timid. Hopeless swimmer for ages.

And were your cousins the same, or were you an odd one out?

Oh, they varied. Some were very tough, and charging into the sea, or adoring cricket or whatever it was.

So, did they get impatient with you?

Yes, they did a bit. But, you see, if you, if your role, if your role is one of a sort of wet joker, because I was quite funny, I could mimic and, ... so you're accepted if you make people laugh, and you tell stories in the dormitory and ... it's a good disguise.

And were you reading and drawing? What were you doing ...

I was drawing a lot of ... in those days ... the same as all children seemed to be, drawing dinosaurs. I was always drawing primitive scenes - dinosaurs, and pterodactyls in the forests. And the, I read voraciously because all these houses were full of books.

What did you read?

And ... Well, I suppose all the obvious ones, and the, a lot of the authors of the time, people like P.F. Westerman, and maybe books about the Navy, or, or Ian Hay, or about the War, or the equivalent of giggles. They were mostly non-romantic in the sense of falling in love with anybody. It was all ... and some Angela Brazil, or Brazil. I read, I loved girls', girls' story books, you know, Monica of the Fifth, and they were usually about the War too, there was always some girl who was suspected of being of German birth, and disguised her name, and signalling over the cliffs at Rottingdean!

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 18

And did you have dreams about having those kinds of adventures yourself, or not?

Don't think so, no. I don't remember anything ... anything particular.

And which was the house where you had the boat house you were so proud of?

The boat house? Oh, that was at Sunbury. Every summer we went to stay with a rich uncle, who was Chairman of Grindlays Bank, at the time. And he had an enormous house at Sunbury-on-Thames, with a huge tennis court, and a car with a ... a Vauxhall car with a chauffeur, called Guerney, and housemaids, and parlourmaids. And he lived there, he was a widower, with his unmarried daughter. He was about 60. She was a violinist, and her brother was a pianist. He was in Grindlays too. And he ... they all went ... Uncle Jim and, and cousin Trevor went up to London every day, and I used to go with Guerney in the car to the station, and come back again. And they came back again in the evening. And every evening we used to have music, you know, they'd play the piano and the violin and I used to sing, because I had a very good voice, and occasionally play the piano. And they had this wonderful boat house which we thought was frightfully grand - with two punts and a skiff in it - and an upper room where you could play ping-pong. And, well, our fun was punting up and down the backwater, my sister and I, knocking on the canvas covers of these punts, which are moored along the bank. You could hire a camping punt which had just a canvas hood, which came over, and kept the rain off. And we used to scrabble on the canvas, ask them if they were married. And they never seemed to mind!

Ask who if they were married?

The people ... the couple under the ... under the ... under the hood, because it was a well-known slightly saucy thing to do, if you weren't married, as you can imagine! They used to give us things to eat.

And was that the house where-you used to get chauffeur - driven to Bentalls to do your shopping?

That's right. Yes. Every Thursday or Friday, we used to drive to Kingston-on-Thames, to Bentalls, and we'd sit in the car ... and the counter-hand, the shop assistant would come out Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 19 with a notebook, and take the order. You know, it was mostly food, of course. And we learnt to play tennis, and we used to do that for a fortnight every summer. They took us over, and they took another lot later on.

And if you had things like formal family prayers with your aunt, what were meals like in that house, in Aunt Jocelyn's house?

I should think very conventional, three courses usually.

Would they be served by servants?

Yes.

Who'd be around the whole time?

Yes .

And would you be ...

Probably not more than one waiting, so to speak.

And would it be reasonably relaxed, or not?

Very. Yes, and we had one uncle who had, who was in the Army, and he had a wonderful posting, because he was Commander, or whatever the word is, arson commander of a huge army dump on the Thames, near Rochester, actually, I suppose it was the ... that other river, and it was a dockyard. So that was lovely, because there were cranes and railway trucks, and a wonderful Thames barge which came up once a fortnight, under sail, called "The Seagull", and that was something to look forward to. Because we spent hours in the cabin with the ... those Thames barges usually only have a crew of two, an old captain, and a sort of ship's boy. And we spent hours on that ... on "The Seagull". And what was your relationship with your sister?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 20

She was much more athletic than I was. She was stronger, and good at tennis and swimming, and ... and ... so the cousins she sort of went around with tended to be the athletic ones, and we got on quite, really very well, in fact. Hardly ever quarrelled. She was ... never quite as easy with people as I was, she was much more shy, and I suppose, socially awkward in the sense that she was never quite at ease, and so would either try too hard, or not hard enough, so she, she had more trouble with the ... this constant changing of venue.

And did that affect you?

Well, it gave one the normal difficulties. It's like being picked up for a tug-of-war, you know. They wouldn't actually say "You'll be last", to a temporary non-favourite cousin, but I don't think she had such an easy time really.

Did you protect her at all?

Not much, to be honest. I don't think I was as nice as I should've been. I didn't, I hope, betray her, or say, "Don't let's have her with us", I don't ever remember doing that. But I don't suppose I was as helpful as I could've been, because, if you're naturally, or have made yourself to be a sort of public person, you forget how uncomfortable it is if you aren't very good at that. One, I remember, when W.B. Yeats, saying wasn't it?, "You must be careful, you mustn't become a public person with a smiling face". And I often remember that. Take no notice of it at all.

Was there anyone among your cousins who was your special friend? Were you particularly close to any of them?

Yes, there was one called Angela. She's still alive, and lives near Maidenhead somewhere. She's about 84, I think, and she was very entertaining. She was Aunt Jocelyn's youngest. She was a very funny girl. And then there were two twins, two girls, who were also ... they were the son of the Commandant at the Woolwich ... daughters.

And they were the two who introduced me, really, to, rather agonising dances - blue serge suits, and pumps and ... standing around or doing the Roger de Coverley. And they were the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1084-B Page 21 rather, they were fairly social, because, being in the Army, you ... the social life of wives and families is fairly intense, I think.

But, as a child, your main friends were the girls?

I was very fond of the twins, and very fond of Angela. The elder ones are a bit too... End of F1084 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 22

F1085 Side A

... and ... and your cousins at your Aunt Jocelyn's, who belonged to her, her own children, would they come with you to other aunts or were they only seen there?

No, because their father, Aunt Jocelyn's husband, Cecil, had retired, so he had this big house at Godalming, and he could stuff it to the eaves with exiles from other families. So she was a sort of resident Florence Nightingale, really, a school matron.

But were you conscious all the time that it was Angela's house and not your house?

Yes. But we never had a house, so that didn't make any difference. I mean the only house we'd had in ... in Burma, we were so young, we didn't recognise it as a house at all

And were you in contact with your parents?

Once a week, everybody wrote a letter. Everybody sat down on a Sunday, school or holidays. Every holidays you went to the dentist, had your photograph taken, sent out, to see how much you'd grown. In my case, hardly at all!

Do you think your mother minded being separated from you?

The parents minded? Yes. I think it much ... I don't think the children minded very much because they didn't know anything better, or different, because we lived in a circle where everybody didn't have any parents.

So when you were sent home at the beginning of the War, how long was it until you saw your parents?

Just about four and a half years. They came home in 1919. But then, you see, at that age, you ... you haven't known your parents long enough to realise they are your parents. They're just a more distant form of uncle and aunt.

And you didn't see them at all in the ... Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 23

No.

So what was it like, knowing they were coming home?

Well, we were worked up, you see, of course, by aunts and uncles, "Isn't it lovely, Mummy coming home on Wednesday week", or something. "Only three more days. "So you build up this sort of tension, expectation of seeing them. Inevitably it's rather short-lived. After the first sort of hugs, it just seems like any other old aunt or uncle, really. I think it's true to say, it wasn't until one was much older, in the sort of 12, 16, that they really became parents.

So when they came back in 1919, they then went away again?

They didn't go away again no.

No.

I think ... I can't ... my memory's not very good. I think he may have gone back for a year or something, but I think, on the whole, they packed it in about 1920.

And so therefore, You ...

And then he, then they bought a house in Southampton, when he was working at the University. And that really became a sort of straightforward, normal home, where ...

What was it like?

That was lovely. Because the, it was a nice ... Southampton's a lovely place to live. It's got a wonderful harbor, which was full of huge liners, constantly moving in and out, and there were five or six main steamship lines, and the Union Castle on the ... and the Royal Wales Steamship, the South America, and the P&O, and the White Star, and the Cunard. I mean, there wasn't a day when there wasn't some huge great liner leaving. I had a great friend who was the, one of our neighbors, he was the Chief Passport Officer for Southampton, and he gave me a pass. I spent virtually all my holidays on the quayside. And if I was very good, I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 24 was allowed on board and spent the day wandering through the first class dining room, or the ghastly music rooms and things, on the "Aquitania". It was lovely. And my father had a little boat, taught us to sail. And summer holidays were in the New Forest, of course. Thousands of picnics. Dances in the local tennis club in the middle of Brockenhurst.

And at this point, it would have been your mother and father, and you and your sister?

That's it yes.

And the cousins didn't come to you?

From time to time. But they all lived within reach, you see. With our little tiny Rovers, dickie seats, we used to toddle all round the Home Counties, going over to lunch at Guildford, from Southampton. Or, perhaps, to Eastbourne, or wherever they fetched up. They were all sort of little encampments. Sometimes you'd go for a couple of nights, for a dance, or an event of some kind.

So, hold on, you're only nine when this first happened, so you don't go dancing, presumably, for quite a long time after that?

I was nine, and this was, I'm talking now, between the ages of 10 and 14, when I went ... when I went to second school, really.

But, what was the house like?

The house? My father had a friend who taught engineering at Southampton University. He decided, the first house we had in Southampton was a little detached villette, with a bay window, and three bedrooms, bathroom with a bath on legs, and one WC. And ... I'm just trying to think whether we had a live-in servant. I think we did then, yes, I think we did.

And what was it like? What was the difference between living with your parents and living with your aunts?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 25

Fewer people. Aunt life, you see, was like staying in a hotel really. There were always about four or six members of the family. Houses were big enough, and there was a moving population. I mean, one lot would go, another lot would come, or you'd go.

And so, did you like the fact that there were fewer people or not?

Yes, I enjoyed that.

And what was it like, getting to know your parents?

Not difficult. Pretty quick. In fact, at least, I found it so.

Had you had expectations of what they'd be like?

No, I suppose I just thought they'd be other marks, so to speak, of the other family. Because they were all very very devoted family. they used to ring each other up, and write to each other non-stop. My mother wrote letters every day, after breakfast, for about an hour. And they all did. They were all sat down at their desks, after they'd done the housekeeping, and handed out the sugar to the cook.

Was this the household where everything was locked all the time, in case the servants ate the food?

Yes. All households were like that.

But, was your mother maternal?

Yes. She was, yes, she was. She was very kind and considerate, and not cross.

It must have been hard for her to suddenly become the mother of a nine year old, if she hardly knew you, in a way?

Yes, it must have been. And, indeed, they'd never had any children near them in ... they weren't allowed, you see, during the War, in India and Burma. So they'd never had any Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 26 practice. All the other aunts had had nothing but children under their feet. But they were both socially very easy and they were never ill at ease.

And did your sister do better in that environment?

Yes, I think she did. I think she got, she got some sort of support.

And, apart from family, did your parents have contact with other people? Did they have ... did they entertain? Did they go out?

Well, in Southampton, yes, they had ... they had what you might call "University friends", because they were all professors from the University, and their families. Because it was a ... the academic community there was ... and it had choral societies and, and tennis, dances and things and so it was a sort of community life.

So what do you associate your mother doing, at that period?

Writing letters, in fact, is what I associate her ... she ... she ... but they all wrote letters. I suppose that's why I've got the habit of it. I write two or three a day,

And, did you dislike all your schools?

My prep school, I think, was the one where I was happiest, because it was small, there were only 90 little boys, and there were no bullies, by luck. And I did a lot of singing, piano playing and things, so there was something I was good at. And, but I didn't like my, I ... I ... I'd not terribly enjoyed some of the previous ones because I wasn't there long enough. You know, you're dumped off at a school for two terms, and ... but the prep school was, was three years, four years.

Was that the school where you sang in Canterbury Cathedral?

Where I what?

Didn't you sing in Canterbury Cathedral at some point? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 27

Yes.

That was from that school?

I was sometimes allowed, the head ... the headmaster's wife, when I became rather grand, at about the age of 11 or 12, she used to go housekeeping in Canterbury every Friday, in an old Minerva, with a chauffeur. And if I polished the headlamps with Brasso, I was allowed to come on the shopping expedition, sit in the car while ...

Just you out of the whole school?

Yes, because I was ... I was ... well, I was head boy by then, you see, because I was cleverish or a good memory. But I never liked games, and we used to have, we were all Boy Scouts, and so we used to go camping for odd weekends, learn how to cook.

Were there subjects you couldn't cope with? Was there any

Maths. I'm really innumerate, and remain so.

And was that something you were made to worry about, or was it fairly relaxed?

No. No.

Was that the time, you were a Scout, and you had to go and search for Agatha Christie, or was that later?

What was that?

You once told me you were, as a Boy Scout, sent out to search for Agatha Christie when she was missing.

Oh yes, that's right. That's when I was staying with Aunt Jocelyn at Godalming. Because she disappeared at Hindhead, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 28

and every Boy Scout was asked to beat ... beat the gorse bushes for Agatha Christie. All the time she was sitting in a hotel about two miles away, writing her next book, under an assumed name. So I didn't have very many dramas of that kind. I suppose a sort of quiver of drama we had, always, when watching German prisoners of war, during the War, working on the farm, that sort of, was a little frisson of strangeness, and "these are our enemies", sort of. And we had two wrecks at Folkestone, driven ashore, and that was drama.

But you weren't ...

But, on the whole, we had rather sheltered lives, I suppose.

When you say you were timid, it was just about things like swimming. You didn't have terrible nightmares and horrors and things like that?

No no no.

And did you continue to be rather sickly and ill, or not?

I wasn't really ill, but I wasn't what you might call very strong, I suppose. I was rather frail. Shrimpish. And, I never got ghastly diseases. When I was about 12, they thought I had a tubercular stomach, and so we all trailed off to Montreux in Switzerland, and my mother and sister, and father, trailed around doing a bit of skiing and things, and I lay in bed reading Angela Brazil. Blissful!

And how old were you when you went to your next school?

Next school? My father took me to see a doctor, who said I ought to go to school by the sea, which suited me, I thought, because I was absolutely besotted by the sea, and still am. And so they went to see various schools which were either near the sea, or nearish. But they were ... none of them were what you might call tremendously good schools. There was Dover College where Freddie Ashton was. And if I'd gone there, I might have met him, which would have been fun! Because he loathed school! And, although the other one, I think, they went to see Winchester, they thought was nearish to the sea, but that was too expensive, they Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 29 couldn't afford that. And my mother had ambitions, she wanted me to be a diplomat or a bishop, or something, like all mothers, I suppose! And so in the end they fixed on Eastbourne College, which was about 350 boys, which had a proportion, I would say, a socially sort of cross-mix of prosperous tradesmens' sons, and clergymen’s sons, and service peoples' sons. It was a ...

Were you very aware of class?

I think everybody was in those days. I was aware of it, but I didn't ... It didn't sort of worry me very much, because our family, the whole lot, were very non-snobbish, if I can put it that way. And, of course, the relationships, in many ways, were much easier. I mean, with your, if you had domestic servants under your roof, they were often very very close friends, with the children as well as with the family. You didn't terribly like ... I remember going to very poor houses. If your mother had an old ex-cook, who'd retired, and was living in a rather horrid little house, with rather smelly carpets, you know the sort of thing, and you'd, you'd feel ill-at-ease. I mean, if she'd been in your house, it would have been no trouble, but in, in hers, you became aware of poverty, I think Pretty, pretty quickly.

Do you know how your parents voted?

How did they vote? I think, certainly, I was just trying to think who'd have been Prime Minister in those days. I would think pretty certain Conservative. I mean, they were Fabians, I suppose, really, by nature. But also, I think, pretty trusting in the, Mr. Baldwin, to keep them on the right side of life.

SECOND INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON - FEBRUARY 16, 1990

You told me that your father took you to the Crystal Palace. What was that like?

Well, like all parents left alone with their children, in an unfamiliar interval, so to speak, he was desperate for things to accompany me to. We'd done the Science Museum and we'd ... and we'd done the Zoo, and we'd ... I had persuaded him to go to Selfridges. And then we decided to go to the Crystal Palace, which in those days, was out of Dulwich, and we took a train out there, which was enjoyable. And it was pretty amazing that, I think we were almost the only people there. There was this huge great glass thing. And Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 30 there was a man practising on the organ, because they used to give organ recitals. And he was playing Rubenstein's Melody in F, and he was showing off rather. He'd got absolutely all the stops out, and all the glass was trembling in the iron frames, sort of vibrating, like a lot of bluebottles. And I was terribly impressed with it, and I didn't see it again, in fact, until, until it caught fire, which I suppose, was really about, in the 1930s, early 1930s. And what on earth burned, I can't imagine. But it was a very spectacular sight. We watched it from Hyde Park.

The fire?

Mmmm.

And how long did the fire go on for?

How long did it go on for? All night. And it was a huge blaze in the sky, like a comet or something.

... before we just got you to your second school. Was it harder to go to boarding school when you were living with your parents?

No, I don't think there was really any difference. I think boarding school was boarding school, and, in those days, it was ... it was pretty uncomfortable. If you were at all timid, or, or rather liked central heating, which we never had in the home, of course. My parents wouldn't dream of having central heating, partly on moral grounds, and partly because they'd spent their lives in India, and they were never ever cold enough, because they could never get cold in India. And, coming to England where it was cold all the time was bliss. And my mother used to open the windows every morning, wide, right through the year. Icy. Sheets like clay! Anyway, the school was uncomfy and it smelled of boot polish, and ... and little boys and ... bare boards, and lockers, and ... we did have cubicles, I must say, in our house, which was nice, so you had a little room to yourself, in which you were allowed to pin up ... you were supposed to pin up photographs of your parents, of course. But I pinned up, the whole wall, covered from floor to ceiling, and side to side, all four walls were covered with pictures that I admired, cut out of Illustrated London News, or The Tatler, or The Bystander. Awful pictures of Bonzo the dog, or whatever it was, when I started, and they got more sophisticated in later years.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 31

What happened in later years, what were they?

In later years? Well, I began to get as far as Russell Flint, of course, my housemaster disapproved of nudity, and he used to bring visitors round in the evening, and say, "This is our artistic boy", he used to say. And some miserable visitor didn't know what to say. And he said, "But you have to keep an eye on the sort of pictures he puts up! Ha! Ha! Ha!" And he actually did ask me to take down one or two, and I think they were Russell Flint watercolours of Spanish girls at a well, or something. The usual stuff. But I had quite a number of friends of varying ... varying interests. I had one teacher, a history master, called Paton, funnily enough, whose grandfather was famous, Noel Paton, Victorian artist. And he was ... he was kind to me, he wasn't in my house, he was in another house. I used to go and see him, listen to his stories. Thick pebble glasses, and a moustache. Rather a plain man, but he was very kind to me. But life was just the normal thing. Most of it seemed to be spent on the rugby field, or the cricket field. And occasional swimming, but not much. The school was only about a quarter of a mile from the sea, but we weren't allowed in the sea, so we had to go to swimming pools. And we went to runs up to Beachy Head when it was too wet for football, and the whole thing was irrelevant, I thought. I think most children find school irrelevant. They can't understand what the point is, learning about Henry VII. Most of us couldn't either. We thought it was just because the master knew about that, and if you had to go any further he wouldn't know about it, and so he wasn't going to be bothered. But they never, in those days, of course, or at this school anyway, they never did contemporary history, American history, or Indian history, they never dealt with the Empire, so you never ... I mean, the moment you got to 1800, back you went to King Alfred, and ground your way through the Tudors again, which is not tremendously interesting, unless you happen to be interested in the Tudor period, which is what one or two people were. Anyway, I enjoyed Latin and Greek, because I was quite well taught that. And history, I mean, I enjoyed when it got to the later bits. I was the only boy in the art school. I remember.

When you say the "art school", what do you mean?

There was one room in the school, full of stuffed birds, because the headmaster was a bird fan, and he wanted a stuffed version of every sort of south country's wader birds, you were supposed to draw these. And there was one old boy who taught us, he was called Mr Aldom, and he wore a long blue mackintosh, with the belt tied behind, instead of in front, and a black Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-A Page 32 hat. And I was his only pupil. As far as I remember, the only thing he ever said was, "If you want to put ... if you want to throw your money away, you 'blue it' don't you?" So you said, "Yes sir." "That means that when you want things to look far away in your picture, you paint them blue, and then you'll find they'll recede . "And he was quite a sweet old boy, and he didn't bother me, except he kept on showing me postcards of a picture. He'd had one picture hung in the Royal Academy, which was a girl with a young man on each arm, but they were all in Regency dress. It was called "Two Beaux to her String", and he was terribly proud of this. Poor old boy. I don't know what happened to him. He didn't draw badly, come to think of it. He showed me how to draw feathers, which I've since forgotten. So I was thankful when I ... when I got to the age of about 17, 16 or 17. My father thought that, it became clear to him that the school had been chosen for sea air, rather than for education, wasn't probably going to get me to university. So he took me away, and we went in a little Rover car, with a dickie seat, because the great thing, the humiliation thing, about, about parents arriving in the wrong car at school, it's either got to be so tiny and so shabby, it's all right, or it's got to be frightfully grand. And ours was a small family car, and, I didn't actually ask them to draw up out of sight, but I wouldn't have minded if they had. So the only event I remember really, at school was, I asked permission to go and hear Paderewski play in the local Pier Pavilion, on a visit. I was also learning the piano from a girl called Miss Read, with a long, big boney nose. She wore her hat during lessons, and she was a very nice old bird ... but a hopeless teacher. We spent all our time on exercises. If only she'd taught me Hymns Ancient and Modern, good, nice easy tunes, or good, simple waltzes, or ... I mean, never anything like that. But anyway, I was taken away, and my father was by then, retired and living in Southampton, and teaching at Southampton University. So he asked what my strongest subject was, and the school seemed to pause a long time, to try and find out what it was. They were rather suspicious of me, I think. I think they thought I was, sort of, rather pretty.

End of F1085 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 33

F1085 Side B

... rather pretty.

Rather pretty and frail, and, and tempting to the older boys .

Had you been told about sex by this stage?

No, I hadn't actually. I felt it all the time, of course! But I'd no idea what ... because, I suppose it's one of the most strongest sexual periods of anybody's life, between the ages of 14 and 20. And, but you mostly kept it to yourself, if I can put it that way. Physically. Anyway.

Were you approached by boys and masters?

Oh well, not by masters, except, the headmaster was a, was a rather eccentric character. He ... he rather liked beating you for minor offences. If you were seen in Woolworths, which was out of bounds, he would beat you, and he would lie you face downwards on a table, and take your trousers down, and pick out a gym shoe from a box labelled "Doves' food", because, as I say, he was a great bird man. And he'd hit you about eight times. And then you'd ... he'd say, he'd say "Don't do it again." And you'd go back to the dormitory and show your scars to the assembled mob. He never drew blood, I don't think. No, he certainly didn't. But, I think he quite liked doing it that way, rather than, in the normal, bending over, having been caned in the changing room or something. Anyway, I went ...

And what about other boys?

Other boys?

Mmmm.

Well, there was masses of it about, of course, as there always is.

But were you taken away because they were afraid you would like it. or afraid that you would be unhappy about it? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 34

I think, I think they really took me away, mostly because they wanted me to try and get a scholarship to Cambridge, and I think there were side reasons too, which were not explicit to me, looking back. And so I went to ...

If you were very much on your own, in terms of being interested in drawing and everything, were you made to feel uncomfortable by the other kids?

By the boys? Other boys? No. I think ... there are always enough boys who don't like rugger all that much, and who would prefer reading, and, no, I don't think there was, I was miserable from discomfort and boredom really. Discomfort and boredom, and terror of the games field, because the school was obsessed with games. I mean, every Saturday, there was a match with another school, which you were all compelled to watch, whether it was football or cricket. And if you won ... the muddied crew would come into school hall ... and sing a sort of Maori triumphant song about how wonderful it was to win at rugger, and how this was good in after life, that you learned to ... this, that and the other. That was really awful. Anyway, I went to the university, and I lived at home. And the university, I did Latin and Greek, nothing else.

When you say you went to university, I don't understand.

At Southampton.

And why were you able to go there?

Well, in those days, it wasn't quite, in those days, it was reallY done almost on interview, I mean, in Oxbridge.

So you went ....

I mean, if you were old Allyson's boy ... "Oh yes, I remember Allyson. Yes, yes, let's have him. "And they also had the idea that, you know, in the Colleges in Oxbridge, that you wanted generalists occasionally, or people who were good at amateur dramatics, or were Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 35 able to read and write, but weren't, so to speak, high marks in exams. You had to pass Common, what was called Common Entrance, and I'd done that, that wasn't difficult.

So when you say you were taken away from that school because you wouldn't get into university, you mean, because you wouldn't get into Oxbridge?

No, I'd get in easily, so to speak. I shouldn't boast that! I could have got in ordinarily, but my father wanted me to get a scholarship, you see, because he was finding it difficult to pay for me. But unfortunately, I did quite well but I didn't do well enough, when the time came, so

You went from school, on to a degree course at Southampton University?

No, I went in for a year, by arrangement, because my father was a teacher there, so obviously had a swing, and the Classics professor was an old friend of his. And somebody else on the end of the desk, didn't make any difference. You know, you paid your fees and went. But he was quite a good teacher, but sadly, I wasn't good enough for the scholarship. I liked Greek, because I loved doing the writing, it was so interesting. It was almost like drawing. And then when I went to take the scholarship, those awful two nights in Cambridge, ah! the misery! Dark evenings and nobody ... knowing nobody. I did a paper on the Acropolis. I mean, I'd answered a question on the Acropolis. And when I had my oral, the ... the ... my oral tutor, who was a man called Charlesworth, said, "I'm afraid you aren't being recommended for a scholarship, but your ... your answer on the Acropolis is outstandingly good. Why don't you give up Classics, which is only going to lead you to an administrative job, maybe in the Civil Service, or what ... and because your interest in architecture is obviously latent there, and there's a School of Architecture here. Why don't you go and see them? See if they'll take you." Which I did.

Had you thought about being an architect before?

Once or twice. Well, my mother rather wanted me to be a ... after she'd given up wanting me to be a diplomat and a bishop, she ... she wasn't serious about the bishop, she rather liked ... she was rather theatrical interests, she liked processions and the ... and the bowing and nodding and all that business. Perhaps that's what she liked about the diplomacy, I don't know. She may have been slightly giggly about the whole thing. But anyway, she had Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 36 suggested my being an architect when I was about 10, but I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded. I could draw. And they ... they ... like most parents, they were distrustful of being an artist. But if you were an architect, you could earn a living drawing.

So had you been drawing since childhood, solidly?

Oh, I drew all the time, yes. My father had begun to draw, because he drew quite well, and, having lots of academic vacations, he used to draw a lot, and he actually painted too.

What sort of style?

Oh, very very straight, farmyards, or ... a sort of hanging wood on the side of the Downs behind Portsmouth. Quite big, usually about 2'6" x 18", and he showed in the local Art Society, and things.

Watercolours?

No, oils, he painted in oil. So ...

And what were you drawing at this sort of stage?

I was drawing mostly down in the docks - dock sheds, and bollards, and cranes, and ships, and boats. Because I spent most of my holidays in the docks.

And were you doing watercolours at that stage, or not?

No, I didn't get into colour at all. Rather frightened of colour. But the ... anyway, the School of Architecture in Cambridge, in those days, being a visual thing, was regarded by Cambridge, as a pretty disreputable faculty. It was a sort of branch of plumbing, and so we were stuffed down in a couple of terraced houses near the Engineering School, and told to keep down there, and don't go anywhere near the library or ... I mean, the academic attitude of, on visual science is, one of my sort of prevailing passionate irritations.

Do you think it's changed much since then? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 37

No. They still think it's something done by foreigners and women. And their attitude to women was shameful, at the universities. I mean, it was pretty shameful, even if you weren't in a university, in the period in the 19th century. You see, the first women didn't really appear, you see, until about 1890, in Oxbridge. And they both were placed a long way out of the university, and they weren't allowed to bicycle in certain streets, so I mean, there were all sorts of, and ... no conceivable hope of having a man in your room, unless you had your aunt and your mother with you.

And what was your attitude to women at the time?

At Cambridge it began to liven up a bit, shall I say. And we ... nobody had any girlfriends. And the friends ... I was ... my father was a very good oarsman, and he'd been in the first boat of St. John's College, and so he said, "Why don't you join the Boat Club as a cox? "And, because I was the right weight, about eight and a half stone. And so I did. So every morning I went to the Architectural School, and in the afternoon, I coxed on the river, which I rather enjoyed, because I love steering boats. And you were very commanding, told them to shut up, and stop and start, and that sort of thing. And I got very good, and the end ... by the end of my time, I was the spare cox for the University, but the University COX was terribly healthy, he was a doctor, a medical student, so he never got ill. But I did steer at the Trial Eights, which is the sort of dry run, for the University, I'm very pleased with myself. But, the people who rowed tended to be fairly hearty, amusing characters, rather than wistful dreamers. I mean, they'd sit on their windowsills with their legs hanging out, rather than lying on a couch, twisting hair round their fingers, which was roughly the two sorts of ... and I had one or two aesthetic friends from school, one in Kings who used to spice oranges with, by sticking cloves into them, and he'd stick them all on a great tripod he'd made, and hold them out of the window, in the courtyard, to try and make the smell nice. But the, I did a lot of drawing in Cambridge, and ... but in my second year, when I'd settled down a bit, I thought I'd get interested in the Festival Theatre, which, in those days, was run by a man called Terence Gray, with a long spade beard, and he had a mistress, called Doria Paston, and they were doing things like The Insect Play, and Karel Capek and Kniqht of the Burninq Pestle. And all the scenery was abstract because Doria only liked Cubist scenery. Anyway, I used to go every week, because they had a separate performance every week, and then I ... I wrote in and said could I help paint the scenery, because I wanted to learn about designing for the stage? And Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 38 they said "Yes. What happens is that the performance is struck at half past ten on Saturday night. All the scenery (which is huge, 12 foot flats) is then taken into the painting room behind, and they're repainted, so that they can be set up Sunday morning, for lighting rehearsal at 11, dress rehearsal at 3, and they open with the next one, on Monday. "So every, every weekend, virtually, I spent painting, all Saturday night, painting scenery, which was very agreeable, not only because it was interesting, although, as long as Doria Paston was there, it was pretty dull. She was a great one for silver paint, and black. Silver and black. And for symbolisms, so if two characters were in argument, they'd mount rostrums with a chasm between them, you know. Very ... however, she'd left after the first two terms, and Terence, and we had two repertory companies in sequence. First was a man called Anmer Hall, who was a sweet old boy, he was an old professional. And he recruited, his leading man was Robert Donat, and his leading lady was Jessica Tandy, and he had an assembly of fairly talented rep people, and he ... he ... he did a lot of Shakespeare, but he also did things like Lady Audley's Secret, and Victorian melodramas, and he was great fun, because the scenery was designed, usually by a man called Hedley Briggs, who was a great friend of ours. And Hedley was a ballet dancer, and a frightfully entertaining young man, and who, eventually, after the War, became a cook, when his figure thickened. So every Saturday night, I spent ... and the main scene painter was a girl called Stella, and she'd run away from home, her father was a parson, and she thought there was no future stirring soup in the village down in Sussex, so she came and got a job painting scenery. She was untrained, but, I mean, she'd, she, like all girls in those days, they did a lot of watercolour paintings, and she could measure and mix the paint, and everything, so we, we painted all night. And, it was frightfully tiring, but fun. And, so that was my sort of main ... I suddenly became also, a sort of deposit for dogs. People got dogs and got tired of them. And I was asked to look after a black borzoi, which is a very handsome thing about as high as I was. But vicious. If any other dog crossed it's path, it picked it up and broke it's back, so it had to wear a muzzle all the time, and I had to buy sheep hearts to feed it. And I kept it down in the College Boat House. Exercised it occasionally, not often. It was too big to take to the studio. And then Stella had a Dalmatian, and her landlady said "she can't have the Dalmatian any more", so I took over Stella's dalmation, which was a pretty dog. It had a lousy life, because it had to spend all morning lying in my room, and all the afternoon, when I was on the river, it lay at the boat house, so it had very little fun. And, but I didn't do any acting myself.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 39

Did you learn anything by doing the scene painting? Did it help to think three- dimensionally?

I don't think so. I think, no, I think I learned a little bit about scale, things being the right size, and door handles being the right height, and that sort of thing. Because the drawings given us were pretty rudimentary, by Hedley. Hedley sort of rather fancied himself as a sort of Oliver Messel, and there were a lot of, sort of, pink ostrich feathers and, and Victorian gothic, and that sort of thing.

And were you critical of that, or not?

Was I what?

Were you critical of that, or not?

No. I thought, actually, he was, he was extremely inventive. considering he had to do a whole production every week. And also act, he was also an actor. So he was really hard put to it, and I thought it was amazing that he managed to, to keep going.

Had you seen much theatre? I mean, were you interested in drama or not?

Well, by then, you see, I'd, I was much closer to my Aunt Sybil Thorndike, in the holidays, and so I'd see everything they were in, always, several times usually. And sometimes it was fairly awful stuff, and sometimes it was extremely exciting. So, the last ... my last year, I began seriously to think of going to, to design for films, and find locations.

Why had that appealed?

Because I thought that I wouldn't be interested enough in putting up office buildings and ... so I wrote to Laurence Irving, who was the sort of doyen of scene designers and scene painters in the late twenties/early thirties. He was the grandson of Henry, and the son of, oh, that other famous character who went to live in Italy, Gordon Craig. And Laurence said, "Well, you can come up and see what it's like. I'm making a film of Marlene Dietrich at Pinewood, at the moment. "Not Pinewood, sorry, Denham. So I went up to Denham, and there was Marlene Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 40

Dietrich, sitting in an open carriage, in a rest period. And she was smoking a cigarette, and the smoke was coming up through her eyelashes, winch were fantastically large. So I hung about for a couple of days, and then my Aunt Sybil gave me an introduction to the Gaumont Studios, which is now the BBC at Hammersmith, Shepherds Bush, I mean, where they were making a film about the French Revolution. And that was a producer whose son is now a producer with the BBC, a big fat man called Victor Saville. And so I hung about, I mean, it's always interesting, watching these sort of ... I mean, actually it's a mixture between excruciating boredom, hanging about waiting for lights to be adjusted, hanging about because somebody's hair's got out of ... or lost a heel off their shoe, and I don't know how, I mean, they'd only stand it because they're so well paid. However, Laurence Irving took me aside, and said, "Honestly, I wouldn't touch it. It's such a ... it's such a chancey ... it's just like being an actor. You get a job for three months, and then you're out of work for two years. And it's very frustrating. "So this is when I was just about in my last term, and I'd done very well in all my exams, I'd got a First in each, first, second and third year, and the Head of the School, who was a funny little archaeologist, called Theodore Fyfe, who'd done the Knossos excavations in Crete, with Arthur Evans, and he said, "I think I can manage to get you a grant of fifty pounds to go to Greece. "Now, when you do three years at Cambridge School of Architecture, that's your Intermediate - the whole course is five years, you see. So you've got to do two years somewhere else, because Cambridge didn't approve of having you there for five years. Not that they approved of architecture either, but... So, after you'd done your final at Cambridge, you had to do two more years somewhere else. But, he said, "If you go to Greece now, in September, after the holidays, you can use it as the source for your written thesis, which usually takes somebody two months to write. And not many people will be writing about that, whatever you're going to write about. So, what are you going to write about?" So I said, "Well, I don't think I can really write about Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, because I've been drawing it for the last three years. " Because our training was pretty bad. You started with the orders, and, and worked up to flat roofed houses. But, actually, by then I'd been secretary of the School Architectural Society. It was my job to find lecturers every week during term time. And that was quite fun, because you got people like Eric Gill, or Robert Byron and ... tried to get Evelyn Waugh, to talk to us about Gaudi in Barcelona, but he wouldn't come. But you met most distinguished characters, because people rather like talking to undergraduates in Oxbridge, you know, they sort of, it's more interesting ... what's the word? ... It's a more interesting invitation than going to give a very important lecture in Sheffield. In a curious way, you think, "Well, young things, and dreaming lawns, and things! Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1085-B Page 41

"So, it wasn't all that trouble getting speakers, it was sometimes difficult getting audiences. And matching a good audience with a good speaker wasn't all that easy. If you found somebody like Lawrence Binyon, for instance, to talk about Persia, I, I didn't think you'd get more than 100 people, but suddenly, there was going to be about five or six hundred people in the University. So you put your posters up, as you know, in Oxbridge, every notice board in every college, is papered with posters of poetry societies, dancing classes, lectures, every conceivable sort of activity. So that was a nightmare. I didn't like Gill much. I mean, extremely polite to me, but I thought he was vain ... and somehow, a disturbing man, I felt.

What was he talking about?

I think he, as far as I remember, he talked about printing, I think that was his subject. So that was my sideline. I'd also, oh, organised trips to go and see, because we were crazy about Corbusier, of course, to see anything modern, with a flat roof. There were various famous places in the Home Counties and London, which were Modern with a capital M. And these were the places of pilgrimage because there were only about 12 in the whole country. There was a house in Amersham and Maxwell Fry, and ... and as the Nazi refugees began to arrive, Mendelsohn and Chermayeff, and all the sort of distinguished Germans and Frenchmen started coming over.

End of F1085 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 42

F1086 Side A

We ... I enjoyed Cambridge very very much. We were very young for our age, all of us. The girls who came down on Sundays were all somebody's sisters. I mean, somebody would say, "My sister's coming down. Would you like to come and help punt her up the river and join us for lunch?", or something. And ... but there were never sort of girlfriends, because the Newnham and Girton were, sort of, never allowed really near us, and there was one man, I remember his name to this day, he's a marked man, he was called E.H. Whittaker, and he had a moustache, and E.H.Whittaker had a girlfriend in the chorus of 'Rose Marie', and this was the height of sophistication to us. She used to come down on Sunday. But we were never asked to punt her up the river. E.H. Whittaker rowed seven in the boat, he was a very good oarsman, and I remember, I was asked to do exercises in balance, and he rebelled. You know, I had to say, everybody had to take their oars out of the water, so that they were like legs off the ground, you see, and they had to sit there so that the boat was steady, and he suddenly flung his oar away, and said, "This is bloody silly. I'm not going to do this any more." And I didn't quite know how to handle this, I hadn't been ... I so respected him, because of Rose Marie, so I had difficulties. But, in my later years, my last two years, my closest friends had motor cars, and you weren't allowed to go to London without a written permit, but you were allowed to go and, as it were, visit allegedly the Cambridge churches. But one of my ... one of my great friends was a man called George Miller, who, in his last year, became a terrific rascal, with the girls, and he was going to give up architecture, he was a fellow architect, at my College too, and went into journalism. And he joined the Daily Express, and then during the War, he was a terrific parachutist and resistance man in, in France, and then he came back and wrote about four books about his adventures, because he'd bought a boat and sailed around the Mediterranean with his girlfriend, and he was very sparky. And his car was an open two-seater Chrysler, which I thought was grander, I mean, even than Paul Mellon's car, which was kept in the same garage, it was called "Accord", which was a sort of advanced, streamlined, there were only about two in the whole of the country. And you weren't allowed to use them before lunch, any car. And, anyway, I ... I really had great fun at Cambridge, because I enjoyed my friends. I enjoyed the course, and the teachers were extremely good. I started with Christopher Nicholson, who was Ben Nicholson's brother, and the son of Sir William Nicholson, who was a great Edwardian portrait painter. In fact, I think a wonderful painter. And then I moved on to various other tutors, all of whom were excellent. And my, my main tutor was a man called Harold Tomlinson, who had been in the Fleet Air Arm during Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 43 the War, and he had a terrific limp because he'd fallen off the edge of the ship or something. But he, he was amazing. He had a great open tourer Humber, and he'd allow me to take it away and drive it. He said, "Would you like the car this afternoon?" And you'd say, "Well, could I drive to Oxford?" "Why not?" he said. I thought that was not bad, considering I was only just the age to drive. Well, then, at the end of this, I got this grant of fifty pounds ...

Before we talk about that, can we just actually talk a bit more about the content of the course what You were taught?

Well, in those days, the, the, the architecture course was, was standard right through, through the country, which is partly what, what Oxbridge objected to. Because if you'd been to Glasgow University or Sheffield, or, you'd have had the same course, you had to pass the same subjects. You had, most of the time, eighty per cent of the time was designing, you were set a subject every two weeks, or three weeks, or sometimes you were set the subject for a day, you know, design a gate, for instance. You had lectures at construction, you had architectural history lessons, about three a week, I suppose. But most of it, most of it was drawing and designing. And that went on, really, till your, till the end of your five years.

And, I mean, how closely were you supervised? How much was it ...

Oh, there was a tutor wandering around all the time. It was rather like school in a way, that, I mean, in, in our year, I think, was about 20 undergraduates, one girl, and 19 chaps. The girl was wonderful, she was called Aline Gale.

So you're talking about the one girl student?

Aline Gale. And she was, she was a funny little creature, with a very sharp nose, and she wore her hair like an Aldous Huxley heroine, in a totally straight, golden bell of hair, so when she leaned forward over her board, her hair would fall, fall forward, so you couldn't see her face at all, you'd just see this bell of hair, and underneath was this little funny face. And she announced, when she arrived, that she wasn't going to go out with any of us, because if she went out with one, she'd have to go out with all of them, in, in equity. And so she was going to seek her friends outside the School of Architecture. So we all said, "Oh well!" But, within two terms, she'd fallen madly in love with one of our year, called Charles Creighton, and they Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 44 became lost in each other's arms for the rest of her time, really. She was very good fun. I still see her.

Did she become an architect?

Yes, she became an architect, and she went ... you had to go on afterwards, for two years, as I said, and she went to the AA, and she and I, and another friend of mine called Frank Adie, decided we might set up a flat together. We thought this was very sophisticated, when we came to London. So we trailed round looking at flats, and then her parents vetoed it. So she went off to live on her own, and I went off to share with Frank Adie. But, going back to the Scholarship thing ...

Sorry, you're going off to Greece again are you?

Yes.

Wait a minute. When you say you were all crazy about modern architecture, was that coming from the students, or was it coming from the tutors? I mean ...

Oh, there was one tutor who practised it. And, called George Checkley. And he built two houses which were, sort of, places of pilgrimage to modern, young modern architects in Cambridge. And they're very straightforward, white, horizontal windowed, flat-roofed, but they were ... they were sort of icons. So he was greatly respected, although he was totally, hopeless teacher, poor man, because he was unable to, to string two words together. He was sort of ... a figure that hung over your board, and always found it terribly difficult to speak. He was a very nice old boy. But, no, the ... the ethos, you see, came really from the Head of the School, and Fyfe was an archaeologist.

Who?

Theodore Fyfe, this Arthur Evans refugee, and he, you see, he was a strong classicist, and he tried to push this down our throats. But, on the whole, you got rid of it in your first year, and you went straight off into doing railway stations, or whatever the subject set, and you couldn't, you could cover railway stations with columns, but you didn't think it appropriate. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 45

When you went to Cambridge, how much architecture had you been aware of?

I'd done, the whole of my summer vacation before going to Cambridge, I'd done, as an apprentice to the architect to Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, because we lived about 10 miles from Winchester, and my father gave me a motor bicycle, and every morning I'd putt putt off to Winchester, put the motor bicycle under a yew tree in a graveyard, and spend the day, usually, in the cathedral, mostly measuring up things. He was always having to put in this, and take something out, and repair the vaults, so I spent hours, every day, up above the vaults, you know, finding little stairs and doors. And he was also architect to Winchester College, the school, so one pottered about there, thanking God one wasn't back in those changing rooms and those ... sour smelling urinals and things, you know. But he taught me how to use a T-square, and a scale, and a set-square. And I saw correspondence, and telephones. And he was a very sweet old boy, called T.D. Atkinson. He'd written a little book about the history of the classic style, and the oldfashioned, tall, thin, long white silvery hair, long nose, and very soft voiced, and stooping. And he was very kind to me. And so I ... when I arrived, I was ahead of the others, who'd never seen a T-square in their lives, any of them, so I was just ahead of them.

But do you think you were predisposed to be open to new shapes and modern ideas? I mean, was there anything in your background that prepared you for that?

No, I hadn't taken any interest in, in modern architecture at all. I mean, I was fascinated by ships, because I'd spent most of my last four or five years appraising ships, which is quite good training really, because you can get a sense of structure from them, and ships don't dress themselves up as something else. They don't have anything more than is needed to do whatever it is.

And had that made you think about design in general, particularly?

Well, I, I mean, I did a, my theatre work gave me a sort of frivolous side, because we were all rather solemn. Young modern architects still are, because it makes you priggish if you ... if you're stylistically priggish ... if you, you feel that the School is old-fashioned and you want Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 46 to be more up-to-date. So we were, we were pretty well all convinced about ... about modern architecture.

And did you talk about it a lot amongst yourselves, or was it something that was just assumed?

I think we all assumed this was the way it was going, and this is what we were going to learn to do.

And, presumably, most of it, you were looking at in books, or what?

Mostly. Well, mostly in magazines, because the, all the architectural magazines, of course, were ... they were covering the straightforward Georgian town halls and things, which were popping up and down all over the place, and big country houses and things, but they always had this month's wonder palace -usually from Holland and France, or ... because Europe was, was zinging along in those days with, with modern architecture, workers' flats, and swimming pool baths and ... and Holland and Scandinavia was our sort of actual, in those days, Scandinavia, we thought was the height, that was its height, because there was Stockholm, and Copenhagen, and Finland. And anybody who could afford it went on holiday, holiday trips. Our holidays, we spent, when we came to London, Frank and I, in his car, we used to, usually drive down through France, or, one year, we made this great expedition to Dubrovnik, driving all the way, which was quite difficult because ... no petrol stations once you're beyond Venice, you know. And so you strapped tins to the running boards, and that sort of thing. We thought we were very brave. So we had bachelor holidays, and, but I did have this excitement of this Greek experience before that.

And did you say at some point that somebody at Cambridge taught you to draw very fast?

Yes. Tomlinson, the Fleet Air Arm man, I was very lucky to get him, because he insisted, always, that I drew with a fountain pen when I was designing, not when I was drawing up a final presentation, but when I was designing, always a fountain pen, no rubbing out. And everything had to be drawn in perspective and in three dimensions. And normally, as you know, if an architect's designing a window, the elevation of it, what it looks like upright, he does the plan of it, what would happen if you cut through to see how it's all fixed together. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 47

And a section from top to bottom, so what the section looked like from top to bottom. All these windows are fairly complicated things - sash windows, pulleys, and weights and boxes, and keeping the rain out - and all this is done, normally, in the plan, section and elevation, which, of course, I had to do as well. But he also made me draw in perspective, so that I was absolutely well-informed about when something hit something, that you can't always see in plan or elevation. Would it be awkward? Would a little bit stick up, or drop down? And I'd never been anything but marvellously grateful to him, because it's been a Godsend to me. It's actually, in a way, it's been a slight snag to me, because I get hypnotised by drawing, rather than designing. And if you're quite good at drawing, as I was, in this way, you, you alter the drawing you're doing, to make it look nice, and cheat on the facts you see. If you're a bad draughtsman, or a poor draughtsman, you don't notice whether it's nice or nasty, the drawing, you just get on with the works and bricks. And I've always been hypnotised by skill in quick drawing, which makes things look better than they are.

Are you, in general, quite seduced by architectural drawing?

Did I? Sorry, say it again?

Are you seduced, in general, about architectural drawings?

Yes, I am. It's been very very useful, because it's a wonderful shorthand. If you get, if you go to a meeting with the client, and you want to explain that you're going to turn the library back ... back to front, and put the lavatories on the roof, say, it takes quite a long time to explain to a layman what you're actually doing. But, if you can draw it very very quickly, and very very simply, in three dimensions, so that he can see the block ... block of it, I mean, he can learn it in two sees. So that's, as a useful shorthand, I find, I always found it invaluable.

But, for instance, the exhibition at the Academy at the moment, of the Jones drawings, how do they differ from the way a student is taught to draw today, or how you were taught to draw at Cambridge?

Well, in my day, you mean?

Mmmm Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 48

Well, in my day, the Continental schools, of course, were run largely on Beaux-arts principles, which was the French, sort of Napoleonic tradition, in which you spent hours and hours and hours doing enormous drawings of classical buildings, designed for a temple of virtue, for an island in the Mediterranean, for an eccentric monarch, for instance. And these were exercises in the, not only in the classical style, but in classical planning. And the teaching was excellent in the sense that you got a wonderful sense of proportion from the Beaux-arts, because it was all geometrical proportions in the sense it was ... and you really got into the ... we never did it, you see, because we terribly disapproved of it, because you spent the whole term on watercolouring very very elaborate plans, and, and, of course, you didn't see many tutors in the Beaux-arts, in the Continental schools of architecture, right up to pretty late in life. I mean, as far as I remember, the Professor of Architecture in Venice, lived in Milan, and you'd have to queue outside libraries in most European schools to get in, or even to get into a lecture. You saw your professor maybe once a fortnight, or something, and you were left on your own. So I suppose that was quite instructive, but I think our system is better. But their architecture turned out better, so maybe, maybe they had a thing. But, of course, the Beaux-arts students, of course, revolted against this, but they had to do it, otherwise they wouldn't have passed. They're very beautiful things to look at. They're like huge abstract drawings, and they were vast, they were the size of a hearthrug, every drawing. But, of course, they never learnt, they never did any more of that drawing in their lives.

And when you were at that stage at Cambridge, did you think you would want to be making, to be involved with public architecture, or were you thinking in terms of private?

I don't think I, I, what I did want to be was in private practice, rather than public service. I didn't want to go into the Ministry of Health, or, or Westminster City Council, because I thought that would be rather deadening. I wanted to be in private practice, and I wanted to start with private houses, which, more or less, every young architect had to in those days, and that's in fact what happened, because I came to London after my Greek experience, for two years, to London University, and there it was much more the Beaux-arts tradition. They were all doing pretty old-fashioned things, what we thought were oldfashioned things. The Architectural Association in Bedford Square, was the sort of experimental madhouse, where everybody was flying off in all directions. But when I went to see them, they said, "You from the Cambridge School?" And I said, "Yes". And they said, "Oh well, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 49 it's such a bloody awful school, I'm afraid you'll have to do three years, not two, if you come here." So I said, "To hell with that!" And went down Gower Street, to University College, and they said, "Well, you stay here just as long as it takes for you to pass the exams, might be 18 months. "And then the most extraordinary thing happened. The Registrar, when I was signing myself in, said, pulled open a drawer, and said, "I don't know whether you're interested, but if you take my correspondence course, which I run privately from this office, I can guarantee you'll get through in 18 months. It's 30 quid." So I told my Papa, and he said, "Well, why not have a go?" So this old boy used to, all the Cambridge boys, as far as I knew, used to take this correspondence course and got through in 18 months.

And what did you get at the end of getting through?

Then you were qualified. But, in order to qualify, you had to pass all those exams in structures, and history, and professional practice, and theory of structures, and all that stuff. Then you had to write a thesis, which would take you a couple of months to write, probably. And then you had to have six months experience in an office, and then you could say you were an architect. It hasn't changed all that much since. It's still about five years.

And did you think that anything terribly important was missed out from your training, in retrospect?

Did I think at the time?

Well, no, now, in retrospect. Do you think there was anything?

I'm never quite sure, because when I was a teacher, I always had this problem, you see, the, there are two theories, roughly over-simplifying. One is at architecture school at design school, you're spreading your wings, and you're designing stairs that coffins won't go down, and you're designing mad fireplaces which will smoke, and that the rain will pour in through everything you design with a roof, because you're experimenting with forms and surfaces and textures and materials, and there's no point in learning how a thing is actually built, because that you learn when you go out into life, you see. And then the other theory is, which is taught in some schools, that this was a sort of cheat, really, and that it was infantile doing houses for the future, and mooring masts for spaceships and things, because this wasn't really Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-A Page 50 releasing you, it was just letting you doodle. It released your imagination in some way, perhaps. In fact, possibly quite a lot if you were, if you were an imaginative person. So most schools stuck on half way between the two. But all, all employers always say, the moment somebody comes to you as a student, fresh from school, he doesn't really know how a building's put together, because he's never actually worked in a live office and seen what happens. And nowadays, of course, students do, all vacations they work in offices, and work practically, so they get a mixture of the two. No, we thought this was a ... this was a ... I think we thought it was rather a fatigued course, like we did at school with geography, you know, everybody turned up in September, and went through the same groups as last September, and next. But, of course, it changed tremendously since the War, and before the War it was already beginning to change. The teaching systems are much more ... I mean, the place where I was at London University College, they had, after the War, they had a man called Llewellyn Davies who, who believed that architects shouldn't be allowed to design until they'd learnt ... had a much better education as people, and he made them learn chemistry and philosophy, social studies. And you had to do, I think it was two years, at that, before you were allowed to draw a thing. But, you see, well, that was, old Llewellyn Davies was a tremendous logician, as well as being a very very strong Socialist, it meant that if you were an architect, if you easily ... wanted to be one, he'd kill you. Because the nice thing about Cambridge, in it's old-fashioned way, the first morning you went in, there was your drawing board, with a piece of paper on it, T-square, scale, set-square, and a subject, to be done by the following Tuesday. And none of us had ever designed a thing in our lives, you see. But you were plunged absolutely straight into it. And it's amazing how people's sense of improvisation worked. You see, in a Beaux-arts school, you'd been sat down to do drawing exercises - draw a circle intersecting with a square, or, you know, things with instruments. Well, that wouldn't, that wouldn't spark you off very much. It was quite good training to give you a sense of volume and space. It's a very difficult thing to teach, in fact. And, and, of course, Llewellyn Davies was right, in a way, that you're infantile at the age of 19, 18 or 19, about how people live or anything. And people criticise architects a lot as, as being ignorant of the way, how people live. But they're people, they aren't Martians. I mean, they buy Brussel sprouts and push prams, and go to Sainsburys, and, and carry, go on Tubes, I mean, they're normal people like anybody else. They're not strange, Places ... people from another place.

End of F1086 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 51

F1086 Side B

any kind of social policy or ideas.

Well, there was nothing to stop you. There was nothing to stop you going to lectures in the Social Studies Department, or the Department of Economics, or ... but what was interesting about Cambridge, I thought, was how little you used the facilities of the place. I never entered the University Library the whole time I was there, three years. I mean, the Department had its own library, and Boots had the fiction that you wanted. But the thought of going into that great mausoleum, terrifying, you'd never come out.

And apart from, obviously the other architectural students, was anybody else in the least bit interested in architecture? Was there any kind of public debate going on in England?

At the time? Well, it was just the beginning of ... it was just the beginning of the, 1931, when all the Nazi refugees began coming out, but they were, I don't think, I think the University was a pretty, pretty non-visual place, really.

And you had as a lecturer at one point, the person who did the Burlington Arcade, didn't you?

Yes. It shows how old I am. Beresford Pite he was called. He had a white beard. And we had this Slade Professor, had a long, long grey beard, down to his waist, Professor Prior, and he was an appalling lecturer, and nobody ever went to his lectures. But his rule was, if there were only five people at his lecture, he would give the same lecture next time, well, the five who'd been wouldn't go again, so there were only three then, you see, so he was on a diminishing returns bracket, so the poor old boy, in the end, the School used to have to put you in chains and staple you to the chairs. But I discovered, I thought he was just a silly old thing, couldn't hear a word he said, mumbling away, but I discovered later, that he was a most extraordinarily, wonderful architect. Very very forward-looking and he was actually one of the sort of kingpins of the arts and crafts movement, and everything he did was extremely original. But he never showed any of his work, and we never bothered to look it up. And maybe we would have thought the whole thing was a bit folksy. But now, of course, students are besotted by the poor old thing.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 52

And what was Beresford Pite like?

Well, he was a chubby old, he looked like a very commercial architect. He used to wear a black coat and striped trousers, and hard white collar, and he ... he was a visitor, really, he used to come down twice a week, as far as I remember. from London.

He wasn't a Particular influence in any way?

No, we never got to know him. He didn't come round the boards much. He occasionally criticised. You'd have, your work was pinned up at the end of the exercise, it might have been one week, two weeks, three weeks, whatever it is, and they had staff in, criticise, and go round, and say how awful it was.

And you didn't have any great sort of traumas over that? It was all fairly straightforward from the beginning of the course to the end?

I had no traumas really.

And if somebody wanted to retrace the steps you went through in architecture, what were the buildings that most mattered to you at that stage? Were there actually three buildings, or something, that were really significant?

Well, I was just trying to think what buildings we were told to go and look at in, in Cambridge, for instance. Because Cambridge is a sort of cemetery of reputations, and also a Valhalla of reputations, because every distinguished architect, over the centuries, has done something there, and some of it was very good. We didn't like the heavy Victorian stripey brick and stone things, or Girton, for instance, by the architect who did the Natural History Museum, I mean, we thought that was hideous. We, there was a certain amount of rather pale Georgiana in college extensions, and things like the School of Veterinary Science, or something, usually was behind sash windows, and pantiled roof, in those days. Because the old boys were still working, you know, people like Robert Scott and that sort of period of architecture. But no, as I was saying, our, I think our idols in those days were Finland and Scandinavia, and there were no architecture by Finnish, or foreign architects in Cambridge. There have been many since but there weren't any then. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 53

And had you been to Scandinavia?

Had what?

Did you go to Scandinavia?

Yes, I went to Scandinavia, and jolly nice it was. Still is .

There isn't a particular building there that matters a great deal?

Well, the most famous building in, in ... I suppose, in architectural circle, was the Town Hall at Stockholm, that's the building that everybody used to pilgrimage to. It was very romantic, you know, with an eccentrically placed campanile, and gold mosaics, and tapestries, and all standing up, with its toes in the water. And, of course, the famous workers' flats which were being built all over Scandinavia. And Holland was another place we all went to. And Holland hasn't changed very much. It's still the same, very high quality standard, dullish, it's getting more interesting now, but it was dullish, but very good.

And how do you feel about the buildings that you terribly liked then. now?

I still like them. I still like them. They were, I suppose, soft-hearted buildings, most of them, and not tyrannical buildings, because there's a touch of the tyrant about every architect, I think. "Go out through the door labelled 'EXIT', not through the one labelled 'ENTRY"', and in the end they push you through, "Bloody halfwit, can't you see..." and so there's that tyrannical streak, or bossiness. Because you've got to control, in the end, you've got to control the building, which means, in the end, controlling the way people use it, almost. And Corbusier was the ... was the idol of the hardliners, because he had no compromise with him, you know, and his great city full of tower blocks, and boulevards and ... and everybody with creches, and you know, city of the future stuff. But then he was a great artist. A difficult man. I don't think he had much of a sense of humour, and I used to meet, meet him occasionally when he came to London, or to listen to, and he was ... he was a very dynamic character. But architects like heroes, and there's always a hero kicking about, and they're built up by the students into heroes, and then, it's rather like Madame Tussaud's, and they're Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 54 melted down after a bit, most of them, and new heroes are constructed, just like Madame Tussaud's, you know. I asked the manager of Madame Tussaud's once, "When you decide this man's had his day, or the woman" And he said, "It's very funny. I walk round the galleries, and I suddenly say to myself, 'That politician, or that pop singer's had it', or cricketer. He's not interesting any more, melt him down. Keep his teeth and eyes, because it will save money." And he said, "It's surprising how accurate, in fact, your sort of immediate reaction is."

And what about influences from America, was Frank Lloyd Wright important?

Yes, I'd forgotten him. He was a great idol, of course, because not only was he a very very fine architect, but he was a very inspiring writer, so was Corbusier. And he was, he was a great idol all through my youth. Still was until he died, really. And Corbusier was an inspiring writer too. But I'm not one for philosophy, you see, or theory, because I'm not intellectually disciplined enough to, to ... we didn't do theory of architecture, and ... in our day, or the philosophy of architecture. We just got down, designing a little house or something.

And then, by the time you'd finished Cambridge, had you fallen in love with anybody?

Yes. I had fallen in love with a girl I'd met on a boat going to Oslo, and she ... and her brother was at Cambridge with me. By chance, I hadn't met him before, he was at Clare, and the brother married the girl I'd painted scenery with, and I would have liked to have married the girl I met on the boat, but she vanished to Switzerland to learn French, and by then I'd arrived in London, and fallen in love with the ... with the girl I did marry, my first day at, at, at the School of, London, University College, London.

And tell me the story about the first time you kissed a girl?

The first time I kissed a girl? Ah! Yes! Extraordinary! Well, in ... in our younger days, with cousins and things, in the ages of between 15 and 18, there were lots of things like tennis dances, in the New Forest Tennis Club, or something, and we were all driven off to these parties. I was rather a good dancer, so I quite enjoyed it. I was rather small which made it rather unsatisfactory for so many tall girls. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 55

Did you mind not being tall?

Well, I did a bit, because you could see girls doing the Roger de Coverley moving sideways to miss me! Was it de Coverley when you go round in circles? And you have to dance with the person you stop opposite. Do you remember that? And no, no excuse. I mean you ... when the music stops you've got to stop, and you're bang opposite somebody, it might be the girl of your dreams, it might not. And if you saw this coming, there was a lot of sort of shuffling, and cheating going on, you see, and I'd ... girls didn't like dancing with people who were smaller than themselves. But ...

But, in general, did it worry you?

... Not really, I don't think, very much. But there was one girl who was a great friend of some of my cousins, whose father was Commandant of a depot in Aldershot, and she asked me to stay the weekend for a dance in the Officers’ Mess. I had a black tie by then . She had a Morris Oxford, borrowed from her father, and he was a sweet old boy, long white moustache, very upright. And very gentle, white-haired colonel's wife, who disapproved because she found me in Ruth's bedroom, looking at the pictures. I mean, in perfect, completely, door wide open and she told me to leave the room. So I didn't start very well. However, when I went to the dance which was great, and I danced with Ruth all evening because we didn't know anybody else. And then we got into the Morris Oxford on the gravel forecourt, so celebrated by John Betjeman, at the same ... at a dance at the same Club in one of his poems, and I nerved myself to kiss her, and then felt so nervously excited, that I was terribly sick! Not, luckily, in the car! I vanished into the bushes, so the nervous excitement of my first impassioned embrace ....

THIRD INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON, FEBRUARY 19th, 1990

... scholarship to Greece?

Well, it was fifty pounds, which doesn't sound very much now, but it really paid for me to go to Greece and stay there for about three or four months. The grant was fifty pounds, and you could choose what subject you wanted to study, and I decided to study Byzantine Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 56 architecture, because I hadn't really done anything about it much in my history lessons, and I thought it would get me around in the more unusual places in Greece and Turkey, and, and Italy. And the sum was 50 pounds and it got me quite a long way. I travelled hard, hard class, all the time, on the wooden benches, and sitting up all night, and that sort of thing, which one does at that age, I suppose! And I started off in Ravenna and Venice. and then went on to Athens.

Was that when you saw Venice in the snow?

That was when I saw Venice in the snow. No, that's, I came back by Venice, sorry. I went ... I started off by going to Ravenna, and then I went on down to Brindisi, and went to Athens, and I stayed in the British School in Athens, which was a sort of, exactly like being at Cambridge. There are about a dozen recently graduated undergraduates, doing various archaeological studies and research in the library. We lived ... we each had a room in the, in the building, which was nice. And there was a couple of members of staff, and a librarian who looked after us, and helped us plan our trips round Greece. And so, in those days, of course, there were no aeroplanes, and not many trains, and not many buses, and you walked a great deal, and some of the buses were really large taxis, and they'd drive for 50, 60 miles with a goat strapped to the mudguard, and four or five Greek passengers in the back, and yourself, sitting on their knees. The trouble with travelling in Greece, is that the, the women are terribly carsick, and everybody was being sick all the time, which is very depressing. Anyway, I had two friends I met there, who I had met at Cambridge, and we travelled around together. And we went down to the bottom of Greece to ... beyond Sparta, and then we went up to the top, to Salonika. And all that took about two months, I suppose. It was winter, so flurries of snow, but, I mean, it was rather like England. And the ... and then I went on to Istanbul to see the great Byzantine churches there, and that was pelting with slurry, it was sleet and mud. But I had, I met a young American Junior Attache at the American Embassy. I can't remember how. But he lent me his car and a driver, so that was wonderfully luxurious, because he was Turkish, of course, he knew where everything was. And you waste so much time, normally, if you haven't got much time, and you're trying to find six monuments in a day, finding buses, and not speaking Turkish and everything. And then I went back from there, from Istanbul to Venice, and that was two days and a night in the train, there was a slow train, because I couldn't afford the Orient Express. And I searched Istanbul for one English book to read, and there was only one Tauchnitz softback, P.G. Wodehouse, for two Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 57 days and a night! So I decided that you must keep it until it was dark, because you could look out of the window as long as it was daylight. So I rationed myself to a, sort of, chapter a day, you know, sort of thing. And I arrived in the middle of the night, in Venice. And just, just before dawn broke, and came out of the station, which as you'll remember is on the canal, the Grand Canal there. You come out, and down the steps, and the, it was thick white snow, the whole of the quayside was white. It wasn't actually snowing at the time, it was flurrying a bit. And the water was black as ink, and it coiled like a serpent out of sight, down to the sea. Nobody about, no footprints. And one vaporetto with black smoke coming out of it's funnel, like the one in Death in Venice, and dawn was just coming up, and I stood there for hours, trying to draw it. And I suppose it was about four o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning, and the dawn was just coming up, and the houses opposite were beginning to turn apricot coloured, and people would bang open the shutters, and gradually life began, so that was a very romantic start. And I stayed there about a week, in a funny little hotel near the ... near the station. I was rather lonely, in fact, because I didn't speak Italian, of course. And my friends I'd left in Athens. And I 'd never actually been abroad totally by myself before, I'd always been with my parents, or friends, or some relations or other. And it was very lonely in the evenings. You go down to this ghastly little restaurant, prop a book against the water jug, and go to bed early because there's nothing else to do, and it's freezing cold. But anyway, that, the great advantage of that trip, apart from the enormous fun and experience of being in Greece at that period, which is quite impossible to do now, because it's so crowded and familiar, was that I ... I missed the first two terms of my post-graduate course, so to speak, at London University College. And so I arrived two terms after everybody else, and I came into the big studio in Gower Street, and there were about 60 students, I suppose, boys and girls, mostly boys. I think there were about six girls, because there weren't many girl architects in those days. And I came through the door. I knew two of my friends from Cambridge were there, so I was coming into a familiar group, which was nice. And one of them I lived with, no, two of them. We ... we all three shared a sort of rather fading villa, down by the Regents Canal, in the back of the Edgware Road, with pretty big sash windows, and high rooms, freezing cold. And a landlady with red hair, called Mrs. Phallus, a little pom she had, barked. And all I remember about it, it was so damp that when you ran your hand up the staircase rail, you knocked the condensation off the, you know, like a bloom on a grape, in the evenings, when you came home. However, it was quite fun. And we three lived there, three of us. And we used to go to the movies, and go to work every morning. We lived a very unadventurous life. And what was amazing, considering we were architects, we never went to see great Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 58 masterpieces of architecture, like Westminster Cathedral, or Chelsea Barracks, or Greenwich, or something. Never for a minute. We used to plod off to Gower Street every morning, and sometimes ... and we ate, every night, in Charlotte Street, and then came home again. I mean, we were very unadventurous. Went to the movies about once a week. But as I walked into the room the first day, there were two girls working just inside the door, and one of them, I thought, was of surpassing beauty. And she had fair hair, and she was wearing it in a sort of plaited coil on the nape of the neck. It was very long and thick. She was very demure, and she looked down at her drawing, didn't look up, except just a quick look to see who was coming through the door, and I decided that this was it! And that I would pursue. And I was still very inexperienced and, and ... not exactly shy, but sort of ill-at-ease with girls. I was ... how old was I? Just 21 I think I must have been. Anyway, after about two or three weeks, I discovered that she was slightly the belle of the ball in that studio, and there were a lot of admirers who'd had the advantage of a couple of years service with her, so to speak, in architecture school. And I discovered also that her father was a doctor living in, in Pretoria, South Africa. So every long vacation she went home from the end of June to the end of September. Which was my long vacation too, of course, so she vanished during the most promising period, if I can put it that way. Anyway, I stayed there 18 months, because I was taking the correspondence course, which ... from the Registrar, which nipped me through my exams jolly quick. And, in those days, you used to go home, usually, in the long vacation. Foreign students went home to their parents. Nobody went off to Kathmandu, or sit at the feet of a swami! Partly because it was too expensive, and partly because it was too far away, and partly, I suppose, because it was too adventurous, and we were all rather ... I suppose we were very very young for our age and ... I mean, we used to cling together, tremendously. London was a bit strange, and, you know, you'd always go out with two or three people, to keep safety around you. Anyway, we, we ... I enjoyed that period very much. And I used to go home on holidays, and do a lot of sailing. Didn't, we went abroad three summers running, two of us. Normally went to stay with friends in France, or we went down ... one, one occasion we drove through Italy and down Yugoslavia, to the bottom, which is slightly more adventurous. Famous only because one ... one morning we were sitting in Dubrovnik, and in steamed a steam yacht, which was the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson, and my companion whom I shared a flat with, was, actually happened to be his double, and we were mobbed in the streets of Dubrovnik, because they all thought he was the Prince of Wales. So that was our lives. And gradually I was prising off my future wife's admirers.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1086-B Page 59

What was her name?

Margaret Troup, she was called, and she was the granddaughter, no, it must have been the great-granddaughter of George MacDonald, who was a friend of Morris and Ruskin, and ... and he was the man who tried to arrange a reconciliation between Ruskin and Rose La Touche.

End of F1086 Side B

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 60

F1087 Side-A

Well, what happened was, when, when Margaret pushed off to South Africa every summer, she used to appoint a stand in, a sort of representative, girlfriend, who was to look after me while she was away, or to keep an eye on me, whichever the theory was. I don't know myself. They were both ... I had three in sequence, and they were all people she'd been to school with at Oxford. And they were all very sweet and nice, and we still see them, at my age still! Except one, one's died, and the other two are still going. And then ... where did we get to?

Can we just go back a bit. When you did your thesis in Greece, you were doing terribly meticulous drawings of the bricks and everything.

That's right, yes.

Did you learn a lot from doing that? Was it a useful thing to do?

Well, it was ... the thesis was, I think, very very dull. It was just recording what was under my nose, and I'd spent three days at some monastery in the south of Greece, drawing ... Byzantine brickwork is very elaborate patterned stuff, with its zig-zags and coils and every sort of thing, and so I was measuring these up and recording them, which isn't really research, it's really assembling stuff, and then writing it in an orderly way, so that it ... I didn't have any thesis in the sense that I was putting over a theory, I was just really, just recording what I saw in front of me.

Was that very good training then? Should architectural students do the same now?

I think architectural students do have to learn to do quickly, recording what's on a site before you build there, and that sort of thing. So you ... the ability to record quickly, in, in what I'd called "shorthand drawing", and write the important things, so that when you got home, you didn't have to, so you'd missed the entire point of the thing, because you'd missed one key dimension, which meant the whole thing was useless. So that was instructive, and it taught me to draw. I was still drawing with fountain pen all the time. But no colour. I didn't use Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 61

watercolour at all. I didn't even take a paint box. And then when you'd done an expedition, you'd come home and you'd write it all up, ready to present it in a, two vols. at the end.

Who actually typed it?

Who typed it?

Mmmm.

I think I got it professionally typed. There was a sort of system at the School of Architecture, where you got theses typed.

And were you quite organised or not?

Reasonably well-organised, yes. I wasn't sort of besotted by Byzantine brickwork, you know, I mean, I liked everything I looked at, and so, and I drew a great deal, just 18, 20 Turkish villages, and, you know, well-heads, and, you can't stop drawing in Greece.

And did Greece stay important to you or not?

I did get a great liking for it. I learnt a little Greece, I learnt a little Greek, and I can get around the country, and ask for food and drink, and where was the nearest bus station, and that sort of thing. And I, I ... they were very ... it was very very simple. If you went to a village, the problem was that they'd kill their last hen to feed you, so it was always a bit difficult if you looked in any way hungry, because they were extremely hospitable. And I liked them. I thought they were ... I suppose what I'm saying is, I rather like ... they're the ordinary sort of simple peasant type of figure who's the same all over the world, probably, hospitable, and thoughtful, and kind and

And what did the training in London add to what you'd had at Cambridge?

What did it teach me? Oh! I ... I'm not sure. I ... you see, I was blessed or cursed, whichever you like to put it, with a very very good visual memory. I could have almost total recall at school, of pages of a history book, almost. I could see on the page, the date of Henry IV, or Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 62

something, just as a thing. And I wasn't interested in Henry IV at all, but in an exam, if anybody asked me what Henry IV was, I could remember what he did or what he didn't do, and where he died. So, so I had a very strong visual memory, which I still have. I mean, I can still draw as reasonably accurate, say, if I go to dinner with somebody, if I had to draw the room in which we had dinner, from memory, I could do it with recognisable truth, I think.

Immediately, or could you do it three months later? How long does it last?

I don't know how long it would last, probably not very long, but enough for an exam, so to speak So I was rather specious, in a way, in my, so I did well, and I passed my exam easily, and, and ... and even my theory of structures, which is, which is formulae, and arithmetic. I remember the examiner saying, "You've got every answer wrong. Every single one. But you remembered the right formulae. And you knew the process. You just couldn't add up, multiply, or subtract. And so everything was wrong. But, I mean, the system you used was right, so I'm going to say you've passed. "He was a kind man.

And by the time you'd finished the training in London, had you changed your way of thinking about architecture, or the kind of building you wanted to do?

No, because this is the funny thing, you see, when I was saying earlier that we never went to look at monuments, I did at Cambridge, because I was Secretary for the Society which was set up to look at monuments. But when we were in London, enjoying ourselves, we might as well have been bookie clerks, or accountants or something. It was very, very odd. And we ate every night in the same restaurant at Charlotte Street, Bertorelli's, usually the same dishes. Usually the same waitress - Lily. And I suppose we were frightened, really, probably. And still terribly, as I was saying, terribly young for our age. Well, then, having qualified, my father inherited 1200 pounds from an old aunt, and he said, "I'm putting this at your disposal. And you can do what you like. You can go to Australia, or you can buy your way into an architectural partnership, or you can build something for 1200 pounds. Whichever you like. "And I was just qualified. And I said "I'd like to build a little house. And we'll build it near where we live, near Winchester, and see if we can sell it and make a profit. "And, but that got delayed for a bit. So meanwhile, I got a job while I was waiting to do this little house. And I got a job, 30 shillings a week was the salary, in a funny little two-roomed office in Dorland House, Lower Regents Street, from an Australian, called Wylton Todd. And he was a young, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 63

bouncy, cheerful ... he was a tremendous, quick mover, he was leaping in and out of the office ... and leaping back ... and popping his head round the door, and I was the only assistant. He had a secretary called Gwyn Charles. There was about ... she was a very faded, faintly in fact, quite strongly beautiful woman, she must have been. She looked rather like a dance hostess, and, she didn't type very well, but she was, she looked after Wylton Todd's office, and she did odd interior decorating chores for the office, buying cushions or lampshades or something. She was very nice to me. She must have been about 40, I suppose. And Wylton Todd made his living by playing jazz in nightclubs in the evenings, because he made no money out of the office. But he made good contacts in these nightclubs, and cafes, and restaurants all round the West End, and so a lot of our work was to do with restaurants, putting in new ladies' lavatories, or enlarging the kitchen, or redecorating the bar, or ... which was great experience for me because they had to be done very quickly, they had to be done, usually at night, in some sort of odd hours The ... I was totally inexperienced. I mean, ridiculously inexperienced. But he was very,very good, because I made several really quite serious mistakes when I was working with him. On almost my first job, I was designing a cashier's desk for a smart hairdresser in South Molton Street, called "Meg Scott". And Wylton had done the shop, which was very sort of fifties, thirties, chromium and white paint and lower case lettering, and she wanted a desk behind which her cashier could sit, with a timber screen round, hiding the typewriter, because she thought typewriters were ugly. And so I went and measured up her typewriter, and all the size of her stationery and everything, and designed this desk which, of course, was painted glossy white, and had her scribbled signature on the front, black. And off it went. And then one morning, the telephone rang, and it was Meg Scott, she said, "You know that desk you designed for me", and I said, "Yes". She said, "It's out on the pavement and you can take it away any time you like. "Put down the telephone. And I was, of course, paralysed with terror at what had happened. So I went up to see, he was, Wylton Todd was out. And what was happening, there it was on the pavement, actually. What I had forgotten to ... when a typewriter is used, it doubles its size, because the carriage, you know, and I'd designed this thing to fit the typewriter, you see, and when she typed, crash against the side! And so, of course, the whole thing was useless. That was my first mistake. And he said, "Oh well, we all learn", or something like that. Sweet of him. And the second one was ... was slightly more serious, more expensive. The Hungaria restaurant, where I'd designed the entrance room, or re-designed the entrance room, and they wanted little glazed showcases in which they put boxes of chocolates, and the sort of things that people used to carry around nightclubs on trays, like dolls, and things that you gave your girl of the evening, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 64

as a little present. And I designed these little showcases in this oval hall, and they, and I remember they were setting up the dolls and chocolates, they were secretly lit, you see, in this sort of dim, dusky ... I thought they looked wonderful. And the next morning, of course, all the chocolates had melted. There was a sort of ghastly heap of molasses at the foot of the case, in which were embedded the dolls' eyes, because the wax dolls had melted too. And there was a sort of ... so you got chocolate mixed with golden dolls’ hair, and two horrible little eyes staring out of this thing. Because I'd put no ventilation in, you see, and the heat from these bulbs, that I knew nothing about, had destroyed ... And he was very good about that, he really was. And he didn't ask me to stump up any contribution or anything. Then we got one more job which I worked on, which was a Woolworth heiress who had a huge house up in Hampstead, on the Heath.

Who was it?

She was called Maisie Gasque, and she'd been a Miss Woolworth. And she'd bought this huge, dreadful Edwardian house, and her son-in-law was an MP for Blackpool, and he had ... Mrs. Gasque's daughter was a terrific blondie, with long legs going up to her shoulder blades, and it was quite fun going ... going up there, because ... Mrs Gasque was the sort of archetype 65 year old American lady, you know, very very very thin legs and brisk movements, and loaded with heavy jewellery. She was very friendly and nice. And we designed absolutely everything. We designed armchairs, and dining chairs, and I was put in charge of the bathroom, and she wanted an oval bathroom. And in peach corner of the oval she wanted a shower and a bidet, and a WC, and a linen cupboard in the sort of corners. She wanted to have the bath isolated, and a big couch covered with towelling, on which ... which was heated from below, and which she, she would lie, presumably, and dry herself. And this I can remember ... you can imagine, I had great fun with this. And gold taps, of course, and gold door handles. What we'd overlooked, of course, that gold is a very soft metal, and when you have gold keys, and you turn them, they snap. And so it's unwise, if you have an opportunity to put a gold key ... and I remember when the Bodleian Library was opened in Oxford and King George went down to open it, and the Vice-Chancellor and all the officials were inside the Library, and he was outside, and he was turning the lock to go and be greeted and, of course, it snapped. So he was isolated, and they were isolated, and there was a terrible scene. And the architect, Gilbert Scott, got into great trouble. But I didn't get into trouble, because Wylton Todd was very nice. He was married to an American girl who was heir to a fortune in Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 65

orchids. And she was a little plump ... sugar plum fairy ... with pouting lips and sort of flouncy blouses, frills down the front. She used to come and see us. Very seldom. By then we had one more assistant, who was a big rugger playing chap. And he was more experienced than I was. He was older. But I wanted to widen my experience, if that's the phrase. And I found out that my ex-tutor, Christopher Nicholson, had just set up in a bedsitting room over a chemist's shop in the Fulham Road, opposite the Queens Elm. He was wanting an assistant, because he'd just got a big job doing the London Gliding Club at Dunstable. He was a great sailplane pilot. And he said would I come and help him? And we had one sort of London first floor room, L-shaped, and the drawing office it was him and me in the front, and behind was his wife, Mrs. Nicholson, who typed the letters and answered the telephone, and we had three jobs, four jobs. One was a front door in Elm Park Gardens, for a house, for an aunt of his. And this is the sort of thing, you know, a young architect, it's the sort of thing you do. Another one was a coal scuttle, and the third one was the London Gliding Club, which was quite a big job, it was hangars and a Club House, out at Dunstable. And I was his chief assistant. In fact, only assistant! And I was very very devoted to him, because he was wonderfully giggly, and it was really a hilarious time. And his father, Sir William Nicholson, who was a tremendous dandy, and he wore patent leather boot, button boots with cloth tops, and shirts Which were spotted instead of striped, and a collar that stuck out, like Mr Gladstone, and a little green pork-pie hat, and a face like a walnut. And he was frightfully dandy and elegant. And he lived in St. James', just off St. James' Square, in the same house as Lutyens' drawing office, in the stables of an old mansion there. All the loose boxes were still there, and you ate in one, and you cooked in the other, and sat in the third and everything. And I worked there, I suppose, really, till, in fact, till the War broke out, pretty well. I went there, I suppose, in about 1924, probably, '34, what am I talking about! When did the War break out? '39. '34. '33, '34. And he had a wonderful great Lancia, open, horizontal Lancia, as long as a zeppelin. And he let me drive it. I can't understand how all these people let me drive these cars, these wonderful cars. And I used to go and do the supervision out at, out at the London Gliding Club.

Is this William's car, or Christopher's car?

This is Christopher's car. William didn't have a car. Whenever he got a cheque, he used to chuck it into a great glass Japanese pot, and when he died, they found hundreds and hundreds of pounds, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 66

William?

Lying there. This is William. Anyway, Kit and I had ... and then Kit, we got, we got one or two houses, and we got a huge modern house at Henley, which I did all the drawings for. He designed it, of course ... which is still standing. Flat, white, strip windows, all the modish stuff. And then we got this job from, through William, through Lutyens, to alter Lutyens' house in Sussex at East Dean.

Did you know Lutyens quite well?

I didn't know him at all. Never knew him at all.

What did you think of his work?

I loved ... I loved his work, always. And Kit, who knew him since he'd been a boy, always had the bound volume of Lutyens lying around in the office, because he so respected Lutyens ... Kit was very sort of geometrical in his design, and worked out on various metrical systems, you know. And Lutyens had the same system. He'd got it from Lutyens, really. If you drew a bit of a cornice, it was like being an archaeologist, you could do the whole building from it, because he never varied. It was always three units to two units, to four units, to one unit, and so the assistants in Lutyens' office, once they'd got the concept, they could follow their way round. And this house was ... was an extraordinary house. It was a little shooting box, way up on the hills, near Goodwood, and attached to the house, East Dean, which is where ...

Do you mean West Dean?

West Dean, I mean. And it was the sort of house you had to open about eight gates to get to reach it, you know, up a sort of farm road. And it had been inherited by Edward James. And Edward James had just come down from Oxford, where he'd been a tremendously wealthy, eccentric aesthete, publishing his friends’ poem in hand-tooled leather, and ...and much loved, because he was a very entertaining man. And he had a big house in Wimpole Street, which he used to keep open house for foreign artists. And he was the first surrealist patron in London. And I remember, if you went to see him in this house in ... I remember when you went to see Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 67

Edward James in Wimpole Street, it was so odd, because he would pass people in the hall, and he wouldn't say anything to them, and he, then he'd say to me, "I wonder who that was?" Because he let it be known that these ... any artists could stay there. And they were all French, virtually. I don't know whether he was showing off, and in fact he did know who they were. But they didn't take any notice of him. They didn't take any ... And he was extremely elegant, small, tiny feet and hands, and very giggly again. I mean, any meeting with him was very hilarious. And his, his main, he was Dali's first supporter, Salvador Dali's first supporter in London, and he paid for most of the first surrealist exercise held in, in London, in the thirties. And I was very fond of him. But the, the house was a rather ordinary little house, brick and high tiled roof, and big huge chimneys, and small white painted sash bars. Typical sort of Lutyens farm. And Edward wanted to make it something really different, you see. And he got Dali over to advise. And Dali, of course, couldn't cope with planning permissions, and bye- laws and drains and wiring and that sort of thing. He had concepts, ; and then you had to think of ways of carrying them out. And he used to come down to the office in Fulham Road, and ... with an idea, and then say "Can we do this?" And some of them were fairly easy to do, like, he wanted sculpted dust sheets, or blankets, thrown over the top of all the chimneys, so they all looked as though they'd been put away for the winter. Well, that wasn't too difficult. And I did the drawings for those, in sort of formalised folds, like togas. The central chimney, he wanted turned into a ... a huge clock, which told the times, the days of the week, and not the time. And it had to be illuminated at night, and each day was a different colour - Thursday was mauve, and Friday was buff - and he would make, mix these colours on, on the plate, and, I can't say I took much notice of the colour, because it was going to be 50 or 60 feet up, and painted on glass, so subtle colours wouldn't .... And then he wanted exploding swans on the lake and I said we couldn't handle that one, he'd have to go to the theatre people for that. I don't think he ever got them. And I put in a new staircase. And he wanted a staircase which had a tank on it, you looked through into a fish tank. The tank was very very deep, and went up, it was the same tank that you looked into when you were having a bath, so the fish, if you looked very carefully up the stairs, you could see somebody in the bath. If you looked very very carefully down from the bathroom, you could see somebody coming up the stairs. I don't think anybody ever did. It wasn't a great success, I don't think. But, it was obviously fun to do, and I, I was rather prissy, and, and, ... about Dali, I thought he was what my nanny would have called a "show off", you know. And he looked so bizarre, with that terrible moustache, with two points, and a rather exaggerated way of talking. And I, I suppose I was slightly frightened of him, really, I think. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1087-A Page 68

Did he treat you well, or not?

Yes, he was quite polite, and, I mean, he treated me, quite rightly, as a sort of tradesman/executant of his ideas. But his most difficult idea was that he wanted the living room to look like the inside of a not very healthy dog, and I said, "Well, what's that like? I've never been inside a dog, healthy or unhealthy." And he said, "Well, you can always tell a dog, unhealthy, because it pants in an uneven way. It doesn't pant regularly. And I want the room ... the walls of the room, to contract and expand in an irregular rhythm."

End of F1087 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

F1087 Side B

... and, so we worked out a system of a rubber sheeting, just clear of the walls, with compressed air jets behind it, which were controlled on a, on an eccentric machine, but, by then, Munich, it must have been 1938 by then, Munich had arrived, and James decided not to proceed with it, and he, he was, he was, as you know, half American, or not fully American, I don't know, and he left for America. And, and the job died. When we were, sort of, stopped at that point, it subsequently, since the War, and since James' death, it's been bought by somebody who loves it, and is trying to do as much as he can, restoring it to Edward James' wishes. The stair carpet was originally going to be woven in the pattern, bare feet pattern, of his mistress, Tilly Losch, Edward James' mistress. But they had a row, when the carpet was half done, so he ... he unravelled it, and we put it, the paw marks, he had a great big deerhound. And I don't know whether that carpet's been put back, there's a bit of it still in West Dean College, in one of the stairs. Terribly pretty it looks, too. So that was the sort of larkiest thing. But meanwhile, we were doing reasonably ordinary houses, and small jobs for various people.

So have you been involved in what's been happening in West Dean more recently, or not?

Have I been ... since the War?

Mmmm. Well, since this new person wanted to restore it.

No.

No

No .

Did you know Tilly Losch?

I wouldn't say I knew her. I met her once or twice. And I went to, James paid for her to have a short dance season at the Savoy Theatre, which I went to.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

The Savoy Theatre can't have been open very long at that stage?

Just open. Very flashy and nobby it was too. But what had happened was, in the ... while I was working with, with Nicholson, in between going to Nicholson, leaving Wylton Todd, I had gone back to Cambridge to teach for two terms, because they were short of a tutor, and so, which is the equivalent of about six months, I suppose, which I quite enjoyed. I had digs with the tutor I'd had in Athens, and his lovely Belgian wife. And it was, I was teaching first year, which I was just about capable of doing, I suppose, because I was only about three years ahead of them. And then I got mumps just at the time of, the exam time, and, by the time I'd recovered, it was quite a long illness, their tutor was coming back, and Kit wanted me back with him. But in between times, while I was doing this, I had designed this little 1200 pound house at Winchester, and, believe it or not, it was a five-bedroomed house, and the contract price was 1153 pounds, and it was spec, you see, we ... it was three sitting rooms and five, five bedrooms.

Did Kit Nicholson help you on it or not? Or was it entirely independent?

No, he didn't, actually. He ... I mean, he helped me very much on, on practical matters, contractual matters and things. But he said, "This is your first house, so you'd better do it yourself, and make your own mistakes and things." Anyway, I got it ... normally what happens is, architects, their first job, they're frightfully pleased with it, they put in everything they can think of. And then they get it published in an architects' paper, and mail round copies to the aunts and things. But I thought, I was rather smart, and I thought it's no good sending it round to architectural papers, architects aren't going to order any buildings, so I published it in The Lady which, I believe, still exists. And from it, I got five houses to do, within about three months. Two in the Home Counties, one in Devonshire, one in Dorset. They were all about the same size. They all started off their letters by saying, "This is a house I've always wanted, could you do me one exactly the same?" But then, of course, once you started talking to them, they wanted it totally different, so none of the houses have the faintest resemblance. They were all a bit garden cityish, they were all white, but they all had roofs, usually slate roofs.

Why did you do that? Because I thought you were keen on flat roofs.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

I was keen on flat roofs as a student, and we did some flat-roofed things when I was with Kit. Kit was more of a convinced modernist than I was. But none of my clients would stomach a ...

And so, the first house you did, you foresaw that they wouldn't, you were being quite commercial?

Well, that was a spec house, and you had to, you didn't want to make it different, you wouldn't have sold it. Trimming, you see, as usual. And, anyway, so, between us, Kit and I were quite busy, and Margaret came and worked in the office in vacations, because she was three years behind me with architecture school, and, but we never really got beyond, I think, the highest of a total of four in the office. It was very cosy and nice, and ...

Didn't you do something for Augustus John?

Yes, I did. Your memory! Kit had built, before, just before I went there, Kit had built Augustus John a, a studio in Hampshire, in Fordingbridge. Very very nice building, on stilts, raising it off the ground. John kept his car and garden rubbish underneath, and Kit had followed the Lutyens geometry thing, he was so exercised ... he was tremendously keen on this proportional rhythms, and things, all done by geometry. And me being so mad on, bad on figures, I, I only worked by eye, you see, so I didn't, I never worked on the ... But Augustus John then said that he wanted a porch put on his house, alongside the farmhouse they lived in. And I went down to see Dorelia John, his wife, who was a very tall, grave, and beautiful lady, and I was frightened of her too, because she was tremendously dignified, and, I mean, friendly, but contained sort of lady. And I measured up the site, and Kit designed the porch, or did the design sketch, and I did the drawings for it, and they all seemed very pleased. And years and years later, only about 10-15 years ago, I went past it, and I thought I'd go and have a look to see how I was doing. So I drove up the drive. The studio had been altered, they'd filled in the open stilts with rooms, which was a pity, because it didn't look so nice. But the porch they hadn't touched. And the man came out from behind the house and said, "Can I help you?" as I'm sitting looking at it, in the car. And I said, "I'm terribly sorry. I did the drawings for this. I just came to see whether it was still standing." He said, "I'm very glad you've come, because it's leaking badly." And I said, "Bad luck! It's 30 years ago now. It's probably time you put new felt on." And drove away, to his surprise. So then, that was about Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

... by then we were sort of, I was 28 and thinking of getting married, pretty hard, as I had been, and we decided to get married in November 1938, we decided this in the summer, and I'd never met my parents-in-law who lived in Pretoria, and they seemed to accept this, and Margaret's mother decided to come over for it, and her father couldn't. He was Smutts' doctor, and ... and Hofmeyr's doctor too, and they were, I think they were both rather frail at the time, and so he was stuck there. Anyway, we decided to get married, and we hadn't decided where, or how, or a registry office or church, and suddenly the ... the Canon Storr, who was the Canon of Westminster Abbey, and the incumbent of St. Margaret's, Westminster, wrote and said, "Please come and get married in my church. And you can have my house for the reception. And you can have the bells and the carpet and the choir, because your father-in-law saved my life when I was ill, years ago." So we were faced with this. And then we thought, "Well, it's pretty difficult to turn this lot down. We might as well fill it with everybody we know." So I hired a dress suit, and Margaret searched London for low heels, and we had the most wonderful wedding. We couldn't bring ourselves to leave the party afterwards, which was in the Canonry behind. And that was '38. And then it was ...

What was she like in those days?

Munich ... Munich was just over, I mean, the crisis and the gas mask fitting and all that stuff, was all gone in September, in October, so we were all thinking however shameful it had been, with Chamberlain in Munich and all that business. We thought we were all right. So the atmosphere at the time was, sort of, shamed relief, I suppose, you could put it that way.

What was Moggie like at that time?

She was beautiful. And ... as she always was and is. She ... she had a problem, being taller than me with shoes. Trying to find the right shoes, and she had to have something on her head, which made her taller. So we had to lump it.

But, as a person, what was she like?

What was she like? She was still very very quiet, and terribly, terribly silent, and shy. And when I took her down to see my parents from time to time, she was very very quiet, monosyllabic. I think the fact that she'd, when she'd been ... all through her education she'd Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B been in England, in London, Oxford and London, and when she didn't go home for the ... she stayed with an old, old aunt, and an old, old uncle, in Holland Park, and these are a funny old pair. He was a, he was the senior Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Mines, pince-nez and sort of black stock tie. And she was, she was one of the MacDonalds, sort of Burne-Jones, playing the piano every night, after dinner, and very sweet, gentle. But they were very, they were too old for a young person to live with, because they didn't ... they liked the quiet and going to bed, and I ... he didn't actually have a stamp album, but it was the sort of thing that he might have had, if you see what I mean. So she had a good ... rather crushed, I think, teenage period. She had a sister, Freida, who was ... she was an undergraduate at Oxford. They were both there. But they both had this ... Freida was, was, was less shy and, by then, we'd, I'd moved from our dewy house by the canal, I was still living with this friend of mine, Frank Adie, and we moved in to a little maisonette over a shop in Holland Street, little ... beautiful little black Georgian house, two storeys, white sash windows, and panelling in all the rooms, and we hired a daily, a manservant, who came in to do our breakfast and supper. And he made lampshades during the day. He was that sort of manservant. Very good he was. And, during the Spanish Civil War, we had a Spanish station master, refugee, after the Franco victory, as a refugee, staying with us for a bit. But, as we didn't speak Spanish, and he didn't speak English, it was a very monosyllabic relationship. And Moggie and I had ... we went on one holiday to-tether, with my sister as a chaperone.

[BREAK IN RECORDING HERE]

So now we were in 1938, and we had to find somewhere to live, and so we stayed on in Holland Street. We had the manservant. We turned poor old Frank out, he had to go and find somewhere else to live. And so our first year of marriage was in this little house, which was very cosy, sort of young magazine story, you know! Very happy we were there.

Did You have very similar ideas about architecture? Or were hers different?

Yes, we did. She was more quirky as an architect than I was. I was rather ... middle of the road, I suppose. I was never tremendously adventurous as a designer. Not imaginative enough. I'm too susceptible to what I see around me. Shall we go up to the War then?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

Hang on. In 1937, you did a book.

Ah! Yes. All this time I was supplementing my income, such as it was, by architectural journalism. There used to be, and still is, an outfit called The Architectural Press, of which John Betjeman used to be an employee, and so was Osbert Lancaster.

And you knew them both?

And I became a ... it was owned by a man called Hastings, who was very eccentric, and he used to sit in one of those club porter's hooded chairs, wearing a deerstalker, drinking hock and seltzer, and shouting. He used to shout for this, that and the other. And he wrote a lot. He drew rather well. He illustrated one of Betjeman's poems, book poems, collections. And I was very devoted to him. He was extremely eccentric, very choleric, I thought, brilliant. Totally, pathologically shy, I mean, if he saw anybody coming that he didn't know very very well indeed, he'd wall himself up in a cupboard. And the main ... the main sort of mainspring of The Architectural Press in those days, he was, but he used to ... he lived in Sussex, and he used to come up once, or two days a week or something, and stir the pot, and then go off again. And The Architectural Press owned, really, two papers. A weekly called the Architects Journal, and the Architectural Review which is a monthly, and the ... both were the, I suppose, the senior architectural papers in the country. The Review had a huge international following, and was dedicated to modern architecture. It was edited by Sir James Richards as he now is, and they had advisory editors, one of which was Nikolaus Pevsner. Another was Osbert Lancaster, and Osbert retired about that time, and I took over there, so I became one of the ... advisory editors of the Architectural Review. The paper was edited by Jim, inspired by Hastings, and Nikolaus and I used to go along every Wednesday, and spend Wednesday thinking up ideas and thinking up authors, thinking up illustrators, thinking up subjects, but Jim, James Richards was the man who really had to get the thing out. But I also wrote, every week, or was editor, really, of the Architects Journal gossip column, this week's events and anecdotes and ... a sort of professional Nigel Dempster, I suppose, if I can put it that way, if that name means anything. People would send in funny things that had happened, or gossip about some building that was falling down or something, and I had to turn it into, into a weekly column. And I also did quite a lot of journalism for women's magazines, you know, like what to do with the cupboard under the stairs, and how you can turn your attic into a nursery. And that I used to do freelance, so to speak. And it was those journalistic efforts, I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B think, which, in fact, got me my big job after the War, in the Festival of Britain, because the ... the man who ran the Festival of Britain, Gerald Barry, was the editor of the News Chronicle, would read these articles, he was always looking for people who could write about architecture in a not too pompous a way, or too philosophical a way, and so I think that's why he'd heard of me, because he couldn't have heard of me from the buildings I'd done, really, I'd done so few.

And did these magazines, in some way, lead to the book you did?

Well, yes. That, that the ... one of the ex-editors of the Architects Journal was a man called Christian Barman, and he was of Swedish extraction, and he'd become, sort of, patron of London Transport. He, in fact, was the man who ordered the posters and chose the artists and the publications and all that sort of thing. He's a very nice man, and he asked me to go and see him, and I went to see him, and he wasn't in his office, but there was a letter on his desk, so, naturally, I read it. I mean, he'd just dictated, he'd just signed it, and he'd written to somebody saying, "I think the work of this artist is too etiolated. I thought, "Oh Lord! I've never heard that word. I wonder if I shall get on with this chap." And I looked it up when I got home - botanical word for emaciation. Anyway, he came in, he was very jolly. And he said, "I want a little guide, architectural guide to London, pocket guide, we're doing a series. Robert Byron's doing one." And Robert Byron was the man who'd been extremely helpful to me in Greece, because he gave me introductions to all the archimandrites and people, because he'd ... was one of the first people who went and stayed and seriously studied Mount Athos, and I think he's a wonderful travel writer, one of the best ever. He wrote about six books about his travels in Persia, Afghanistan, and Himalayas. "And this guide to, it's got to be a list of buildings which you think are any good, that's all. I suppose we can have about a couple of hundred. And you've got to choose them. Find out who the architects are. It's really a catalogue, you don't have to do much writing, but I want each list to be divided into churches, offices, houses, whatever, and you will have to write 500 words all about that. whatever it was, about each thing, about churches or houses. And the fee is 50 pounds, and I should think it will take You about two months." So, I did that, and enjoyed it very much. I must say, looking back on some of the selections, they're fairly odd. On the other hand. some of them I thought, were rather perspicacious .

And what was it like working with Pevsner? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl087-B

Pevsner was wonderful. He wrote everything down. If you said anything at all, he'd write it on a scrap of paper and put it in his pocket. He never trusted his memory to anything, although he had a fabulous memory, I mean, absolutely fabulous, and he was, he was very meticulous, and liked to know how things were spelled, and where you could find out about things. He was very very unrelaxed about what he was doing, and, I think, a very good writer too. Not dry, as you might think, because those Penguin Guides, County Guides, are very extraordinary. Well, I ... they were really references rather than guides, because he wouldn't ... he would describe everything he saw in front of you, which you would see. He would say, as it were, "there are five columns of this church", well, you could ... it wasn't tremendously interesting, and you could see them for yourself, if you were using it as a guide. But if you were trying to remember, and you had to write something about the church, that was the only place you could find it, and he, he, he had a system with churches, that he would write to the vicars, and say, "From the guides in my possession, this is what your church has got. Are they all still there? And has anything new arrived?" Roughly speaking, you see, he would do. And then he'd go and check, and his wife would drive, and he always used to allege he could stand up in the car and write it as they drove along! But, but I don't think ... he was a fantastic worker, he never relaxed. End of F1087 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 77

F1088 Side A

He had very pink cheeks, and gold spectacles, and very brisk movements, and was a man of quite an outstanding industry. And I remember he told me once, he fell asleep, giving a lecture, because he was so tired! But he, he could go to a place, and say, with his boxes of slides, he used to keep them in chocolate boxes. "What do you want? Do you want the history of the Industrial Revolution? Or 17th century baroque Central European architecture, or the Arts and Crafts Movement? Or Modern Architecture in France? And which language do you want it in? French? German? English?" And then off he'd go. But he did actually fall asleep, because he was very tired! He must be the only person who has ever done that! I was very fond of him, and, and he's a very remarkable man. And people used to laugh at him, because they thought it was absurd that you could collect so much information so quickly, and so accurately, and not become a sort of termite. But he never did. He was very, he was very, I think he was really blissful. He had a really blissful life. He adored collecting facts, and he adored getting them right, and he adored getting them corrected. It's like collecting butterflies or something, you know, he'd got a passion. And he was our sort of, on the Architectural Review, he was our resident scholar, because he would know who did what, any period, any time, any country. Jim was the, was experienced ... author, and I was a sort of, hired as a sort of common reader, I think, really.

And was this when you first knew Betjeman?

No. I'd met Betjeman, not through The Architectural Press, I'd met him through a man called Robert Harling. Because, in amongst my journalistic moonlighting, I also used to do drawings for advertisements. I did drawings for Heals, a new range of dressing tables, you know, or ... for magazines or newspapers, you see, and these were given me by a man called Robert Harling, who was the art director of a firm called Everetts Jones, in Park Street. And Robert was a very, extraordinarily handsome, curly hair, boring-eyed, in the sense of penetrating-eyed, and he wore very very tight trousers, up above his ankles. He was frightfully elegant. And a black hat. And a fantastic chaser after girls. He actually, the girl he married, in fact, he saw from the top of a bus in Regents Street, saw her disappearing into Liberty's, leapt off the bus, followed her in. And he married her, and they had their golden wedding the other day. So. And he, he subsequently became a very successful author. He wrote-two or three books about his life in the Navy, during the war, and he's written two or Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 78 three novels since. But he was very good to me, and he gave me a, a ... odd drawings to do. And he also ran a magazine called Image which was a typographical printing monthly, in which I did one or two articles. And then he founded a magazine called Interiors, and he asked John Betjeman to be the editor, and me to be the assistant editor, and he actually wrote the whole thing and got it out, John and I, that's where I first met John, and we used to meet at the Cafe Royal for editorial meetings at which Robert would tell me what we were doing. And I wrote about four or five articles, I suppose, and then, this was again, roundabout '38, '39, then the magazine died when the War came out, and Robert went into the Navy, and became a very successful typographical designer. He designed the Sunday Times, which remained unchanged for about 20 years. And he's still, he's still working. Yes, I suppose he's about, must be nearly 80 now, I should think.

And what was Betjeman like in those days?

Very odd to look at. He had a sort of blue face, and, and very untidy hair, and he always used to say he had green teeth, but they were rather discoloured teeth ... a rather bulbous nose. So, to look at, he was slightly grotesque, in a way. But as, as a person to have an evening with, wonderful. It was ... one of his most engaging things was, he'd laugh hysterically, and naturally, at almost everything you said, which is always rather welcoming. Makes you feel good. And he didn't seem to be putting it on. And he was, himself, very funny.

In what way was he very funny?

Well, just, a sense of the absurd and the ridiculous, and, and gossip. There was terrific gossip about his ... because he left Oxford without a degree, he failed in scripture, and, but he'd known everybody, because when he went to Oxford, he decided that ... he came from a middle-class, faintly tradesman background, his father was ... was made oh, stuff for Aspreys, sort of high class ... epergnes and that sort of thing. And John wanted to get away from that world which he found stifling. And his father was very deaf. He was fond of his mother, and I don't know how ... but I haven't really grasped how fond he was of his father. I think he was quite fond of him. But, when he went to Oxford, he wanted to escape from that. He decided to throw his lot in with the aristocratic aesthete lot, you know, all the people like Robert Byron and, and Harold Acton, and Lord Birkenhead, all those sort of well-born, but genuinely aesthetic lot. And they dressed absurdly. They didn't get up early, and wore Farve Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 79 dressing gowns, and they were the sort of arch Oxford undergraduates, as the people of England think they always are. You know, getting up late, and spending the afternoon lying in a punt, and the evenings drinking, never opening a book. But they were all clever, witty, and nice people. Poor John, he'd just got over being a prep school master, which is the fate of all people who failed their degrees, because you can't, it's awfully difficult to get a decent teaching job. And he ... he was a very popular teacher, apparently. The little boys loved him, because he didn't take the thing too seriously, you know, he would, he didn't know how many balls there were in an over if he was asked to umpire the cricket, but it didn't stop him umpiring. I daresay some of it was studied, but ... but he seemed to have been really genuinely much loved, because he was rather like them in many ways. And his last day at his prep school he'd, they all got into their little Morris Minor, and drove across the cricket pitch to show what he thought of it! And I ... I was rather in awe of him, because he was the first sort of semi-famous person I'd met, so I was rather hanging on his words, but he was so sweet and friendly, and nice, and then ...

Was he confident?

Confident?

Mmmm

Don't think so. I don't think so. I think he, I think he was not confident, and I think that was the reason why he ... he tried to ... to join the, the Smarties, at Oxford, which he did, because he was amusing. But if you're very amusing, it probably shows, as a rule, that you're not confident, I think. Because you're, you're hiding your shyness or your unease under a ... under a constant lighting of sparklers, and hoping that people won't notice that you aren't as interesting as you think you are, if you see what I mean. I think ... I think he was unconfident, and I think, not entirely happy either, all the time, until his last years when he ... he rather enjoyed being a telly star. Rather like me, isn't he! I think he was ... he was a professional jester really, those people ... people asked to parties, because he'll liven it up.

And when you got married, or before, you had your portraits done by Topolski, didn't you?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 80

Yes. We met ... are we recording this? - Mmmm. We met Felix Topolski when we were living by the canal, because he had a huge great studio, which was falling into the canal. It was absolutely enormous and crowded, and it was a funny sort of ... place of exile, what I'd always imagined a cafe in Prague was like. You couldn't see across the room for cigarette smoke. Everybody seemed to have far too much hair, boys or girls. They talked and talked and talked, and nobody ever seemed to go home. Whatever time of day or night, how Felix ever got any work done, I don't know, because this ... these mountains of drawings and sketch books, and old teacups, and beer mugs ... And it was exactly like a mixture between a film-set version of an artist's studio, with Felix crouched in the middle, and this Prague cafe. And they'd be every ... absolutely every, the first time I ever set eyes on Prince Philip was there and ... but the ... but he would be slightly unusual, but it would be mostly, you could see anything ... Polish poetesses or ... people rather like Jeffrey Bernard. I suppose you could say people hung about, and people enjoyed being with. And Felix I got to know, really, through a man called Antony Hippisley Coxe. And Antony Hippisley Coxe I'd met because his sister, who was called Tacina, was being courted by Frank Adie, who I was sharing a flat with, and she was a jolly girl, and Antony was slightly sort of ... odd man about town. He worked for P.R., Shell, and he used to wear shirts with horizontal stripes, and always wore a black hat, because he was rather a dandy. And he had founded a troupe of performing cats, called Coxe's Catrobats. And there were about eight of these, and they lived in a caravan parked in Smith Street, Chelsea. It's amazing to think, in those days, you could leave a caravan in Smith Street for a year without parking offence. And he had a manager for these Catrobats, and they used to tour, sort of for flower shows and agricultural shows, and various sort of country parties. They did little things like walking tightropes, or ringing bells or running up ladders, and they were all mongrels. And when the War began hotting up, so to speak, the beginning of, sort of, '38, '39, he thought he couldn't really cope with this complication in his life, and so he gave them all away to his neighbours in Smith Street, and he said, when he went down to the bus in the morning to go to work, there were all these old troupers would be sitting on the steps, washing themselves, and as he passed, they'd raise one paw to sort of say, "Hi". And ... I don't know whether that was true or not, but, anyway, he was ... he ... one of those who had joined with me in, in joining the River Fire Service in '38, when we were all asked to take up some form of National Service. He and I and Frank decided to join the River Fire Service, we thought it was more interesting than the ordinary Fire Service, because you had boats instead of fire engines.

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One of Hippisley Coxe's chores was buying pornographic films for Middle East customers of Shell, and by some mistake, he once put on a pornographic film backwards, so you started with the end of the excitement of the evening, and finished up with the foreplay, and they ... they all loved it, so that he used to advise them always to play them backwards, because, he said, "They're far more funny and entertaining". But he and I joined this, the River Fire Brigade, and we used to train once a week, from Battersea Bridge, there was a fire station there. And there were fire boats and there were fire barges. These were barges which were fitted up with Climax fire pumps in the hold, and we tore up and down the river, and we learnt how to handle the equipment, and couple the hoses and ... and we were told if war did break out in '39, we would be called up, and we were to report to Battersea Bridge. Well, then, in the middle of '39, I decided that ... or Margaret decided, she ought to take me out and meet her father, because I hadn't met him. So we, we took a, the boat to Cape Town, and the train up to Pretoria, and we, I stayed there with them for about a month. We went mostly in the game reserve, because Margaret's father was a ... one of the sort of founder members of the game reserve, and he used to help with the, counting the animals, I can't remember what it's called ... census ... how many elephants, and that sort of thing. And you camped in tents and things, or, or little huts and things. It was very enjoyable, and I thought her father was absolutely lovely. A splendid old man. And while we were out there, in September, war actually did break out on September 3rd, and, so, I was, so to speak, supposed to report back the next morning at Battersea Bridge, you see. But, when we enquired about the ships, they said, because, although the air raids hadn't started, they had started dropping mines and things, you see, and so the shipping was in a sort of turmoil for the first two or three months. However, in the end, the ship arrived, packed to the teeth with people coming back to South Africa, but, of course, bone empty going back, nobody wanted to go back to England. So I suppose about 20 passengers on this ship, which normally carries about 600 or 700. And it was very eerie, because this huge empty liner, fully equipped with thousands of stewards, and a little ship's orchestra playing at dinner, to this tiny little huddled group, totally blacked out, because we were not in a convoy, we were in a, we were considered fast enough to zig-zag our way out of trouble. And this ... it was very eerie, because you went out on deck, pitch black, no lights coming out from anywhere, and every evening we used to go into the wireless officer's cabin to hear the news. And it was really quite interesting, in fact, in many ways. We called in at Sierra Leone, weren't allowed ashore. Then we got back to London, and by then, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 82

Frank Adie had ... with the ... our last surviving girlfriend architect from Cambridge, who by then was married, not a house in Ladbroke Terrace, and she said, "Why don't we all live here? Because we're all working. So she was doing something, VAD or something. The three men were all in the Fire Brigade in different stations, and you, you did two days on, one day off, sort of thing. And so we had a sort of commune, took it in turns to cook, the girls did, of course. And we played the weary warrior. John Stafford, who is Aline's husband, eventually he and I both took a navigation course, because we were thinking of going into the Navy, and John did go into the Navy, but his eyes were bad, so he ... he wasn't allowed to go to sea, he was posted at various harbours round the country, and spent the War in the Navy. Frank remained in the Fire Service, had a very horrible war. I mean, he had the most dreadful experiences during the Blitz and things. And I was rescued from the Fire Service by, through the RIBA, by the Air Ministry, who were looking for camouflage officers. And I'd been recommended by the RIBA as somebody who could draw quickly, and make up his mind quickly, and had a strong visual memory. And so I toddled along to the Air Ministry in Kingsway, this was just at the beginning ... bombs were just beginning to fall in London. We had one in Church Street, where we were staying at the time, just before our Ladbroke Grove ... and so I went to the Kingsway and, and was enrolled the next day, where I spent really the rest of the War. Not in Kingsway, but in camouflage. And, what was interesting about it was that nobody knew very much about it, because there was hardly any science in it. There was one sort of book on what had been done in the First War, it had been very clever with the Navy, with the dazzle ships, that had been done by Norman Wilkinson, largely, who was in charge of me, he was my, so to speak, commanding officer. And there were a group of about eight of us, I suppose, working in the drawing office, and we were, at that stage, designing everything from bomb dumps to scattered ... what's the word? Dispersed ... aircraft and aerodromes. And Margaret was pregnant at that time, so she wasn't doing any war work, she was, I suppose, about four months gone. And then, by a miracle, the aircraft production people decided that they could no longer risk keeping aeroplanes as they were built, near the factories. They were too vulnerable. It all had to be flown off, delivered, and hidden, and this was the new dispersal policy. So they founded a ... a sort of delivery service of men and women, they were civil pilots mostly, who, who would deliver these. When an aeroplane was finished, they got into the seat and drove it off to wherever it was. And they were brilliant pilots, because they'd be flying a four engine bomber in the morning, and in the afternoon, a single-seater fighter. They just got into the cockpit, put it into gear and roared off. And a lot of them were women. And that was all right, but somebody had to deal with them when they Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 83 arrived, you see. And the question was finding places to hide them. And they invented two little portable hangars, which could be put up by very small crews, each one would take two fighters, or one small bomber. And, I remember meeting the man who arrived with his trucks to put one up, and I said, "How many tools have you got?" And he said, "Well, one of them's a-the hammer, and the other one isn't", and went on working! Which I thought was a wonderful reply! Bloody silly question he thought! So the Air Ministry decided that somebody had to go round and site these things, and then to try and make them look like something else. They could make them look like hay barns, or you could make them look like roadside garages, or you could make them look like houses, but it all depended where the siting was. You obviously wouldn't have a garage in the middle of a field, so they decided to send us all off, break up our unit into regions, and we'd each take a region, and take on this particular chore, which was extremely interesting, as you can imagine. And I was ... I drew, by luck ... the West Country, from Oxford to Cardiff, roughly, and Stratford-on-Avon to Salisbury, roughly. The nicest area in the whole country. Beautiful. And it was packed with aeroplanes and aerodromes, and most of the fields had their hedges grubbed up, and being used for early training, flying training, and it was a sort of huge dump, it was regarded as a very safe area, and not likely to be, because there weren't really many big industrial towns in it, so it wasn't likely to be heavily bombed. They wanted to avoid the ... the odd raider popping out of the clouds and seeing what he could drop, before going back again. And there were a certain number of aircraft factories put up, of course, but ... so Moggie and I went down to ... to Cheltenham, and she had her baby safely, Carola. And I had a little Vauxhall car to myself, and I drove all over my area all day, and I had to do about four or five hours flying a week, to see what things looked like in various sorts of weather. And the advantage of that area was, it ... all the aeroplanes were different. I mean, you, anything that had more than one seat, because you would have to go to the flying officer commanding chap and say, "Can anybody fiddle me round for an hour?" And there was usually somebody on a training flight, or a delivery flight, or something. So that was ... that was enjoyable.

And did you actually do any of the painting yourself, or were you just supervising other people to make things look like cottages, or ...

Well, I did designing, because I had to design the ... when you decided where to put them ... I mean, if they, if they were going under, if they were just going to be pushed under trees, what we found was, there were quite a lot of big parks like Blenheim, and ... and that big park at Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl088-A Page 84

Cirencester, which had huge avenues, and you could land a smallish aircraft, small bombers, on the great avenues, and then push them under the trees until they were wanted. So there wasn't much ... that was ... the task there was siting them, finding the places to do it. And then the second one was siting the little barns, the dispersal barns, and finding places where they could easily be got at, got out quickly. It was no good hiding it so well, you could never get hold of it. And the third thing was the ... disguising the, of the airfields, because a lot of them were not runways in those days, they were still grass. And what happened, you just grubbed all the hedges up, knocked down all the trees. But if you were flying, you could see an aerodrome, you couldn't see the buildings at all, but you saw the suddenly huge great plain, grass area, which was very conspicuous. But if you painted the hedges back with black paint, sort of road sprays, it was amazing how, how difficult it was to spot them at a distance, you see, because, on the whole, you were aiming, bomb aiming early in the war, was fairly rough, you know. People probably ... they mostly ... one or two aircraft only popping out of clouds, and seeing if they could drop something, then pop back again. There wasn't the sort of mass raids, working on machinery, on equipment. So one, I mean, you could do a simple thing like, for instance, this huge green area, if you painted that with two hedges, or carried a road across it, a painted road, and one yellow field, which you got by spraying the grass with sulphuric acid, it was really enough.

But you weren't doing any of the painting and spraying?

Oh no, no. These were all sort of huge teams of men with great equipment, like you get on a road sprayer. And they'd travel round and you'd sort of supervise ...

End of F1088 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 85

F1088 Side B

... you were involved with the founding of the Georgian Society, is that right?

It was called the Georgian Group, in fact. And it was the almost single-handed enterprise of Robert Byron, whom I'd known when he'd helped me with letters of introduction when I was going to Greece. He became a, a very splendidly perceptive and experienced travel writer. He wrote about Persia and Greece, and Afghanistan, and he was a curious figure, with a huge pale, moonlike face, and hair brushed straight back and ... and a habit of ungovernable rages, which is quite interesting, because when he went to Persia, and the Shah had the same problem, he used to suddenly go absolutely wild with rage. And Robert, who was a great friend at Oxford, of the ... what you might roughly call Evelyn Waugh/Betjeman/Harold Acton group - and a very popular member of it. He used to travel in the most appalling places, with the skin being flayed off his face by Himalayan winds, but his saddlebags full of Fortnum and Mason truffles, and, I think he's one of the best travel writers of this century. Anyway, he founded the Georgian Group because there was a proposal, quite a serious proposal, to pull down Carlton House Terrace, which was owned by the Crown Commissioners, and replace it with an office block. Roughly in the style of Carlton House Terrace, but a bit more money making in its interiors. And, in fact, nobody really knew about this until the ... the block nearest Buckingham Palace was, in fact, actually pulled down and rebuilt. And if you go and look at Carlton House Terrace now, you can see it. This was what it was going to be. It was going to be built in stone. Robert flew into one of his ungovernable rages, and issued pamphlets, and stirred everybody up. And as he was quite a frequent contributor to the Architectural Review for which I worked at the time, also, I met him again, and he didn't have much trouble in persuading me to join this Group, and we won, the thing was stopped.

What did you do to stop it?

Well, I mean, there was such an agitation, and the agitation was, was at a fairly high level. I think the Chairman was a man called Lord Darwent, who lived in Yorkshire, and it was the intellectual gentry who came riding along on their steeds to save Carlton House Terrace. And the government of the time yielded, and the only block that was done, a couple of houses at the Buckingham Palace end. The Georgian Group still exists, and, but ... but gradually as Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 86

Georgian architecture became overtaken by Victorian architecture as a subject of interest, they play a rather quieter role now. They are, in fact, still one of the statutory bodies that the Ministry consults if there is any question of a listed building being altered or demolished. The Georgian Group and the Victorian Society are both consulted.

Are you still part of the Georgian Group?

No. I retired, I think I was Vice-President for years, or Vice-Chairman, or something. Years. But I thought, about 10 years ago, that, that particular battle had almost been won, and while they still do useful work, I thought there weren't any exciting battles.

And that brought you into contact with Queen Mary, didn't it?

Once, yes. Queen Mary invited the Council of the Georgian Group to go and see her collection of furniture and objets d'art in Marlborough House. And one of the Council was Christopher Hussey, who, at the time, was editor of Country Life. And the biographer of Lutyens. And a very sweet, nice man. who lived in a marvellous Victorian, romantic gothic house in Sussex, with a castle and a lake. And we all trooped in, and Queen Mary, I remember, she was tiny! I always imagined, she always looked so regal in her photographs, with that knob-topped parasol, and her toque and her piled up hair, and absolutely straight back. She really looked like Mrs. Noah in Noah's ark, or one of the people who come out of a weather box, saying it's going to be fine. I can't remember which they do. Anyway, she was showing us around and she, she considered that Christopher Hussey was obstructing the view of the rest of us by bending over a showcase of miniatures, or something. And she gave him a sharp rap with her silver-knobbed cane on the back of his kneecaps, which gave him quite a turn, poor man! That was the first time I ever saw Queen Mary. Very splendid she looked. And the second time I saw her, was driving up St. James's in a very high Daimler which, about that time, overturned with Queen Mary in it, on Wimbledon Common, which just hasn't happened since, I think.

(CANNOT HEAR INTERVIEWER OR RESPONDENT - BOTH SPEAKING AT SAME TIME)

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 87

And all her, her wonderful pointed shoes that she used to point out as she walked along ... she was helped out of the great Daimler on its side. But she was running up, she was driving slowly up St. James's Street, so I raised both my arms, as if to say "Hooray", or something like that, and she tapped on the pane with her parasol to draw attention to me, to her lady in waiting. What she was saying, "Is he going to throw something at us?" I expect like ...- Anyway, the last time I saw her, in person, was at the beginning of the Festival of Britain. She came round in a wheelchair by then. But that was the ... that was all started from the Georgian Group, which, as I say, still exists. There weren't many City battles in those days. The architecture was more, on the whole, it was pretty middle of the road stuff. Nobody was sufficiently offended or excited by the new architecture that was going up. It had a very strong Scandinavian influence. I mean, the traffic in architects to Scandinavia was only equalled by the traffic in old horses to the slaughterhouses of Antwerp. And in shoals they went, every ... Students went to look at Stockholm Town Hall, and the new housing at Copenhagen, and also in Holland. And that was the general architectural language of the day, so there were no extraordinary buildings that looked as if they'd been built back to front, and upside down, or anything.

When you were working with Kit Nicholson, apart from his father, and being aware of Lutyens, who would be the other architects who you actually saw socially?

Well, the, there was, the avant garde, so called, was a ... which I suppose was led by Lubetkin, who designed the penguin pool in London Zoo, and he was leader of a firm called Tecton, which was a co-operative of architects, all about my age, I suppose, about thirtyish. And they were, sort of, first swallows of the modern movement here. And every time a modern house was built, usually in the Home Counties, or one or two in Hampstead, because they were only built by intellectuals, there was a row, because the roofs were flat, and the windows were wide. And sometimes they stood on legs, instead of standing on the ground, and every house was a statement, a sort of manifesto of this, I believe. And everybody read, when I say "everybody" - our generation - Corbusier, and Siegfried Gideon, and Mumford, were the sort of bibles of the modern movement. All foreigners, you notice. And many of the, the Nazi refugees had begun to come over - Gropius, and Mendelsohn, on their way to America, and they stopped in England for two or three years, en route. Built not very much, sadly, because they were fine architects, and they were the people we, we made Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 88 our pilgrimages to. And when I'd been Secretary at Cambridge, we used to have pilgrimages to these little tiny icons of the modern movement.

But once you'd got to the next stage, were you actually meeting them, and discussing things, and all that sort of thing?

I met them all really, because they formed a thing called the MARS Group, which was the Modern Architectural Research Group. And these were a very continental idea of, of philosophers, intellectuals and architects, meeting for evening discussions. And I hated that. I always hated that sort of evening, partly because ... I don't know whether, it's the sort of pretentiousness of it, it seemed to me, and the thick cigarette smoke ... and the thick spectacles, and the broken accents, and the whole evening was, to me, a nightmare, so I'd never go to the meetings. Kit wouldn't go to meetings either. But they did have an exhibition in Burlington Gardens of their beliefs, their philosophy, as an exhibition, which Kit and I did a section. Everybody did a section. Maholy-Nagy was the, from Hungary, he was the sort of maestro of the exhibition. A sweet man. Terrible broken accent, I mean, hardly understand a word he said. And it was all, I was on the fringe of it, you see, because I, I'm very thick about theory. I don't like talking about theory, and the MARS Group talked theory all the time. They hadn't got much opportunity to build much, because they weren't given the opportunities, they were thought to be a bit scary. And it seemed to me that, unless you'd been brought up in the cafes of Prague, and Vienna and Budapest and Paris, it wasn't the sort of thing I was brought up.

So what was your contribution to the exhibition?

I was a fringe figure really.

At that exhibition, what ....

Well, I was Kit's assistant. We, we'd ... Kit designed a chair, a chaise longue, in bent plywood, and, and together we designed a sort of pergola made out of aircraft plywood, which was very wavy.

How do you design something with somebody? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 89

With somebody? Oh, architects do that all the time.

Well, how does it work, then?

Well, it works well if you both think along the same lines. And it works quite well if you don't. Because controversy always brings in new ideas, or ... I think controversy ... a lot of people don't like it because, in a way, it wastes time.

With you and Kit, would one of you draw and then the other one would fiddle around?

Kit was my tutor, you see, originally, so I deferred to Kit, because he was my employer, until we became partners, which was the ..., we were partners in 1938. And he was a very interesting mixture, you see, because he'd been brought up, in a way, by Lutyens, he was an earlier generation than me. And, so, at the drop of a hat, he could put on a, an appropriately sympathetic addition to a Georgian house in Sussex, with, with ordinary windows and a roof, and chimneys as big as Buckingham Palace, like Lutyens always had. All his buildings are pinned down enormous great, fat, lovely strong chimneys. But the, the buildings he was proudest of, were his modern ones, which is the Augustus John studio, the London Gliding Club, which was totally modern, and the house he built at Henley, for a Dr. Crowe. Again, in the current language, was blinding white, flat roofed, non-stop windows, wavy walls, and so, I ... it would be interesting to know what ... because he was, he was killed just after the War, in a gliding accident, and from 1939-45 he did no architecture at all, he was in the Navy. And it would be interesting to know how he'd have developed. I'm pretty sure I'd have stayed with him if he'd allowed me to, because he was a wonderful giggly companion, never took himself seriously. I mean, he took his art seriously, but he never took himself seriously. And he and I would, you see, would be unsympathetic to the MARS theoretical evenings.

And would Moggie feel the same?

Moggie was, she was three years junior, you see, and she was an assistant in the office in the vacations, and she wasn't doing any work of her own, in those stages, she was just helping Kit and myself to, to battle through the working drawings and that sort of thing. But the, by then, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 90 you see, it was about 1938, and Munich time, and everybody was being issued with gas masks, in the Fulham Road, and we thought we'd get married.

Yes, we actually talked about that. I made you go off.

Yes.

Where we got to last time, you were in Cheltenham, doing camouflage, and the first child had been born, but Nicola was born in Cheltenham as well, wasn't she?

Carola was the first child, she was born in Cheltenham, and Nicola was the second child, born in Cheltenham.

So by that stage, where were you living?

Well, we had a great piece of luck, because I'd been posted from the camouflage ministry, to the West Country, to Cheltenham, that was the Headquarters, and there was a unit there, called the Works Directorate, and they were responsible for looking after anything that was concerned with aerodromes, bomb dumps, repair shop stores, barracks, anything to do with the RAF, and I had, I had my own car, because I could drive all over the area, constantly touring, and inspecting, and designing and doing a lot of modest flying. The area was rather nice, because it was the sort of assembly area for, for every aeroplane that arrived, from America, Canada. And one morning you'd be in some funny old coastal command Hudson, and the next moment you'd be in an Anson, which was a reconnaissance thing. And the next one, you'd be in a big bomber, perhaps towing a glider behind it, so that was fun, because you were always in a different sort of aeroplane.

But where was your family actually living?

And the family lived in Cheltenham, and because we had a, a cousin who was teaching at the Ladies College in Cheltenham, teaching English, and she had a friend who was also teaching English there, who had a house in Cheltenham, so eventually we moved into the house, and Moggie spent the War there.

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Was she working at all, or was she looking after the children?

She was looking after the two tots.

With any help?

No help. Towards the end of the War, we had a war widow popped in in the mornings, who became our housekeeper after the War. She had two children to look after too.

What was your involvement with the children when they were very small?

I think as close as most fathers usually is, you ... you saw them at breakfast, and then again at 7 o'clock at night, and I used to sing hymns to them when I ran out of lullabies. They adored hymns. And I knew hundreds of hymns. Years and years of going to chapel at school. You knew all the verses and all the tunes. and I should think I could've done 20 or 30 hymns, throughout. And my experience with children is, it's better to read and sing very very slowly, that makes them go to sleep. And if you said, for instance, "And then the mother duck said, 'Come along, children, we're going down to the pond."' If you said it, you didn't say that, you said, "And then ... mother duck said ... 'Come along, children' ..." and gradually the pauses, you'd get longer and longer, and they'd have gone, they'd never get beyond the second sentence. And, of course, I had Sundays off as a rule.

And how would they be spent?

Worked Saturdays. And they were very well behaved and well brought up, I think.

And what would you do with them on a Sunday?

Well, the house was on the top of a hill outside Cheltenham, and you could walk out of the house, really, onto close turf and sheep, and walk for miles. So, we used to walk rather than pram push. And it was a very soft war. I can't pretend it was anything but a very soft war.

Towards the end, you were moved back to London, weren't you?

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Yes, round about, I suppose about, I can't remember how long the War lasted, till 1944 really, didn't it? Are we still talking?

Yes

Roundabout 1943, the end of '43, the time of the Second Front, and the camouflage became really a waste of energy and effort, because the number of raids from Germany were falling rapidly. Anyway, they turned over to V-ls and V-2s who had no pilots on board, so it was no good painting anything or disguising anything, because it didn't make any difference to a rocket! Just arrived. And I was moved back, sort of head hunted, to, that sounds much grander than it really was. But I was asked for by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. They were just setting up a post-War department to think about prefabs and new towns, and it was a small outfit in St. James's Square. We were in the research department, about, I suppose, about a dozen of us. And there was a man called Colin Buchanan, who was working on transport solutions, and Lord Holford as he became eventually, was the head of the department, and he had two deputies. Then there was a bunch of minors, of which I was one - M I N O R S! And I worked, to start with, on layouts for prefabs, which still exist in some parts of London. A very great success they were. And then on ... I did a bit of work on the County of London Plan.

Which was what?

With Abercrombie. Well, Abercrombie was engaged on the Plan for London, the post-War Plan for London, and the Greater London Plan, which was the sort of outskirts of London. He was the Chief Planner. And he had a separate office, but he required, occasionally, a drafting hand, consultation help, as well as his own staff. And I did a bit of work on that. I wasn't a trained planner, so my work was pure slave, slave labour really.

But it was exactly the kind of project you'd said you hadn't particularly wanted to work on, so how did you find it?

In life I wouldn't have done it, because it's too long-term, and too huge. I mean, to consider the future of Sheffield, say, and decide or recommend decisions about density of housing, and how many schools per 1000 population, it was too figurey for me, and too distant. I didn't Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 93 think I'd see it in my lifetime, or that it would all be superseded before. I liked the prefabs because they were going up, and you could go and see them.

But the whole point of those was that they were temporary, wasn't it? Or not?

That, that, the temporary one?

Mmm.

Well, yes, they were temporary because they were put up on bomb sites mostly. They were madly popular, because they, they were compact, beautifully, beautifully designed. Very quick, sort of, well, a lot had been learnt, of course, in military structural systems of building hangars, and, and every conceivable sort of shelters, and things had been, had been devised and produced. And so they could begin to turn over to peacetime occupations, you see, too, and you'd switch the people who were building air raid shelters or aircraft hangars, into building houses, steel houses. There were ... thousands of steel houses were built. And this was just beginning, so that was quite exciting. Because it was done, and it came off, and you could see them, and people were crazy to get them, and indeed, there are masses of them about still, they've lasted so well.

And you were involved with Stevenage weren't you?

With who?

With Stevenage. With the New Town there.

I worked on Stevenage, yes. I wasn't ... the main worker on Stevenage, who was in the same office as I was, in the same room, was Peter Shepheard, who eventually, who was a landscape architect, and, by inclination ... ordinary architect, but he was a landscape architect. And he was the sort of master planner for Stevenage under Holford, and advice from, from the Ministry. And so I helped him out. Again, I was slave labour really, colouring acres of stuff. And this was, this was the time of the V-1/V-2, and we were still fire watching.

So you were living back in London? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1088-B Page 94

And I was living back ... I was ... I was lodging in my, I left the family in Cheltenham, because London was a bit nasty, and I was lodging with my aunt, Sybil Thorndike. She was working in the theatre, and she lived in Chelsea, and so I lodged with her. My Uncle Lewis, her husband, was the, can't remember what it was called. It wasn't actually ENSA, the entertaining of the troops business, but it was more cultural than ENSA. You know, he was touring, touring Greek plays in the Welsh valleys, enormous success.

So what was life like with them?

With them? Very cosy, because she, my Aunt Sybil, I suppose was in her late sixties, early seventies. She'd get up very early and she'd play Bach for about three-quarters of an hour. And then she'd get breakfast, and then she'd usually either go to rehearsal, or be learning her lines, when I went off to work. And very often I collected her from the theatre in the evening, because the blackout was still on, and she didn't terribly like the tubes, all the people sleeping in them, she found it a bit creepy, all these shrouded figures, it looked like some awful morgue. And then, I was still there when the European war ended in 1944, and the whole war scene shifted, of course, to the Far East.

End of F1088 Side Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 95

Fl089 Side A

... the time when you wrote your book about Homes for the Millions or whatever it was called, wasn't it?

Yes. Well, the moment the ... the European War more or less quietened down so far as this country was concerned, people began to think of what they were going to do. And the country was extremely shabby and dirty, and people were very thin and exhausted. And when you see photographs of them now, it is amazing how like it looks to the sort of refugee photographs you see now. Because the shortages were, in fact, had got worse and worse during the War. In fact, they were at their worst three years after the War, I mean, there weren't butter, sugar and meat, and sweets and bananas, and oranges, and all those things were virtually unobtainable. Petrol was, sort of, one gallon a week you were allowed if you had a car, and it was ... it was low quality existence compared with subsequent years. But people were beginning to, I think, decide whether they wanted to stay with public service or jump into the pool of private practice. I'm talking about people, I mean architects. You see, all through the, the immediate preWar period, the liveliest people, I think almost without exception, I'm not talking about the foreign architects, but the liveliest young people all went into public service with the London County Council, and housing was all over the country. And then they went into the War and disappeared, and surfaced again afterwards, and a high proportion of them wanted to go back, because they saw that the ... the need was terrific. I mean, the damage in London was, and most big cities, had been very very bad. And they could see, a sort of, a national need, plus a sense of service which they'd ... I suppose acquired an extra strength from serving during the War, which, I think, did teach people a lot of things. One of which was instant responsibility, that if you were asked to do something, you did it. The second thing which was, I think, true, you're mostly thinking about other people rather than yourself, because survival and happiness, really, depended on company, of the people you were working with, whether in an aircraft factory, or, or in a naval unit or whatever it was. Everybody depended on everybody else for survival really. And so there was a sort of feeling that, we've learnt something in this War, for mutual support, and it would be nice to try and keep this in some way. And that's why I think there was a terrific drift towards public service, particularly, I think, in London, in the LCC, which had, I suppose, one of the finest housing departments in Europe. And they did some very very good and lively work. Other people, the other side of the thing was that people had had enough of this, being constantly in a Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 96 disciplined, huge establishment of hundreds and hundreds of people, and they wanted to be on their own, making their own decisions, and however small they were. The difficulty with private practice was that, there was virtually no building. You couldn't get any building done at all without a licence, and the licence had a sort of list of things you were allowed to have - so many square feet of timber, and so many bricks, and so many areas of glass. I mean, it was like a ration, like a ration book. If you were going to do a house, you picked up your rations and you couldn't, you couldn't use any more than you were given.

Did that have any kind of good effect, like sometimes in the theatre, having to be very economical does?

I don't think so. I think it meant, I think, on the whole, it had some sort of effect on ingenuity, but ... and, of course, there was a lot of wide boys who knew where you could pick up some second-hand flooring and that sort of thing. So the, the other side of the service, of the, what in the services was called "winning", where you said, "Can you win a couple of tins of petrol for the unit?" You didn't ask where they came from, you just said, "Could you win it?" you see. And so there was a bit of that. But I think, no, I think the trouble was that the, the architecture looked very pinched, because nothing ... everything was pared down to thinnest that'll actually stand up. Doors were paper thin, and door handles were, fell off, and the whole thing was very unsatisfactory. And there was so little of it done, and nearly all of it being done by local authorities, that the people who like Kit, who came out of the Navy, round about 1945, spent the last two years in India, and I, we started up a little practice, as most of our friends did.

Who, when you say most of your friends, who are you talking about?

Well, none of them have become tremendously famous, I suppose. I suppose, there's a man, Sir Philip Powell now, as now is. Philip was a young student from the AA, and he won a competition for the housing in Pimlico, that started him off. It was rather interesting that he and his partner won this competition when they were in the last year at school, Architectural School, and Westminster City Council said, "We can't have these striplings designing these blocks of flats. They've never built anything in their lives, but nothing." And, so they appointed an old boy, old professor, as their Daddy consultant. And after about three months, he said, "They're totally all right. I'm making no contribution at all. They're very very bright", Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 97 and they went off on their own. That was their first big job, and they became, and have since become major big architects now.

And, people like them, would you see them as colleagues, or would there be competition? How much would you discuss what each other were doing?

I think Kit and I were not great discussers, actually. We didn't go to many, what are they called now? Seminars.

But socially, would you meet them?

Socially we moved with, with friends who'd been students with us, all of whom were struggling along. The actual thing, funnily enough, you were allowed to do, because it involved the continual re-use of materials, was exhibitions, big exhibitions at Olympia and elsewhere, they were either exhibitions on, Government exhibitions on, it was ... not patriotic, they were just what we're going to do with the post-War world, and various ... about diet, or schools, or .. and a lot of private things. There was a big, the Ideal Home Exhibition started up again. And there's a huge exhibition in Birmingham and London every year, called "The British Industries Fair", and we used to do exhibition stands, and they were great fun to do. It was rather like the theatre, because you had an area given you, about the size of the Covent Garden stage, say, in Olympia, and you had to tell the story of overcoats, or metal windows, or ICI, or whatever it is. And the great joy of the thing was that it was, it was rather like the theatre in that you were up all night during the previous week, finishing it, and the whole thing came down after a fortnight. And all the material, as much of it as possible, was cannibalised, and there'd be another one, you see. And so we did a lot of that work, and what was fun about it was that it was immediate. It taught you a great deal about planning, quick decisions. It taught you a lot about, about getting effects with simple means, because you couldn't be expensive or complicated. But most of all it taught you how to handle workmen, if I can put it that way, because we were all rather young, and although most of the people had been in the Services, they'd handled soldiers, or sailors, or been one themselves, more likely. But they were, they were accustomed to taking orders, and giving orders without any ill feeling, or if there were people you didn't like, or bullied or ... But once they got into civilian life, you see, they were half used to it, and half longing to get rid of it. And the exhibition world, and the contractual world, has always been full of wildcat strikes. There's Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 98 always somebody suddenly downing a hammer, and saying, "Come on, we're all off." And the stand would empty. And then it would spread, and then there'd be a meeting. And what I found was so interesting, you see, you'd go to some of these quick strike meetings, about a tea break usually or, whatever the claim was, and you'd be addressed by the, I mean, there were several hundred workmen there, being addressed by the shop steward or the, the anti-shop steward. And how often it was, it only needed one man, or two men, to say, "Oh, come on, for God's bloody sake, I'm going back to work", and pick up his hammer and start hammering in, and the whole thing nearly always- collapsed. It really needed one or two people who got bored with the, and it wasn't worth the worry, you know, mostly like old men, of course, I suppose, rather than the young ones. Anyway, we did that for, I suppose, till '46, '47, and tiny little alterations, and messings about.

Who else was working with you in the office at that time?

Nobody. Kit and me, in a bedsitting room off the Fulham Road.

Hang on. Is this ... the book you wrote, Homes by the Million?

Oh well, I was doing quite a lot of journalism, because they were, you couldn't make much of a living out of architecture in those days, unless you were a salaried member of the LCC, or one of the local authorities. So I used to do a lot of journalism, and I did some work for Penguins, three sort of Penguin books on housing and, I can't remember what they were, and village planning and ...

And did it involve going to America?

No. Heavens no!

So you filched the whole thing from somebody else's research?

No, no, absolutely not. Digging it out of libraries and things, and handouts.

The whole thing was very idealistic at that stage, about the New Towns, wasn't it?

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It was very idealistic, and people were jolly relieved to be out of danger, and jolly relieved to, those were the lucky ones, having their families back again. There were quite a lot of people still involved, of course, in the Far East and Malaysia, and places, but the, round about 1947, things began to improve slightly, except the rationing which was just as bad as ever, in fact, it got worse. And then, one day in 1948. I cot a letter from Gerald Barry.

Hold on, we're going too fast. You were also writing for a magazine that George Weidenfeld had started, weren't you?

Oh yes. Well, among the rationing difficulties of the time, was paper rationing, which was very, very serious. And particularly serious for magazines. You could, you were allowed paper for books, but you were allowed virtually no paper for magazines, and George Weidenfeld, who came from Vienna, as a refugee, at the beginning of the War, had the simple idea of making magazines with hard covers. They came out once a month, it was called Contact, it came out once a month in hard covers. And he roped together a sort of extraordinary collection of slightly Horizon-like writers, and a very good team of illustrators, and they were really quite sparky. It was a sort of mixture between Picture Post and The Economist, and Horizon. It was really for a pretty intellectual market. And I was their architectural correspondent.

Did anyone think of you as an illustrator at all in those days?

Oh yes, I illustrated my own articles then.

And had you started using colour by that stage?

But only ... no colour, no. I'd used colour in camouflage, but it was a fairly limited palette, as you can imagine! No, I was rather frightened of watercolour, so I stuck to pen and ink. And, and there wasn't all that money for, for colour things in the, in the magazine. However, I mean, I did learn to draw quickly and reliably, deliver on time, and meet dates, and so, I got quite a lot of work, because so many editors would rather have the copy on, when, the minute it's wanted, rather than have a good copy that comes late. And, so if you get a reputation for turning up on the delivery day, you get quite a lot of work. And I did a lot of pretty trivial Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 100 journalism, in fact, architects ... I mean, articles for all sorts of things. And I think that was what attracted the attention of Gerald Barry because ...

Sorry, we can't go back to that yet! So who else was writing on Contact?

I wish I could remember. I'll have to tell you next time.

Was that the one that Elizabeth Bowen was involved with, or was that Night and Day?

No, that was Night and Day and that was, before the War, I think. Night and Day, yes, did I talk about Night and Day?

No.

Round, I think it was round about 1937, Chatto and Windus had the idea of starting a London New Yorker, the same sort of format, the same Talk of the Town, funny jokes, slightly intellectual architect, articles, short stories, high quality reviewers, a big book page, and films and movies. And it was edited by Graham Greene.

What was he like, then?

And, what was he like?

Mmmm

Well, I didn't meet him all that often. I did one article for him, the first article I did. I think it was about, "What's going to happen to the Stately Homes?" or something like that, and he told me he wanted a lighter touch, because I was terribly nervous, I mean, with Graham Greene, I thought, "My God, I'll have to watch my adjectives!" And He said, "Yes, so that was the only criticism he gave me. but very nicely written, but it, it's a bit solemn," he thought. So I, I touched my forelock and, and continued ... we didn't last ... the whole magazine, I was the only architectural correspondent. It didn't last tremendously long, it was about two years, I think. But the, on the literary side, they were ... absolutely everybody, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 101

Elizabeth Bowen, and Peter Fleming, and Evelyn Waugh, all the sort of what were to become post-War writers of the day, writing on anything from fashion to films.

And did you come into contact with one another?

Not much, no. It was, it was, you all stayed at home and wrote your pieces, and there was no sort of Punch table or anything, or at least, I was never asked to one but I was a pretty junior character.

And what caused the magazine to close?

Shirley Temple, in fact, caused the magazine to close, because Graham Greene doubled as film critic as well as the editor, and he wrote a review of "Wee Willie Winkie", which was a film, it was a Kipling story about a little four year old girl who was, or six year old girl who was the Regimental mascot in Kandahar, or somewhere, and he said that she, she used to wear a kilt, and stride across the parade ground, sticking her little bottom out, and then this film, and, Graham Greene made some sort of slightly saucy remark that Aubrey Smith, who was the, in those days, the, the archetype English actor in Hollywood, captained the English actors team, and had a white moustache, and craggy face, and was always playing old country gentlemen, and earls, and chairmen of banks and things. And he was the commanding officer in this film, and watching Shirley strutting across the, the parade ground. And Graham Greene said he thought he detected a rather unhealthy spark in his eye, and Shirley sued Graham Greene, and sued Chatto's successfully, because the judge obviously had great sympathy with Aubrey Smith, I would say. Anyway, the damages were enough to sink the paper, and it never, it never revived. So that was my previous sort of regular appearance in, in magazine form. And then, Contact again, after the War, but it didn't have any jokes. It was rather, prided itself on being rather, something like Life magazine too, taking current issues, political issues and things, and I thought it was extremely good. And there was a newspaper in those days, called the News Chronicle, run, edited by Gerald Barry, who had previously been editor of The Weekend Review, which amalgamated with The New Statesman. And I had a letter from him once, saying, one day, saying would I join his team, organising the Festival of Britain? I didn't know anything about the Festival of Britain. But what had happened was, that during the War, Stafford Cripps had been put in charge of some post-War think tank, and everybody, of course, assumed that we were going to win, and so Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 102 the point was, which way were we going to go? And Stafford Cripps being a ... it was a national government, in those days, of course ... had this idea that we should have an international exhibition in England, as perhaps, badly damaged as it was, the least damaged of the European countries, because France was flat, and no railways, and ... and this went hopping around various Ministries, and it came out as a national exhibition, not an international exhibition. Less ambitious. And a man called John Gloag who was a journalist, wrote to The Times, and saying, "Why don't we have it in 1951, which is the centenary of the Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition. It gives it a hook, if you have a hook, something happens. If you don't have a hook, it filters on, goes from one pigeon hole to another, and nobody does anything about it." And Gerald Barry picked this up, and supported it warmly in his paper, a Liberal paper, and in the usual way of people on committees, suggest something, they say, "Well, why don't you do it?" He was made the king of the Festival, and told to put forward a project, a proposal. But Gerald was a, a very ebullient Hampstead wet, I suppose you could call him, loosely. All his life he'd been a sort of Fabian Socialist, very cultivated, and a very good journalist, and a very good editor, and the idea then was a Festival, not an exhibition, it was a Festival Party to celebrate the end of the War, and what we were going to do next. As it was put forward in a Left-wing paper, it received instant condemnation from all the press. It was absolutely 100 per cent ridiculous idea, you know, why don't we get on to something serious, like building houses, or improving the milk supply, or something. It's ridiculous having a party. Nothing to celebrate here, the place looks dreadful. Gerald's theory was that you don't do anything about your house until you have a party. If you have a party, you clean the windows, and get some flowers in, and hoover the carpet. And, or, if the Queen visits a railway station, the platform edge is re-painted, I mean, things happen when there's a party. So his idea was that, it's a good way to get a party, to get things moving, by having a party. And he persuaded Herbert Morrison, who was the, I think he was, sort of, a slightly roving Minister in those days. I can't remember what they call them. Lord President of the Council, or something. And he'd been in charge of the Home Front, during the War, really, with things like ARP, and defence, and portable houses, and Anderson shelters. And so he'd been the, the nice uncle who looked after us. And so it was a very appropriate appointment and, of course, he was very keen on this because he, he was an absolutely besotted Londoner, found it very difficult to be interested in anything outside London. And he thought this is a chance to get London hopping, and so he, he got together with Gerald Barry, and they hatched up a scheme of a theme which was the, the achievements, past, present and future, of the British people, based on the thing they were handed, which was the, the country, and the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-A Page 103 coal and the wood, and the resources, and the people. There were two units which made England what it was, which was the actual, physical country, and, and the people. And that it should have some sort of, three or four months demonstration in every town of major importance, in the country, which was to be run by the town itself. And they would get a grant from Head Office. If you want to drain your duck pond, or if you want to put up a clock tower, or if you want to have a street party, or if you want to rebuild a railway station, it was up to whatever town you were, but there were certain official ones. One was in London, one was in Glasgow, one was in Belfast, and one was in Cardiff. They were the sort of official ones. And they were paid for, largely by Government funds, and largely controlled by the Central Festival Office, that was the idea. I mean, this took some months to go through, and Gerald, being a man of his period and faith, thought that you should have weekend parties with knotted sticks, and stride over the Downs, like Hilaire Belloc, and, to get inspiration from the Downs and the cliffs, and the coppices and the churches, and, and the people he gathered round him were gradually coerced. He'd have them down for weekends, you see, coerced into a, not coerced, or to cohere, that's the word, cohere into, into a group with a, with an attitude. That was his concept. And so he, he started with this man called Ian Cox, from the BBC, who was a scientist, and he said, "Now you think about science." He had two, two people from Government, one of them was a man called Cook, who'd been in the Ministry of Information during the War, organising billboard bombers, or "Save us another Spitfire" exhibitions. He'd been, he was a professional exhibition man. He had a Scotsman in charge of money, who came from the Treasury, I think. And then he turned to other people. He turned to Huw Wheldon for the Arts. Huw Wheldon's father was, by then the Arts Council was established, it was called CEMA - Council for Education of Music and the Arts, or something. And Huw Wheldon's father was the Welsh chairman of it, and Huw was just coming out of the Army. He was put in charge of arts. He got a chap called Paul Wright to run PR, press and public relations, who subsequently entered the Foreign Service, and became a diplomat. And Huw, of course, went into the BBC after the Festival. And then he ...

End of F1089 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 104

F1089 Side B

... who had been doing, what you might call, roughly speaking, official exhibitions all the War, and one of whom, called James Gardner, who'd done the "Britain Can Make It" exhibition, which was a little pilot run at the Victoria and Albert Museum, of products, of recent products, or products planned, and this is what'll happen if you all behave yourselves, sort of thing. And it was terrifically popular, queues round and round the block, to see the new Hoover, or new chair, or whatever it is. And James Gardner, who'd started life as a graphic designer and illustrator, he was the sort of man who would be given a lot of drawings of the Queen Mary or a battleship, and then he'd, he'd cut slices through it, and show people cooking, and people storing shells, and, and if it was an aeroplane, there would be the stewardess in a galley, and somebody, the pilot at the wheel, you know those sort of cutaway things. He was a fantastic three-dimensional visualiser. I mean, you'd really give him a dozen blueprints of a very complicated thing, like a carburettor, I mean, he could do engines, and he'd explode it in 3-D, so you could see exactly what everything did. And, he'd been in camouflage during the War. And a very ingenious and a witty camouflage man. I mean, he would build decoys which were so bad, that the Germans would say, "Coo, isn't that awful. Anybody could see those tanks are made of canvas and sticks of wood", and drone on, but, of course, underneath these ridiculous decoys were real ones, you see, so he always had sort of double bluffs, and he was full of absolutely wonderful ideas. And the other one was Misha Black, who had been a shop designer, really, before the War, and a typographer in advertising. And he'd also been, during the War, in charge of the design side of exhibitions, he and James .... James Gardner was mostly in camouflage. Misha was in charge of the design of exhibitions. And he had a colleague called James Holland, who was a man also for the Ministry of Information, an artist and a graphic designer. And then, finally, he thought about buildings, because none of these people had built a serious building, nor for God's sake had I! But anyway, he wrote to me, I think, because he'd read my articles in these magazines, and said would I take on the problem of putting over architecture, the post-war architectural scene?

And this is the man who edited the News Chronicle?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 105

Yes, Gerald. And Gerald, I remember going to see him, and he said, "I have to tell you that it's, it's really, there won't be any building. You won't see any buildings. But I want, whenever architecture's mentioned in the exhibition, whenever architecture's mentioned in the exhibition, if it's mentioned seriously and in an informed way, and you're the person to do it." So, that was how I got started.

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON. APRIL 19th, 1990

... actually hired. I had to go and see the Government Department responsible for the Festival, which came under the Lord President of the Council, he was called, and that was Herbert Morrison. He was the Cabinet Minister. And his chief aide was a man called Max Nicholson. Max was a very early green figure, an environmental expert. Very brainy, bird watcher, sort of herbivore. He was a herbivore. And he was very agreeable. He said, "I've got a very good secretary for you, called Kate", which she, she had been his secretary I think, and she was sort of white-haired, and really experienced in government departments, and lived in Richmond. And I was introduced to her. And then I was taken to see Mr Morrison, and I'd never set eyes on him, actually, before. But he had a very disconcerting wandering eye. I can't remember whether it was the left or the right, but it went straight up to the ceiling while the other one was looking at you, which gave him an advantage over you in some funny way. And he slightly whistled under his breath, a little tuneless tune. But he was extremely welcoming, and he said, "I don't want to see you till the thing opens." He said, "Please don't come and see me with every trouble you have. Never come and see me, unless you're really up to the eyes in a disaster, and then I'll do what I can." So that was nice, because he, what was so extraordinary about it, you see, that, as he'd met everybody, I was the last to join really. He'd met everybody, and we were all really between 30 and 40, with absolutely no experience. The last five years everybody had been doing something else in the War. None of us had ever built anything, none of us had ever organised anything, except Misha Black, who'd organised travelling exhibitions to buy more Spitfires, or give up your saucepans, or whatever it was. He was experienced. So, we had no real offices. Our little designer group was set to find a place to have this exhibition, and then get out a sort of synopsis of what it should contain. And how it would be put over, because, in fact, most of the ideas were probably better put over by film or books, really. But as they'd decided to have an exhibition, it had to be translated into three-dimensional objects. And they were encouraged by this, by the success of "Britain Can Make It", which had happened a year before, at the Victoria and Albert, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 106 which was a huge success. And we were given a couple of rooms at the back of Harrods, in one of those tall, red Pont Street houses. And there was no central heating - this was the winter of, I suppose, it must have been 1948, '49, and we sat there, this little group of designers, trying to think up where to have it, and what to do. And we, we got rid of the impossibles. We first tried Hyde Park. No luck. We then tried Battersea. No luck. They said they'd have a funfair, but they wouldn't have an exhibition. We then tried the empty museums, because they'd all been emptied and sent to safety. They said, "Not on your life, we want to get all our stuff back." And then, I often wondered whether Herbert Morrison had planned all this, entirely for this. He went to Gerald Barry and said, "Look, the LCC own all this property downstream from County Hall, and we were going to, with the Government, we were going to build a national theatre there, and build a new embankment." Because in those days there was nothing, no embankment, it finished with mud and wharves and rot and slime and things. And "what do you think about that?" This was a device, really, for getting the South Bank done, you see, I think, because he was a tremendously keen South Londoner. And he said, "Nobody goes to the South Bank, they try not to go to the South Bank, it's because it's nothing but mud and rotting wharves, and rubble, and industry, and warehouses, misery and poverty, and railway lines. And we must clear it up." This was about October, and we were rather excited about this. And we went down, and it was, in fact, a very romantic place. There was no embankment wall, no trees, yes, there was one tree, which is still there, near the Festival Hall now, yes. It was bisected by a railway line, and there were, under the arches, were people bashing out mudguards, and, and selling disused motor bikes and that sort of thing. And the railway divided the site almost exactly in half. And below the, downstream from the railway, it was the Shot Tower, which had been there for about 150 years, I suppose. And that was working. It was one of the few things on the site which actually was operating. The men under the arches. And the Shot Tower is a, an extraordinary device. It's a factory chimney, with a staircase inside it, and you take hot lead up to the top, and you drop it down, in drops, and the drops don't make tears as you'd expect, to get thicker as they go, they're absolutely perfect globes, and they're tiny, you see, as you know, I mean, they're absolutely wee, like the shot you get inside a cartridge. And there were two old men, one at the bottom and one at the top. The one at the top was the one with the hot lead, and he dropped it down into a cold bucket at the bottom, and it cooled it off at once, and then it was taken away and sold. And these two old boys were rather like two old fishermen in a boat, they'd been there for years. And they didn't speak, most of the time they were separated by 150 feet of shaft. Later on, I remember, a girl came to us and said she was a poet, and could Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 107 she come and sit at the foot of the Shot Tower, she thought it might be inspiring. And I remember I gave her an admission card to do this, but she never sent me any poem, and I never heard what had happened. Anyway, we reported to the top council, we thought this was absolutely perfect. It had the most wonderful view, from Big Ben to St. Paul's. It had the river as one boundary. It had ... which ... were opportunities for river steamers. It had a Tube at Waterloo, and a Tube at Charing Cross, buses surrounding the site in all directions. So all the crowds could get there and away, easily. It was bang central. And it wasn't too big. And the Council, there were two Councils, one was the Executive, which, in fact, did all the work, which Gerald Barry headed. And the other was the Council of Nobs, and they were the sort of, you could call them a sort of French Academy. I mean, they were people like Kenneth Clark, and A P Herbert, and J.B. Priestley, and sort of famous people in the arts world. There wasn't an Arts Council in those days. There was a military artistic enterprise, called CEMA, which was Council for Education and Music and the Arts, which was a sort of thing which Kenneth Clark more or less ran. And the Council was presided over, the whole thing was presided over by Lord Ismay, who was a General, and a very splendid, sort of pug-faced man, indeed, he was known as "Pug". Always in a bowler hat, and he was one of Churchill's greatest friends. And this was a master stroke, I think, of, of Morrison's, because Churchill was against the Festival, surprisingly enough, because he thought it was a Labour racket, a Socialist advanced camp, you know, give them the South Bank, and they'd have England, before you knew where they were. But, having Ismay in charge of it, you see, he had to keep quiet, he, all his grumblings and criticisms, he had to keep out of the papers. And Ismay was extremely good, fair, nice, decisive, excellent Chairman. He remained right to the very end, and everybody loved him, because he was, like all soldiers, he was very polite and decisive and firm. And so he, he was the Top Council. They didn't meet terribly often, but they, sort of kept an eye on what we were doing, and on the finances. And they had to go to the Government if we wanted any more money. So anyway, it was decided, some time in November, I think, to take on the South Bank, and the, and the agreement with the GLC, or the LCC as it was still then, was that the LCC would build the Embankment, and fill up the earth behind it, so you had a hard edge. And that went from County Hall, right down to Waterloo Bridge, underneath Charing Cross railway bridge. And that was one contractor which the LCC had, and they were fenced off for the entire length, and nobody bothered with them. They just got on with it. They just built the retaining wall, faced it with stone, put the railings on the top, the lamp posts, planted the trees, and everything. The LCC undertook to do a survey of the site, found out where all the gas, water, sewage and mains were, because it Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 108 was all hidden, at that time, under an enormous pyramid of rubble, which had been moved from bomb sites all over London. It was rather dramatic. It was a great hill of bricks, broken bricks. All that had to be taken away, which the LCC did, and this was, I suppose, during, from November till about March, they were doing this, the LCC. And then the Embankment wall, of course, wasn't finished until '51 really, because it was quite an elaborate thing, keeping the water out and everything. Anyway, once we'd got this, and we were very very excited about it. Meanwhile, the man who was writing the script, who was called Ian ... what?

When you say story, what do you mean?

Well, it had been decided in the Executive, that the theme of the Festival of Britain should be the achievements of Britain, in all facets, and effort. From agriculture and mining, to industry and the arts. And that these achievements were due to the British people, and the British land and resources. Those were the twin, the twin things. The land and the people. Between them, they had done what they had done. I mean, it all has to be very simplified, as you can imagine.

What was the name of the man?

He was called Ian Cox, and he had been in the BBC for years. He was a scientist. And very good he was. I mean, he worked jolly fast, it was like getting out, I imagine, a television serial on the history of England, or something. And what we had to decide was, while he was doing this story, all we knew, it was going to be the land and the people. How we would handle this. And the first thing which was very obvious was, the site was divided into two, therefore one side of the railway bridge you put the land, and the other side of the railway bridge you put the people.

You mean the Hungerford Bridge?

Yes, Hungerford Bridge. But as the upstream side was slightly larger, the land would have to take in the main arrival points, the tube station, and the assembly piazzas and the, what you might call the slightly service side of the exhibition. So that, so that decided on that. Well, then, we decided it be sequential, but not compulsory. And that the beginning should be, roughly speaking, where the Shell building is, a little bit further downstream, because that Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 109 was, you could have a bridge over to Waterloo, over Waterloo Road, a pedestrian bridge, and the Tube came from underneath, so people could pour over the bridge from Waterloo, come up from the Underground, come across Hungerford Bridge on the over-bridge, it was perfect. And everybody came at all levels, you see. So, having got the centre, drew in centre, you then had to decide how the thing would go, and it worked out as a very good figure of eight. You started with the land, the origins of the land, that is archaeology, and geology, and that moved into mining. And then when you'd extracted your steel and coal, and what you did with it, that was, that became industry, that was going down, round, like in a slow circle to the right. By then you'd hit the river, so then you did ship building, and the British naval and nautical tradition. And then, all along the front, by the river, and then you hit the railway bridge, And so then you had transport, back to the starting point, so you'd done a circle - land, below the land, industry, shipbuilding, transport, home. Then you'd start off again, and you'd do the people, and you'd go under the bridge, and you'd have first schools and children, and then you had homes and gardens, and then you had sport, and, of course, by then, you're getting near the river again. And the Festival Hall, which is where it is now, that was the centre of the artistic side, exhibitions and music, fine arts. So you'd done a figure of eight. You'd started in two sort of starting takes - left, land. And then you could take it in either order, it didn't make any difference. And that was the sort of simplest way of putting it. But, of course, in addition, you had to have big administrative buildings. You had to have reception areas for VIPs and things. You had to have restaurants, you had to have lavatories, and all the, what you might call, supporting activities. But, funnily enough, it all fell into place so easily, that it was quite sinister, in a way. We thought it was so simple, must be some fault. And, of course, the main fault was that in the first one, all these activities, the land, mining, industries, had, all went round the edge of this site, and there was a hole in the middle, a huge hole. Downstream, that hole was filled with the Festival Hall. Upstream was a hole. And so Ian Cox said, "This should be British inventions and scientific achievement." And so we thought to ourselves, the Design Group, said, "That's fine what shape we'll make it?' And we thought, "Well, as it was a hole, we'll make it a round. We'll make it a dome because it was an unfamiliar building in England." And, of course, it had to be the largest dome in the world. I mean, there's no point in not, in an exhibition. So we looked up statistics, and the largest dome in the world then was about 298 feet, or something. So I remember, Misha said, "Well, let's call it 365, it's a nice easy sum to remember." So that became the Dome of Discovery.

Why hadn't the English had domes? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 110

Why what?

Why hadn't the English had domes?

I don't know. It's not a very English architectural form. It's a classical form, it comes from Italy, really, and Byzantium. And we've had a few domed churches, but on the whole, you don't, you see cupolas, but never big huge arenas covered with domes. Plenty of them about now, because they make sports centres and stadiums.

But in theory, there's no practical reason why we don't?

No. But, then, I went off to see, we'd by then appointed a consulting engineer, Freeman Fox and Partners, and they were the people who'd been consultants for the Crystal Palace originally. And they'd also built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I'd been to see two other engineers who said they couldn't build a 365 foot dome in the time. It just wasn't feasible. So then I went to see Sir Ralph Freeman, who was a tiny little man, white haired, bright blue eyes, sitting behind his desk. And I said, "Well, here we've got this problem. We've got a hole in the middle of the whole exhibition. It's got to be 365 feet across. We don't know how it's to be held up." And he said, "No problem. Absolutely no problem at all." He was about 76. "Absolutely no problem. Leave it with me and I'll get something out by the end of the month." So that was wonderful. And it was off our plate, you know, we suddenly felt, "Well, there's something fixed." And then we, we divided the site into two. Misha took the upstream, the land, and I took the downstream, a sort of co-ordinate, coordinating of architects following each side of the railway bridge. Ralph Tubbs was the, another architect who was on our little group. He was given the dome to do with Ralph Freeman. And James Holland, and James Gardner were the two display people. James Gardner downstream, and James Holland upstream. So, within about a week, sitting in that Pont Street house, I suppose things began to take charge of themselves, you'd take a decision, and, what was nice, you see, you couldn't change the decision really, it was too late. Made that, that was the way it had to be.

So this whole thing of it being said to you, there wasn't going to be any architecture involved, I mean, that became clearly ...

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 111

Well, that was a sort of, that was a rather, that was a rather, what I might call a slightly lay attitude, that why don't we do the whole thing in tents? Or why don't we do it like a Jungle Jim, the whole thing of scaffolding, to build the whole place of ordinary standard tubular scaffold? Any shape you like, like Lego, just wander around. Tents were struck out because of the, the frailty of tents, and the problems of insuring some of the displays of very very expensive and elaborate working models, you know, and, and the fire people were very anxious about it, and, you see, in those days, you only had, really, canvas. Nowadays, of course, you can have tents that'll span the Thames without any trouble, of Teflon and stuff like that. In those days, it didn't exist. So we then had to decide, do we do it in a standard form, every, every building is the same, has the same component parts, like Meccano? And each architect is given a box of Meccano, and he's given the story that he's got to enclose, and the site he mustn't go beyond, and the budget he mustn't spend more than. Now we've, our great decision then, of course, was, what do we do about the architects? Do we have one architect upstream, and one architect downstream? Because Misha Black and I both decided that we'd have too much to do, to do a great big building ourselves, because we, we were so busy coordinating and, and endless, endless meetings with contractors and things. So we decided that we would give each chapter of the history to a different architect or firm of architects. And we'd have several ones which were competitions. And the competition ones, you couldn't wait for a competition, because by the time you've set out the conditions, got the designs in, made the judgement, the exhibition would be open. So you could only have small things like restaurants, and the most exciting competition was the Skylon, that was a competition one. Because that, you needn't have had it, you see, if it was a failure, as a competition.

So what was the competition?

The two competitions, the main ones were a restaurant on the riverside, because right on the riverside would be almost the last thing to be built. And the Skylon, which was the vertical feature.

The Skylon happened to win, but it can't have been a competition for a Skylon?

Yes there was. It was called, a competition for a vertical feature. And some people just did a plume of steam 300 feet high, roaring up like a geyser in New Zealand. And, I mean, there Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 112 were all sorts of mad ideas. Moveable cranes, and those sorts of things. The Skylon won because it was the simplest, and cleverest, and the most dramatic.

And was the competition open to anybody, or were people invited to

No, it was open to anybody. But the architects for each chapter were all invited. And that, of course, was an edgy business, because, in the end, there were 27 architects, each given a building, or a storey, and there were 27 acres on the site, so, and architects are pretty good at ego trips, and wanted their, each one wanted his building to be more interesting and exciting than the one next door. And we said we didn't want a box of funny hats, we wanted a serious solution, which was exciting.

Could they have used any materials whatsoever, or did you 1imit it?

The instruction was that all materials were so short that they should use as many materials as they tidily could, because you could start with a steel building, and the steel in England would run out, so you changed to concrete, and then the, the rods that reinforce the concrete would run out, so you'd have to change back to steel, and that three times happened with the Festival Hall. The one thing we were asked never to use if we could possibly avoid it, was wood, which was the only one you want to use, because you can saw it, and hit it, and hammer nails into it, and make it any length, and use it to span, or to prop. But wood was so short, that each, in the house building programme at the time, each house was given so many square feet of timber. And they weren't given any more. And if they ran out of it by bad design, that was hard luck. So the, one of the reasons why the Festival, in the end, was criticised, the South Bank Exhibition, was the fact that it was too bitty. Too many changes of material, and too many changes of colour. The colour was due to the fact that everybody had been used to khaki and grey and blue, and they were absolutely longing for strong colours. And the bittiness of the material changing all the time was partly due to the fact that nobody built anything except block houses and factories during the War, air raid shelters, and this great shortage. And the fact that everything was very sort of frail and spindly was due to two things. It was really, the main one was economy, because chair legs suddenly became like rods, knitting needles, because you used less steel and they were just as strong, or it ....

End of F1089 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1089-B Page 113

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 114

F1090 Side A

Are we off again?

Yes.

We reckoned that we worked very very fast. That got the orders for the South Bank about October, we had the master plan of how the buildings should be arranged, circulation, and the placing of each subject on the plan, by about Christmas. And all the architects appointed by January. The architects had their first sketches in by February, and the first spade went into the ground in May.

Didn't you start off by getting ill?

Getting ill?

Mmmm

Yes, I had chicken pox in the middle of it. Still, that enabled me to think. But the way, what happened, you see, by giving the problems to all these architects, Misha and I, and the other members of the Design Group, were free then to worry about other things, and there were many. There was not only the problems of the exhibits and how they were to be displayed, there were problems of things like, who's going to design the uniforms for the uniformed staff on the, on the ... who was going to design the typography of the tickets? There were millions, and millions, I mean, the agenda every day on the desk was terrifying. What you had to do really was, in fact, shove it off, by saying, "Well, we'll get so and so to do this, and so and so to do that. And he's got to produce his designs by two weeks time", and then we'd say okay, or not okay. But, the other main problem was, that subsidiary to this exhibition, the Design Group, were responsible in the chain of command, for the other subsidiary exhibitions. There was one huge one in Belfast on agriculture, and there was a huge one in Glasgow on heavy industry, and then James Holland, who was besotted by ships, we decided to suggest, which, and it was accepted, there was an aircraft carrier, surplus to requirements, was converted into a miniature South Bank exhibition. And this was a separate design job which Jim took on. And this sailed round England, stopping off at all the ports, so they all saw a bit of the South Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 115

Bank. And there were small things, like we sent some buses round Europe, just to say that England's going to have a wonderful time in two year's time, somebody had to design that. And so we, we, what was, I thought was the most interesting thing was that the, nobody had any experience of ever doing any of this, you see. And all, there were, nobody who could design exhibitions much, so you had to go to shop window people, or poster designers, and a man like Henrion, who was a very very brilliant graphic designer, he was a poster designer, had never done anything in two dimensions in his life, in three, and he was given the problem, with the architect, of telling the story of British agriculture. Now, the architect had a reasonably easy time, because he was dealing with a building, and he was used to that, to decide what he was going to do. I mean, Brian O'Rorke was the architect, and he decided to do a huge a Dutch barn, which was almost sort of standard unit. But the inside, Henrion had to find people to help him do this, he wanted a huge tapestry, about 30 feet high, of the seasons, Spring, you know, which had to be woven, so as the request was for participatory stuff as much as possible, this was given to the Women’s Institutes all over England, "You do January, and you do April", whatever it was, they all to a master design of course. Then he had to find somebody to make a huge bee, about 14 feet long, you see, a model bee, and he had to decide what sort of, and find somebody who would do it, which was quite difficult. What sort of fee do you pay them? Because, how long is it going to take? And what are they going to make it of? You see, these were all totally new problems, unfamiliar to graphic designers and typographers, and they did absolutely wonderfully. Didn't seem to make any difference. But the main one they did have difficulty with, as you can imagine, was in, for instance, agriculture. It was decided that we wanted live animals - horses, pigs, chickens, sheep. The agricultural pressure group said they couldn't have the same horse all through the exhibition, had to change the breed every week, so Henrion, the chief designer of the Pavilion, had to put in his budget, this sort of thing. "Transport of a horse to stay with a week, be fed, mucked out, taken away and exchanged with another horse of a different breed." The same with the cows, the same with the sheep, the same with the chickens. And you had to allow for veterinary attendance in case they got ill. You had to budget for, in certain animals, exercising. A man had to be paid to exercise them every morning before the exhibition opened. And all these things were off-beat really, as designers. I mean, they'd never come across it. Some of them who had been in the Services, didn't find it all that different from a Service problem, because if you were a soldier, and, of a sort of modest rank, and you were towed across a stream, and all you had was a piece of string, you were left to it, you see. I mean, nobody bought anything else, so you had to find it. And if you decided to fill the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 116 stream with old petrol cans or whatever it may be, or go across on a rope by hanging old Magnita wheels on it, or something, this was the improvisation side, which the War had been very helpful in, in, what's the word? Inspiring. Because, because when people are in difficulty, and with horrible time pressures, they become wonderfully full of ideas. And one hardly ever was held up by people not having a good idea. And the other thing was, of course, it's a familiar thing to say, that the Services had inculcated, more than anything else, a sense of responsibility. And if you said to somebody, "Well, that's your job. It's got to be done by Wednesday week. It mustn't cost more than so and so, and I'll see you when it's finished." And You didn't go back, except in a sort of social way, "Hello. Getting on all right?" sort of business. And that, of course, needs a sort of national spirit which you get, I imagine, in building the pyramids, in a rather lower sort of way, in that they were slaves, poor things, and they didn't have much initiative. But the people who were building it, every morning had to think up a new way of getting a stone up to a certain position. And if you're all joining in the, in one shared enterprise, with very carefully delineated responsibilities, it's very inspiring, in fact. So the, the number of quarrels and complaints and, and, sort of, "Can't I have another five feet on my boundary, cos I just want to fit in a new sort of ....?" was very very small. They were all extremely professional.

Didn't you say you had a lot of strikes?

We had a larger number of strikes than we anticipated, actually. Partly because the weather was so dreadful. It poured with rain for almost two and a half years. Partly because there is a long tradition in the exhibition world, of quick strikes. The Ideal Home Exhibition, the British Industries Fair, the exhibition contracting trade, had a bad reputation for downing tools the last week, and saying they wanted another ten bob an hour, otherwise they'd walk off, you know. So we did have quite a lot of strikes, but they weren't tremendously long, and they weren't vicious, and there was no sort of riotous behaviour or anything. It was fairly straightforward, handled by shop stewards, and things, it was perfectly straightforward. The complications were that, in the building industry, you've got to keep contracts separate. The man who is building the river wall was a separate contractor from the man who was building behind it. So they had to have a fence between them, because they sometimes had different rates of pay, and that sort of thing. And then when it was decided that the Army would build a footbridge across the Thames, the Army, of course, mustn't work on the same site as a civilian contractor. The Army was all Royal Engineers, so they had to be given a little sort of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 117 compound of their own where, where they worked and assembled the bridge, and pushed it across. And there had to be no contact between them, which was, that was a daily sort of problem. But as, as the thing went on, the difficulties really began to get difficult when they, worst, when there was nowhere to put anything, because all the roads had been heaved up to put in sewers and electric cables and ... so there was a very limited passage for trucks bringing in cement or wood, or objects. And it was a nightmare when the objects began to arrive, because some of the objects were very big. I mean, we had a full size locomotive, and a full size aeroplane, and, and the transport would be, there were masses of trucks and lorries, and ... and in the seaside section, in the shipbuilding, there was a huge ship's propeller, you know, about 30 feet across. Well, getting that into the site, finding somewhere to put it. Where can you find a spot to tip the crate off? This is the nightmare. And in the end it, it became a sort of two-storey site, that when the crates had been emptied of the exhibits, people would move in and start a site office, you know, somewhere to store things, and somewhere to have ... have brew up rooms for the staff.

Who decided what the objects should be?

The architecture?

No, who decided what these objects were going to be?

Oh, thank God that wasn't anything to do with us! That came under Ian Cox who was the Head of Content, if I can put it that way. He'd worked out the story, he had the contacts, he had his own sub-committees advising him about sheep, or, or transformers, or radios, or motor cars, or whatever it was. He had these little separate expert committees, who told him that he must have this, and don't bother with that.

And then in the exploration side, which was in the enterprise section, we had some husky dogs. There was a sort of Arctic theatre, and these gave a performance every hour. They sort of came in in artificial snow, and barked, and were fed, and well, they had to be exercised every day, and they had to have their vet and things. So all these extraordinary outside building, or outside graphics problems, were dealt with with extreme efficiency. And, underneath us all, who were the sort of amateurs really, were these very professional and wonderful road engineers, services engineers, structural engineers, and quantity surveyors, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 118 who calculated costs all the time. And everything had to be monitored. Every month we had to say if there were any extras, and if so, why. And the, we hived off the, the Belfast and Glasgow people, locally up there, and we said, "Well, really, we'd just like to see, when you're ready to show us, what your thing is like, and we won't interfere too much." We couldn't do it. And there was an architectural exhibition down at Poplar, because Gerald was very keen that some of the stuff should remain. The South Bank, a lot remains, the Embankment, and the trees and the layout, and the things on the Festival Hall, of course. And the footbridge remained for a time, and the Battersea Funfair, that was hived off too, to James Gardner, he took that with Osbert Lancaster and John Piper, as his main collaborators for ideas. And I was concerned with the other one in Poplar, which was a, a sort of neighbourhood unit, down in the East End, bombed flat, and we put up houses, a couple of churches, a shopping centre, and a sort of little community outfit which is still there. What was interesting ...

Whereabouts is it?

It's, it's in Poplar, just off the Commercial Road. And what was interesting, of course, it was done in the days of great shortages, so it was very very simple, roughly speaking, rather cottagey Welwyn Garden City stuff. Houses had roofs with tiles on, smallish windows, it was quite, it was done by Frederick Gibberd, and the churches were done by different architects. But now the, all these little houses have been sold off to the owners, under the council house buying proposals of the Thatcher Government, and of course, they've turned every house into a different one. Some of them, they've covered with that sort of artificial Cotswold stone, and bought little Georgian porches, and, and so the whole thing looks very very mysterious, because ours was, of course, tremendously architectural control, of white and black paint, and careful little brick paths, and you know, architects telling people how to live.

So how do you feel about it now?

Well, the houses are jolly well planned, and everybody loves them, and the ... it was very mousey, because Berlin did something like that just before the War, they took an area of Stuttgart, and they gave a different, little tiny area to each architect. That became a museum of the Modern Movement in the late thirties. It's quite interesting to go down now. But, of course, they haven't permitted artificial Cotswold stone to be nailed up. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 119

So did you actually design these, or were you ...?

No, I didn't, no. The only bit I designed, I took over the Shot Tower which I, was my favourite building on the whole site, and the, the, while we were excavating round it, we found an old barge dock, which we filled with water, because it was attached to the river, and turned it into a, a sort of model yacht, and duck displays, and there was a pavilion where we had, we had little tiny dinghy displays, which were changed regularly, and there was a sort of boat-house, where we were building and re-rigging those, and I did that. And the surround to the Shot Tower, which had at the foot of it, a model of the Crystal Palace, which, which is about, I suppose, about 30 feet long, with the Hallelujah Chorus belting out of it, and, so I didn't, that was the only one I did. And I, I contributed, I suppose, quite a lot to, or quite a little, to a lot of other ones, but I only had time for a little tiny one. And I liked it, because I was, the Shot Tower was so marvellous. And we put the Shot Tower, we put a, anti-aircraft gun mounting, and a great dish to send messages to the moon, which was regarded as frightfully advanced in those days. And the Army provided the antiaircraft gun, and hauled it up the chimney and the rope broke and it dropped to the bottom of the shaft, which was about 150 feet I suppose. And the whole Shot Tower jumped off the foundations, it dropped again, just about half an inch out of where it had been - one solid cigarette. Thank God! And I had, my other main worries, apart from liaising the, all the downstream architects, I suppose was, I was there to mainly liaise with the GLC, with the Festival Hall people, Leslie Martin, and Peter Maurier, and anything one was interested in. If one was particularly interested, for instance, in the landing stage for the river boats, one took a hand in it. But, on the whole, I never seemed to stop running from one place to another, as usual.

So what sort of hours were your working, and what was the atmosphere?

The hours were long, I suppose, but then one was young. In the summer they were very long, in the winter they weren't, because building doesn't go on, until we were in desperate straits, after dark, because it's so expensive, all the floodlighting, the overtime, and everything else. No, one used to meet, we only met once a week for dinner, and post-dinner, the Design Group, post-dinner working, which would go on until 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock, but we were all youngish and, and excited.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 120

And you were mainly on site, or you were also in the office, or what?

We had offices in, just adjoining the Savoy Hotel, so I could look out of my window, across, actually, at the site, down that little road. So from my window I could see how everything was going. But I didn't have a site office. There was a site office which everybody could use, but I didn't have one. And my grey-haired lady, Kate, and I, had this room. I did a lot of drawings, because I also did ...

Do the drawings still exist?

Yes. They're all in the Record, National Record at Kew. Absolute mountains of them. Rather moving, going through them. Because I had to do a lot of talking and publicity work as well, giving lectures on, on what we were up to, and so I, I had a very interesting time.

And how were the artists chosen?

By us, of course! Well, what happened was, the artists ... we asked every architect to put aside, in his budget, after he'd dealt with what he thought it was going to cost, and what he thought the inside was going to cost. We then asked him to allow for a small restaurant, a snack bar, or eating place, and a lavatory, a public lavatory. So every pavilion had a little coffee shop, and every pavilion had a little bunch of lavatories, so that coped with most of the normal worries. They were asked to suggest a sum for the fine arts, and would they choose, or recommend the artist they would like to work with? They weren't guaranteed to have them, but they, that was the first pool, which was very disappointing. Very few architects had heard of anybody except Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash. And then they'd sort of run out of ideas, so, we had our ideas, and Huw Wheldon, who was running the fine arts and music side of the Festival, which was a separate thing, ... and we and him got together and got out a rota of artists.

When you talked before about being a student in London, you said you never went to galleries.

Mmmm

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I mean, how much did you know about painting and sculpture at this staqe?

Not very much. Not very much. There had been quite a lot of, during the war, funnily enough, Penguins on modern painters, sort of, Edward Burra, and Edward Bawden, and all the, all the war artists, we knew. And I think we got a pretty good collection in the end.

Who did you get?

Well, sculptors - we had Henry Moore, and Epstein, and our main, in the sculpture line, we had, our main heroes, so to speak, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Epstein, who, I suppose, were the three top sculptors in the country at the time. And my memory of the other ones is, there were various fairly middle of the road people, like Karen Johnson, who'd do a charming Renoirish nude, you know, for the homes and gardens section, or something. And the painters, we had Sutherland and Piper, and, oh, I can't remember any of them. We had virtually everybody who could still walk! And some of them were big abstract painters, and some of them were, some of them did the, the sort of Birth of England, huge sort of origins of the earth, and flames and rocks, and huge great things. And they all, they all coped with the size, because sometimes they had huge areas to cover.

And did they all sort of adapt to working as part of a team, and being told to work within limitations?

Mostly. Mostly. Well, there were some difficulties. Mostly practical difficulties, that they hadn't been used to climbing a ladder, or ... and they all had to have, of course, union cards, became members of the Signwriters Union. And Felix Topolski did a huge history of the British Empire, under the arches. It was absolutely enormous, about 30 feet high, by about 60 feet long. He didn't take any trouble over that, I mean, any fuss, just got on with it. So the, and the other thing, the two other important points, were the landscape - and we had a very good, two very good landscape designers, who dealt with all our planting. And we had a very good lighting man, he was a Dutchman, from Philips lighting, and who was a sort of world expert on the combination of underwater lighting, and flood lighting, and mystery lighting and ... And then, of course, we had an events side, because every day of the exhibition, something happened. Every day, for instance, the, there was a, a Changing of the Guard section came down from the barracks, and marched up and down playing their military band. And then in the evening there'd Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 122 be Joe Loss dancing on the piazza, Joe Loss and co, in his dinner jacket. That was extraordinary.

So once it, tell me about the opening, anyway.

The opening, for me, started, I had to get a tailcoat and top hat for the occasion, because everybody was going to be there. And I went first to the office to see if there were any desperate messages, saying somebody had fallen down or anything. The only thing, I promise you the only thing in my office was a roneo'd slip saying, "Your appointment ceases as from today", signed by the Treasury chap, not a word of, I mean, it was roneo' d, didn't even say, "Dear Casson", or anything. Didn't even say, "Thank you for three years work." So I was rather cross. I thought, this is pretty sharp hatched, and I went over to meet the Minister of Works, who was Mr. Stokes in those days, and he wanted to walk round the site at half past seven that morning. And so I met him, and we walked round, and it was a pretty miserable day. sunshine and showers, and not much sunshine.

And the rain began really round about midday, and becoming sort of slight drizzly, which was unfortunate. And we were each allotted a member of the Royal Family, and King and Queen, and Gerald and Ismay.

Did Churchill, I mean, Churchill was out by then, wasn't he?

He was Prime Minister then, was he? No, no, it had gone back to Labour, it was Attlee. It was Attlee. We'd been through Churchill. And there was a sudden ...

Attlee was, presumably, there.

Attlee was there, oh, the Cabinet was all there. And I had, as far as I remember, Princess Marina and her two children, now Princess Alexandra and I can't remember who the other one is. So that was easy for me.

Hadn't you ...

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-A Page 123

And somebody else, Cecil Cooke, the manager, the management/administrating chief, he had Queen Mary in her wheelchair. So we all, well, we all tootled round which was fairly exhausting, about two hours, and they all ... But before that, we'd had a service in St. Paul's, to start it all off. So I had to design ...... I remember designing that with my assistant. At the last minute they decided they wanted the King to address troops, the nation, from the steps, and not inside the Cathedral, and it had to have an awning, because of the pigeons, so we had to design a dais and an awning, and wire it up, all within 24 hours. That was quite something!

And then, what was it like at the Festival?

What was it like?

Mmmm.

The whole thing?

Mmmmm.

Well, I think it was extremely popular. I think we had about eight million visitors. It came out on, it was finished on the day, and not too much over the budget. Very modest, because we'd been very very carefully watched by this Treasury.

End of F1090 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 124

F1090 Side B

... any money, or was it ...

Oh, I don't think so. Well, I mean, it sort of paid it's running expenses, but the, it was crowded every day. Long queues in front of most pavilions, which was difficult. Battersea, the only disaster was Battersea, because that, being built on grass, simply disappeared below about four inches of Passchendaele mud. And they had an awful time. They had to bring in loads of gravel and just pour it down to, poor old James Gardner, he had an absolute nightmare. But that made a lot of money, and stayed up for two or three years. And I don't think it, as a piece of architectural high spirits, it was, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't tremendously novel. I mean, I suppose it was very close, you see, we were all bottled up since 1939, hadn't done any architecture, and we were still prisoners of the thirties. And the thirties, the big exhibitions of the thirties had been Stockholm and Paris, '37, a big international ... and so the language in which it was put over, was really late thirties, which none of us had ever done, and none of, none of England had ever seen. So it seemed more novel than it was. But, in fact, it was a pretty straight development of the sort of steel, aluminium, and wire, and bright colours, and masses of plate glass, and, I suppose it was criticised. By the time it was over, at the end of it, the, the normal swing started to come against it, towards what was called, in those days, Brutalism, and you, you remember in the Hayward Gallery, you see, which was a sort of reaction against the prettiness, as it was seen, of the Festival, it was criticised, I suppose, for being effeminate, or too light on its feet, and not dogmatic enough, and, I mean, you could say that was true all over - too many colours, and too many flags, and general sort of - bit frivolous. Because architects are very serious. I'm talking entirely about the architectural profession, because none of this, I think was the view of the public, they just thought it was terrific. Because you could see it from the far shore, if you were walking along the Embankment, and you could just pop across.

And when the idea was first started, the whole press was very against it, wasn't it?

The whole press was against it.

But what was the feeling by the time it opened?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 125

What was what?

By the time it opened, what was the general feeling?

Oh, oh, I think everybody had come round to it. I mean, what you might call the worst sort of Conservative opinion, remained suspicious of it. I mean it, it was quite rare, till the very end, when it really became, largely through the children, I think, something that you just bloody well had to go to, and it's no good saying you don't want to go there, the commonplace, down there, socialist nonsense, which, there was a hard, hard-core of that opposition, because, I mean, I think, it's true to say that the nation was in a very socialist mood, you see, because while this was going on, one has to remember the Korean War was going on, not doing very well. So the rationing was worse than it had been during the War, a great deal of privation, of that kind. The, the Labour Government had begun their huge programme of nationalisation, the railways and coal. They'd started the new universities plans, and they'd started the new towns, and I'd been working on the new towns before I'd got into the Festival. I mean, all that great socialist tide, borne on the backs of the returning ex-Service people, they didn't want to go back to the, the old systems, so the, I mean, I could see that the Conservative Party were a bit nervous of it, because this looked as if it might be rather fun,. and not sort of grey, traditional idea of grey-faced men in grey offices telling, going through the number of buckets of sand that had been made this week, or whatever. So I think, I really think it was very very popular. Some people said that it was devised really, as a lollipop, you see, to stop people grumbling. Shove a pink folly in their mouths, in the shape of the Festival, and for a couple of years, they'll think things are going to be okay. I mean, this was one criticism, and that it wasn't a genuine outburst of national relief at survival after the War. And, sort of rebuilding confidence, which was part of the idea. We didn't get many foreign visitors, but then we, we didn't expect to really, because it was a totally inward looking thing. But I think it was, what was nice about it, no one was taught to hate anybody, or to hate anything, particularly, which was nice. And that came, I think, from a herbivore leadership of Gerald and his colleagues. It was, it was, as I was saying, it was Fabian, really, it was Hampstead Fabian, really.

And how often did you actually go to it?

How often did I? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 126

How often?

Oh Well, to start with, I went every day, for weeks, because although I wasn't responsible for anything, I was, I was responsible to myself, of seeing that standards were, that people weren't sort of bringing in half-timbered huts to sell ice-cream, and putting them in the middle of the lawn, you know, so easily happens - a little bit of local enterprise from one of the sub-managers - "Don't bother the bloody Design Group lot! I've got a friend whose got a caravan disguised as a Tudor hut, we can get that in." You know

But because you, they'd said that you were fired on the day it opened, you could just have walked away from it, could you?

Oh yes. I didn't have any clearing up of the accounts, or anything. I could've walked away really.

Did it feel like your Festival the whole time?

Yes. I was quite cross when it opened, in some secret way, because we'd owned it for three years, you know.

And had you done any other work during those three years?

No

And had it changed you ...

Well, then when it finished, you see, about a week afterwards, I was sent for by George Brown, who was, sorry Mr. Stokes who'd walked round with me, he was Lord President of the Council, but George Brown was the Minister of Works, he sent for me, and he said, "I suspect you're in great trouble because when you've done, or been involved in a work this size, everybody thinks you're too grand to do ordinary work, and not grand enough to do big work. So if you're actually on your uppers, let me know, and I'll see if I can push something, Government work, in your way. Because I know that Basil Spence when he won the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 127

Coventry Cathedral competition, he was almost bankrupted by it, because everybody said, 'No good asking Basil to do anything, he's got a Cathedral on his hands, for God's sake!"' And I'd been knighted, you see, at the end of this thing, which was very unexpected, because, I mean, it had been a tremendously team exercise. But anyway, I was.

What did you feel about that?

What did I feel?

Mmm.

Jolly pleased!

What difference did it make?

I remember telling the children in their bath, they were about six or seven at the time, they were having their bath, and I said, "I'm going to be a knight tomorrow", and they said, "Does that mean we shall have a butler?" And I said,

"No, it doesn't, I'm afraid! We go on living in this house."

So what difference did it make?

Well, it made the difference which it usually makes, if people think you're rather grand, in the sense of jobs, that if you ring up Sir Basil Spence, it's different from ringing up Basil Spence, because you think he's going to charge more, and be more difficult, and be surrounded by acolytes and things. And of course ...

Therefore it would be something you wouldn't want to have?

So, well, I, I, I can't say I was anything but very pleased, because ... I think it was hard on my colleagues who didn't get it, but ...

So what actually did you have to do when you became a knight, what did they do to you? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 128

What do you have to do?

Mmmm

Well, what you have to do, is to turn up on the day, and you're given a little talk in the picture gallery, all the honorands are marshalled together for the day, and they're addressed by a court official, who says, things like, "Don't forget to take your .... If you're, if you're receiving an order which involves something being put round your necks, don't forget to take your spectacles off, because they always get entangled otherwise. And the drill is that you go one step forward, and kneel, and go one step back, or whatever it is, all the drill, it's just like school! And any questions?" And then you're marshalled into a queue, and your family's been sitting in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace, listening to Gilbert and Sullivan, and you're in a queue which is out of sight, you see, the grand people first, you know, all the sort of Lords, and OM's, and the serious orders first. The Queen marches in with her, she has a chap,

Into where?

Into the ballroom. She comes from the other side, you've been coming in from one side, and she comes in from the other side, and she does the little tap on the shoulder, each shoulder with the sword.

PAUSE

... on a little, on a little sort of prayer desk, and she, she's handed a sword by one of the staff. She taps you on both shoulders, and you get up, and I can't remember now whether you shake hands, or just bow your head, and step backwards and say "Cheerio"!

And was it alarming, or enjoyable, or what?

It was all, I think it's always a bit alarming when you've got to remember some little formal drill, you know, if you're going to give a lecture, and they say would you please introduce the so-and-so and please don't trip over the wire, because that goes to the deaf aid of the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 129

Chairman of the Governors, and you know, all these things you've got to try and remember, and it makes you slightly edgy.

So what did you do that day, afterwards? Then what happened?

I don't think we did anything at all, as I remember. I don't think we celebrated in any way.

Did you feel different?

No. Just felt jolly pleased. But I was saved by, professionally, because my firm which was, had just survived the Festival period, because we were just starting building it up again, when the Festival thing came. And I had one, two partners, Neville Conder and Patience Clifford, and a tiny little office in the Fulham Road, and we hadn't got much work to do, and we ... little alterations, and exhibition stands and things, but then we were asked, because of the, because of the Festival, to enter a limited competition, two of us, for a big development in Cambridge, and the, that was entirely the result of the Festival, because before that, nobody 'd known who I was. They would never have conceived of asking me. And the other, the other entrant was an old man, I mean, he was older than me, and a steady old thing, good architect. But we won it. And that meant, that was a really big job, as far as we were concerned. And we're still working on it. I mean, it was a big Arts Faculties layout on, beyond The Backs for economics and history, and foreign languages, and Classics, and, and that we did that for about three years, I suppose, on the first stages, and that, we were then well-known for that, working on universities, and so we got a lot of work in other places - at Birmingham, and in Oxford, and Belfast and all university work, because the sort of rhythm carries you on, you know.

[GAP IN RECORDING]

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON, MAY 11th, 1990

... about this time, Robin Darwin had just begun his new regime at the Royal College of Art. The Royal College of Art had nearly died during the War. It had been moved up into Cumbria, and living in an old farm house. And it was down to about 20 students. And, indeed, the whole art educational system of the country was, was stagnant, and, as always, in England, about every 25 Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 130 years, they pull up the roots to see how it's doing, and it started pulling up the roots with Prince Albert, I suppose really, and then William Morris, and then Ruskin, and various Government Commissions. But in the old, olden days, really, ideas of art and design being taught together was that art was something which you applied to design. In other words, you took a perfectly ordinary pot, and painted a pretty flower on it, and that was, that made it a designed pot. And at the end of the War, Robin Darwin, who'd been in camouflage during the War, and who'd been a teacher, he'd been at Eton, but he taught first at Watford Grammar School, and then he went up to Newcastle, and he taught there, and he had very strong views on art and design, and he was a friend of Gordon Russell's. And Gordon Russell, who was a furniture designer of great distinction and integrity, Gordon had been made head of the Council for Industrial Design, which was founded after the War, to improve the design of English products. And it’s first attempt showing it’s existence, was "Britain Can Make It", at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There were very few things, most of the, it was nearly all window display, and hardly any objects. But anyway, Robin Darwin was asked by Gordon Russell, to write a specification for a re-born Royal College of Art, what he should teach. And Robin wrote this report, which was accepted by the Government, and as so often on these occasions, when you're asked to make a suggestion, people say, "Well, that's a good idea, why don't you do it?" And so Robin was, was put in charge of the, the new outfit. It had really no proper premises. The sculptors were given an iron shed in the service yard of the Natural History Museum. The interesting thing about that shed was that it was a prefab shed, it had been used in the Crimean War, and it was designed by Brunel. It had been dismantled and shipped and re-assembled, and it had come back and was sitting as a store room at the back of the Natural History Museum. The sculptors were put in there. The painters were camping in some, a couple of floors of the attics of the Victoria and Albert Museum. But the other departments, which included fashion and jewellery, and textiles, were scattered round South Ken. And textiles, the studios lived beneath the aeroplanes and balloons in the Science Museum. There was a gallery, a long gallery, full of balloons, big ones, and early aeroplanes. And the textile people were pushed up there, and the furniture people were in another house. And there were two houses in Cromwell Road, and all these separate departments, everybody was camping, and there was very little money for equipment and everything. But anyway, Robin's plan, really, was not really tremendously revolutionary. He believed very strongly that the fine arts and the applied arts should be always taught in the same institution, otherwise they both suffered from starvation, from each other's, from the other one that was missing. You see, the fine artist, I mean, I remember. Kitai used to say that every, every fine artists particularly the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 131 difficult ones, say abstracts or the very avant garde artists, should every now and again paint a normal picture, just to remember that they were citizens like anybody else, and that they shouldn't always be on the hotline to God. And Robin had this view, I think, too, although he strongly believed, of course, being a painter himself, that the fine arts were the aristocrats of the, of the art educational system. But he, his one revolutionary idea, I think was, in finding his staff. He took the line that he didn't mind what the discipline of the staff was, too much, so long as they were people who opened windows for students, and were people whose company he personally enjoyed. And when he started up, for instance, the Professor of Furniture was an architect. The Professor of Jewellery and Silversmith, was an architect. The man who did textiles was a sort of, I don't know what he was. He was a sort of vague, fringe journalist-cum-design manager figure. The painters, of course, were all painters, and the sculptors were all sculptors. And he had some difficulty in finding somebody to teach industrial design and engineering. And the other exception was the ceramics. He had a potter to do that. But they were all, as I say, they were none of them experts necessarily in their own field, but he thought they were the people to whom students would respond, and would respect. And, of course, he was lucky in the sense that people came back from the War very keen to get down to serious work, and they were crazy, as they are, or used to be in most art schools, to get on with their own work. So they were all keen to come, and they were all keen to stay late and they were all keen to learn. So it was not tremendously difficult to get a sense of enthusiasm. Well, Robin, being a great sort of, PR man is not quite the word, but he knew the importance of contacts and distinguished people. Being an old Etonian, he assembled a collection of trustees and College Councillors of people that he respected, and I remember the chief man of the time was John Redcliffe Maud, who was, in fact, in those days, he was the permanent civil service in the Ministry of Fuel, which doesn't exist now. But he was a very lively man, and he became, in fact, the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education, and he was a great ally. So there we all were, and I, and he wanted to start a school of architecture, and asked me to do this. And the RIBA, the Royal Institute of British Architects, said, "No, there are enough schools, we don't want any more architecture schools "

Did you want to do it?

Yes. I had done a teeny bit of teaching at Cambridge for about a year, soon after I left. Everybody in the outfit were close personal friends, whom I'd worked with on the Festival or in camouflage, and so it was very, disgracefully chummy in a way, perhaps, you might think, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 132 and everybody liked each other. And one felt the thing was going to rocket off. Such a sense of buzz. But we had this difficulty. You see, the Ministry wouldn't give us any money for a department of architecture if the RIBA didn't want it. And so Robin said, "Well, you teach architecture, it doesn't matter what we call it. We'll think of another title which is vaguely architectural, but you teach exactly what you like." And so he said, "Well, why don't we, why don't we start, there's no interior design being taught in the country at all, except by sort of debutante schools in Sloane Square, two terms, choosing cushion covers. And the RIBA were told this, that we were starting a school of interior design, and they were very cross, because they regarded interior design as a form of pastry cook, cookery, anyhow. And, but, we in fact taught architecture. All the staff were architects.

Who were?

Well, we had a series of people. We had people, we, I relied tremendously on part-time people. Peter Smithson was one, and Terence Conran, and a man called Norman Potter, who was a design philosopher, and a very bright, intelligent man. And I think we had most of the sparkiest architects came in and took, partially taught. And Robin Darwin was a great respecter of my wife's, I don't know how I can put it. I suppose integrity sounds a sort of pompous word, and she was extremely good with students, and she was frightfully good, and so she came in part-time, for instance, and then she became a permanent tutor. Really, sort of ran the department. And I stayed there, I suppose, from about, it must have been about 1955 till 1975.

And what did you actually teach?

Well, we taught architecture really.

You personally, what did you teach?

What did I teach?

We had a slightly traditional way of teaching, I suppose, in that you had, we had, we first had to find people who'd heard of interior design or wanted to do it, and so we collected an extraordinary bunch of people, because, in those days, all art exams were centrally examined Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1090-B Page 133 by the Department of Education. And there was a huge warehouse down in Bayswater, where the entire country's output was shown, and these were the ordinary degree subjects. And Robin wanted to make his post-graduate, you see. So the people who were running departments used to go down to the warehouse, and choose the people who they thought might prove good at what they taught. It was just a terrific gamble. And as there were no interior designers being taught, my wife and I went down choosing people we thought who had a sense of invention and, you know, you respond to people, or you don't respond to people's work. And our two first, four first students were two young architects from the AA in Bedford Square, who were wanting to enlarge their circumference, so to speak. And two girls, one who was an embroideress, called Joyce Evans, and the other was a girl called Julia Trevelyan, who wanted to be a theatre designer. And that was a sort of nucleus, and there were two or three other people. End of F1090 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 134

F1091 Side A

Robin was a very dynamic head of the Institution, I mean, he looked very alarming. He had a black moustache, and huge black spectacles, and he was rather a heavy man, and chain smoked. And he worked like a maniac all the time. He was always sending little minutes. They were always rather sharp, you know, "I see you've been so pin-headed as to ask so and so to come and lecture. You must realise the man's a charlatan. Please cancel the arrangement immediately." This was the sort of note you'd get in the morning.

And did you cancel?

Well, it depended on whether it was sensible or not. I respected his judgment very very much, because he was a terrific driver. And, being a showman as well, he soon gathered round him, enough influential people to come down and talk, and to, and to help him with getting properties painted up and useable. And he, he, the sculptor, Frank Dobson, who was the head of the sculpture school, he was happy in his iron shed, he said, "We sculptors are blissful. Leave us alone, we don't want any new buildings or anything. It's a wonderful areas white room with a tin roof, couldn't be better." So they were left alone. Carel Weight was head of painting.

What was he like?

And Moynihan taught there, and Johnny Minton.

And what were they like?

And ...Well, you know what painters are. They were very, a very close community. They all had been friends for a very long time, and they had a special table in the senior common room which in most art schools would be called a cafeteria, but the, one of Robin's achievements, was to get it, get the whole of the school onto a university basis, so we got our money from the University Grants Committee, not through the Ministry of Education. You know, as you know, the Ministry of Education used to give money to the University Grants Committee, who are all vice-chancellors, and say, "You sort that out. That's the total money Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 135 for the country, and you decide whether a new professor is wanted at Sheffield, or a new department of psychology at East Anglia", whatever it was. And we were under that system, you see. And that worked very well, because the Darwin family, it had more or less run Cambridge for years in the early part of this century. So his contacts were extremely good. And gradually the College became a very a celebrated place, and the fashion show every year. And a girl called Madge Garland, who had been poached from Voque was head of fashion. And there was an annual fashion show. And there was the annual exhibition of the students' work, and it became a sort of famous institution, very very quickly, I suppose, in about, by about 1960, it was, as I say, a greatly respected and famous place. And then, and then they had sort of, and Robin ran, ran, ran rather smart annual balls, the Royal College of Art Ball, because the Chelsea Arts Ball had disintegrated, and nobody went to it any more, because it was too messy, and too many drunks, and so he started a black tie sort of ball, and he got, he got Prince Philip as the Chairman of the College Council, or Visitor, I think he was called. And it was enormous fun. And the painters, of course, were very interesting, because, as I say, they all sat at a separate table, and although they, if you sat down there, they wouldn't actually say, "Push off", it was made clear that if there was a painter looking for a seat, "Would you mind moving to the other lot of ... plumbers and potters, and whatever you are doing?" But gradually, as the years went by, and Robin instituted extra departments like holography, and films. Films was a very early department. There was no film school in the country, and he started a film school. He built up the graphics, it was run by a, an ex-camouflage friend of his, Richard Guyatt, and Dick Guyatt collected some absolutely top illustrators in the country. So the Graphics and Illustration Department became very very strong, and gradually the, I think the sort of golden thread began to desert the painters a bit, and some of the liveliest, wittiest, most inventive people, were beginning to go into, first into graphics, and then into films, and, as somehow being more challenging than banging away on canvas day after day. And, of course, we, we had a number of very very successful painters who, who went on to make fortunes, or just be very successful. But I think the, I think it's true that the, it may be still true, I don't know, that the painters were having a little difficulty in remaining the aristocrats. They behaved as the aristocrats in that they kept themselves to themselves, and they were regarded rather officially as the aristocrats, but I think it began twisting a little bit. And gradually, but not for a long time, right till the end of my time, the, the people who designed motor cars, automotive design, and things, I suppose this is partly American influence, they also began to move up the scale of, of social acceptance. Before they'd been regarded as sort of banging away in the basement, rather. So it was an interesting, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 136 it was a very interesting period for me, because, and for all of us, because the place was being built up into a sort of institution from nothing. And then Robin retired, and we had a succession of rather short-term Rectors, as they were called, and Lionel Esher, who was an architect, was one of the first, and he, poor man, was a man of the most liberal and open-minded, loose-rein sort of people you can imagine. He'd been Fellow of All Souls, and I mean, he was highly intelligent and cultured man in every direction - wrote well, spoke well - but he, unfortunately for him, came in at the time of the troubles of the sixties, when the Vietnam, the famous Vietnam riots in Berkeley, and, do you remember when students were, one or two were shot by the National Guard. And then there was somebody called Red Deutsche, somebody who lived in Berlin, who had Berlin permanently, tides of students throwing stones in Berlin, and it all spread to England, to all the institutions. It started in the art schools here, in Hornsey School, up in North London, for some reason. I think usually what happened was that, the English students who are normally rather placid in the art school world, because on the whole, they're doing what they want to do. They're interested in it, they don't want to be disturbed, and if you flung open a door of the painting studio and said "All out", the tendency would say, "Push off", you know, "I've got to finish." But in all schools which get foreign students in, they're used to a much less institutional life, I mean, the universities and art schools in Europe, are, are cafes in the street, that's where all the students meet. They don't meet in senior common rooms or anything. They never see their tutors, they queue to get into a library. I mean, it is a totally different sort of life. You don't have weekly supervisions with, one hour with your tutor, with one other pupil reading an essay. It isn't worked like that. And so they are accustomed to taking to the streets, because they live there, the streets are where they live, and so that's where they were always shouting around better facilities or more Marxism, or whatever it was. Anyway, we had two or three American, I think, were our particular problem, and there it was the Vietnam period, and I'm just trying to remember, I think it was a girl really, who started it, and she sort of whipped up, among the Students' Union, which was a rather lackadaisical outfit in those days. Not many people could be bothered to go to meetings, or take on the Treasurership, you know what it's like! And anyway, she got the College out, in the end, you know. And I remember Lionel going to his office and finding a student with his students' feet on his desk, reading his correspondence, and all the files had been opened, and students looking at what the reports said about them, and that sort of thing. It was a horrid period, actually, because the students were unhappy. I mean, there were a few activists who liked the excitement, but on the whole, most people were more genuinely interested in what they were doing. But it was a very horrid time, and I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 137 suppose for about a year nearly, nobody really did any work. And when you arranged for a criticism of a drawing, in the, at the end of the subject or something, you'd probably get just some typed gnomic remark, like "Roses have no employees", or something, you know, which you were supposed to think was a very important saying. And it was the period when grunting was regarded as sincere, more sincere than speech, and articulacy made you look like a double-glazing salesman. If you could express yourself, it was regarded as unacceptable. And it was an extremely uncomfortable, miserable time, and miserable for the staff, and miserable for the students. But every institution had it.

Did you feel very detached from the students, or did you feel in sympathy with them?

Well, my department, luckily, was very small. I mean, we, we never had really more than about 30-50 in our department, and one knew them all. If you'd got a big department of 100, it was very difficult to, to know them. And ours was very, very small, and, so we knew them all, and a lot of them we still see thirty years later. And I think we were rather a non-active lot, really. I don't know whether the, what that was due to. They may have been a not very militant-minded crew, it seemed to vary from time to time. But it, Lionel Esher was, in the end, beaten by it, because he'd addressed the whole College when he arrived, with what, what his plans were for, for, a little less military than Robin. Robin always looked like a military, a major of marines. And, although a very soft-hearted man, he seemed always rather frightening. And Lionel was different. So he, he left. And I remember, I was working at Birmingham University then, doing architecture, I mean, doing buildings at Birmingham University, and they had exactly the same thing. And the vice-chancellor would go into his room, and it would be full of students going through his files, you see, so he, he decided, I remember, he decided not to bring in the police, which is what some people did. He just locked the room when he had the opportunity, and went home for a week. And he was there if anybody wanted him. There was nothing he could do. It was a horrid, it was a horrid time, in fact.

What were your children doing at this time, because they must have been students. were they?

The children, no, they were still at school really. Carola, the eldest daughter, was just about going to the London School of Printing, which was down in the East End in those days, in the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 138

City. And Nicola was doing a secretarial course. Dinah was still at school. It was that sort of turnover period.

I mean, were they protesting at all?

I don't know what they did at their institutions, but they were, they were, I don't think they felt angry enough about what the, nobody quite knew what the educational arguments were. I don't think it was, I never really got, didn't seem to be "student rules" really, what they wanted, but there was this, there were great slogans like, "There should be no teaching, but information should be available", would be sort of written up on a banner, you know. And then, as so often happens, when you're about 20, you debate this for a week, without apparently getting bored with it. You see, at Oxford, if you were learning moral science, or metaphysics, you'd be arguing for three years about whether a table really existed. It wasn't any sillier. In fact, it was more potentially useful. But we had, after, after Lord Esher, we had Dick Guyatt, who came in as a sort of stop-gap, as he called himself, because he was already on the staff, and he knew the place, and he was a sort of slightly calming influence. And then we had a very, tremendously intellectual chap from Cambridge, another architect, whose name I've forgotten, but he eventually went to America, which I knew was where he'd go to teach architectural philosophy or something. And he gave an initial address, and nobody understood a word, and literally, nobody understood a word. And so he didn't stay very long. He was, he was a bit difficult, because he was rather imperious, and he had six children as far as I remember, and demanded a large house to put them in.

[GAP IN RECORDING]

FURTHER INTERVIEW WITH HIGH CASSON, MAY 22nd, 1990

Well, as in everything else in the world, the pendulums swing one way and the other, and they never stop in the middle. And the students were beginning to rise again on the, the pendulum swing we'd come in with, which was an eagerness to get on with work, and to do what they wanted to, and there'd been enough personal successes in the history of the Royal College in five or six years, to establish the place as a tiny bit of a, not quite like Kings' College Cambridge, but the sort of known place where everybody wanted to go, because although the teaching was very good, I don't suppose it was all that tremendously much better Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 139 than other well-known schools like St. Martin's, which was very famous for sculpture, and the Slade, which was equally famous for painting. So there was always a great queue of people coming to the College. We were lucky enough to get our pick. And, there were not many staff chances most of them Hun on from the Darwin period. A few of them left, but not many. And gradually it became, I suppose, a bit of a part of the Establishment really, in the arts scene, and by then, I was getting on myself in age, and the retiring age was 65, and I hung on till my wrists were slapped, and told to push off, because I enjoyed it. It was very nice being surrounded by people of that age group, whom you don't normally meet, once you've passed through it yourself, or your children have passed through it. And they were very sparky and, and most of them, we had a few lazy ones, but not many. And I get letters and news of them all the time still, which is very nice. I mean, some of them have got sons going to the College now, unbelievably. Anyway, the, the direction of the College, it passed through a number of hands after the, the Cambridge intellectual had gone to America, where I believe he's done very well. We had Lionel Esher, who was an architect. We had Richard Guyatt, who was a Professor of Graphic Design, and then we had also, a completely new step, they advertised for the new Rector. By then, I'd moved on from being a professor to being Provost. Provost is a sort of tiny wee vice-chancellor, in the sense that you, you're a ceremonial figure. You have very, black and gold robes, and when it came to my turn, I, being rather small, the hem was turned up about eight inches. My predecessor had been about 6' 6". And you hand out degrees, and you represent the university, I mean, the College, at ceremonial occasions, and you come or you don't come to the Council meetings. I chose not to go to the Council meetings, not because I didn't find them interesting, but because I was getting rather busy as an architect, and somehow, if you aren't actually trying to run a thing, it's, it's not very helpful, I think, to hang about on the edges, saying, "What are you going to do about this?" Or, "Last time, when this happened, we did that", because the, the English have a great tendency to look backwards when they're faced with any problem. However, it was quite fun. And the, when the post was advertised, the, the recommending committee chose Jocelyn Stevens who, who had been a newspaper man all his life. His parents were in newspapers, and his companion, Charles Clore's daughter, was a tremendous benefactor in the world of the arts, and he was appointed. Now, he'd had no experience of teaching, but then a Rector does no, virtually does no teaching, so that didn't matter. He had great experience of political power, through being in the managerial side of a number of newspapers and magazines, and he saw that, as I suppose any outsider would, the fact that a lot of things which should be done hadn't been done, because they were not very alluring Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 140 subjects. The least alluring is getting rid of people who had passed their best, and should really have gone. You see, the system Darwin introduced was a five-year contract, you didn't have tenure, which always amazed everybody else. Robin was very keen on not having tenure, because he believed that, particularly in an art school, you want a continual flow of, of fresh blood and fresh ideas into the teaching side. So every five years your contract came up for examination, and provided nothing terrible had happened, or you were conspicuously lazy, you, you stayed on, because after about 15 years, it was "Old George", or "Old Ted" or "Old Harry", or whatever it was, "he's been here a long time, he's only got another five years to go", or whatever it was. And so I think the College had got a bit lazy, or merciful, whichever you like to put it, in, in cutting away people who were past their best. Because I think teaching art is a very dangerous game. I think you, if you've got any sort of driving philosophy as an artist, it's tempting to shove this down the throat of every poor little student who comes in. They come in wanting to do what they want to do, and you have perhaps not succeeded in doing what you wanted to do in your life, and so you try and push it down their throats, let them do it instead. So there was a bit of that always in art schools. And the first decision, I think, which was, as I say, an unalluring one for the College to have taken, was to ask people to retire, or, or resign, and be replaced. The second decision was that the College had never really had a complete single home. Ever since its foundation it had been scattered about in old houses or old huts, or bits of other old buildings in the South Kensington area, and, of course, the students rather liked this, of course, because buried away in a forgotten store room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, or something, they were on their own, and, and they didn't feel they had to take place, take part in any tremendously Collegiate activities, except for a few of them. So they rather liked the distribution. And the professors, I think, quite liked it too, because they were like satraps, or whatever the phrase is, ruling their little dynasties. But Jocelyn saw that this was extremely extravagant (a), and (b) that some of the leases were getting near their end, and if you didn't look out, there'd be some homeless departments before long, because some of the landlords in which we were occupying our little nesting boxes, were beginning to ask for them back. So he, he undertook a great reorganisation of the property side, of selling off things which were unsatisfactory, or likely to be an expensive investment. And trying to concentrate more departments more tightly, and move some of them around. And what, I suppose is now called, "getting a leaner structure" is what they always say in the business world. Now that, of course, is an extremely unpopular move, as you can imagine. And Jocelyn became known as a hatchet man, with pointed teeth, roaming the corridors with a hatchet, and saying, "You next", which was rather unfair. I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-A Page 141 mean, I think the areas in which he was experienced, knowledgeable and, and dynamic and extremely decisive, were in those two particular ones, which were trying to get the things back on a, on a more, what shall we say? More efficient, I suppose is really the only word one can use, although it's not a very popular one in an art school, because they would say efficiency is not the point. They would say that this is a place where efficiency of product, or efficiency of output is not what you want in an art school. You don't want, as you do in a magazine or a newspaper, you want a success every morning, or once a week, otherwise your circulation goes. But the students continued to work hard. I think the staff were mostly sulky, certainly all the old ones were.

Including you?

Well, I was sulky a bit, because we, we did have a row about the appointment of my successor, because I'd done my term of service, and Jocelyn wrote to me one day and said he'd appointed another chap to succeed me, which he hoped I approved of. And so I was a bit cross about that, because I said, "Well, the College hasn't been consulted about this. This chap you want, irrespective of his merits or defects. It isn't a personal appointment of the Rector." It is, in fact, has to go through a pretty tiresome mincing machine, of a recommending committee, who had to advertise, see people, choose the best they liked, recommend them to Council, you know, the normal sort of ladder hazards, which are supposed to prevent unwise appointments. And he hadn't done that, I think, because in the newspaper world ...

End of F1091 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 142

F1091 Side B

.....he would take over the post of Rector, which, as I say, is a non-teaching post, was Lord Gowrie, who had just retired from being Minister of Arts, and was an extremely intelligent, talented and, I think, visually sensitive man. In fact, he'd run his own gallery for a time. He was a poet who'd published work, and a man of great scholarship and sensitivity, in that case. But he'd just retired from the Ministry and joined Sotheby's, the auction house as, in a senior position. I think he was Chairman of Europe or something. Anyway, Jocelyn defended the appointment by saying that he thought it was a good idea for the art market to be introduced to the students while they were still students, so it didn't hit them when they came out of the, out of the College precinct, to find what you might loosely call "The Cork Street Mafia" in full cry in all directions. Anyway, it was, it was impossible to do anything about it, because the post had been offered to Gowrie and Gowrie had accepted it. And the, I think the other thing I was sulky about was totally confined to me, I think, I don't know of anybody else objected, was that, although I liked Gowrie, I thought he, he'd made a very unfortunate remark that he couldn't live on his Cabinet Minister's salary, that I remember. He said he couldn't possibly live on it, so he was going into business. And I thought that was, even if true, for all, everybody who was a Cabinet Minister, it was an inappropriate remark to get known by. And the second thing was that I didn't think it was a good idea, myself, for the art market to get their foot into the Royal College. Because the art market tends to exploit the chic and the modish and the novel. They're always looking for something new, and the whole sort of system of driving up the prices, and, to heights which were really very distasteful, I think, in the eyes of most people. I thought the whole thing was not a good idea. So anyway, I wrote to Gowrie and said, I hope he was going to enjoy himself, as I had, and I hoped that he would continue to believe that in an art school, you don't want to have a success every week. That's exactly, it's the non-want in an art school, at least, that's what I thought. It was rather impertinent of me in a way, because I'm not an artist, and I'm an architect, and I knew nothing about the art world at all, I just sensed that there was a risk that it would go over to being a town and country zippy magazine place, which would be bad for everybody. But, in fact, I was hopelessly wrong really, because, which I oughtn't to have been wrong about, I underestimated the, the powers of resistance of art students, that they're not swept off their feet easily. I don't know what it's like now, but in those days, I'm talking about ten years ago, I suppose, it hadn't got to the state, when if you had asked every undergraduate in Oxford what he was going to do, he said he was going to be a merchant banker immediately. And Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 143 that, I mean, that really got to that stage, and, in fact, the Headmaster of Marlborough Public School, the other day, said he was deeply distressed to find that was the answer given by the majority of his boys. And merchant banking, when I was a child, is what you flushed your youngest son into, because he knew somebody, rather than he was interested in it. And he could become a country gent or whatever it was, as well. However, all went well. I mean, Jocelyn tidied up the property, he, he did some extremely good remodelling of such buildings as we had.

Weren't you involved with the buildings?

Not after I left. no.

But you had been before?

I had been before, and I ... one of the three architects who did the building next to the Albert Hall, which is called The Darwin Building, which is a workshop building really, they're sort of, they're all workshops, studios, and a bit of administration on the ground floor. But the, the man who took on from me was my chief senior tutor in my department, young architect called John Miller, who was a very very good architect, who also did the remodelling of the Whitechapel, and, also, recently, of the Tate rehang which has just been finished. A very very good architect. And his wife is an architect too. And I'd known her as a tot, I'd wheeled her about in a pram. So that was fine, you couldn't have had a better choice for taking it over.

Had you got anyone in mind that you would have liked to have handed your job to?

I couldn't have chosen anybody better. I thought it, I'm a great admirer of his work, and he's totally professional. He was totally ...

No, sorry, I meant the Gowrie post.

The Gowrie post?

No, I hadn't ... I'd no idea what, where you'd look for them, you see. I think, these days, Vice-Chancellors are quite, they're thick into the, into the administration of the university, I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 144 mean, they have, they're there all the time, they're resident dons and, I suppose, I should have said I was more like a Chancellor than a Vice-Chancellor, like Macmillan, in charge of Oxford, or Prince Philip in charge of Cambridge. You don't do any of the administration, you sign letters and you, begging letters, and that sort of thing. But it was not, sort of, directly active post, and you wanted someone who was familiar with the art scene, as, as Grey Gowrie certainly was, and who kept an eye on how the College was going. I think that Jocelyn's drawbacks, if one has to talk about other people's drawbacks, is that he was, he was used to a pretty rough industry, the newspaper thing, where you shout through the door, rather than sit down at a desk. And this is an abrasive manner which he has, plus a very commanding presence, he was a big man, with a wide smile, and tremendously energetic, and he was a sort of character which the College hadn't seen, probably ever. So it probably did them quite a lot of good, I think, although he ruffled feathers, and sometimes that's a good thing to do. Anyway, he's still there, and I think he's got another five years to go if he wishes to. And certainly he's kept the quality of work, I think, as high as it's ever been. There's been no falling off in that. What has been falling off, which, again, you can argue, is quite valuable, is that the College had got very cosy. Everybody knew each other a teeny bit too well, had lunch together everywhere, and, and, you know, it was ... one did sense, as one does in an Oxford and Cambridge college, a sort of protective, self-protective little group of people who didn't want to be interfered with. And I think it is a good idea to put a spoon in and stir it round a bit. The difficulty of doing that is to do it without being, not unpopular, because that you expect to be, but without being rough. And some people would say that you cannot do it without a degree of roughness, which the old guard had been reluctant to display. Anyway, the College is, is travelling along very well now, still highly thought of. And is, of course, indirectly responsible for the growing standard of, of the visual arts and design, and, indeed, films too, in this country.

Are you still connected to it?

No. I mean, I still get invitations, and I was President of the Old Students, I mean, the normal sort of, I mean, Robert Frost said something, "There's no compensation for disregard", and disregard is, of course, what happens to anybody when you get old. Nobody asks you what to do next because......

People are asking you that all the time! Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 145

No, well, it, if they're kindly, you know. But, you see, you've got to see your time out and then ... I think it's best to step backwards a bit.

Was there much difference between the way you were teaching when you first started there, and the way you were teaching, or the content of the course, towards the end?

Not in my department, because our, our department, which is, deals with, and the one which is industrial design, deals with things that have to work as well as look handsome, and are involved in solving other people's problems, and involved in team, team work in design, as opposed to sculpture and painting, nobody else is involved except yourself. You've got to think up ideas, you've got to test them, and you've got to try them out and improve them and things, but it's all on your own. You don't, you don't have to worry. In design, or in architecture, you not only have the client, long-term, but eventually you have a client who is paying for what he ... he wants a new shopping centre, or he wants a crematorium, or whatever it is he wants. He is the man who is paying for it. But he is also only one of the clients who is involved. There's the town in which it is going, the street, which is a client, really, if you take into ... its absurd extent England is the client, does England really require a shopping centre like this in this particular place? So one's got to have wider contacts in, in our work, and I suppose that the, the difference is, that the, there was one avant-garde school always has been in England, in London, which is called the Architectural Association, in Bedford Square, and these are the, this has always been the traditional, how can I put it? A sort of basic furnace of new ideas in this country, and it used to attract, and still does, indeed, a great number of, of foreign students. It is a private school, it's not in the State system, so they can play their own games in their own way. And the philosophy there has always been, the one which I think I quoted earlier on, "that you should provide information, but you shouldn't teach". That was their slogan, really. And people were encouraged to be ridiculous, if I can put it that way, and all of the, the wilder experiments in architecture, of holding things up with porcelain morangs or fishing rods made out of steel with teflon tenting and things, and all those wild ideas which have been going around in the architectural world for the last 15, 20 years, came really from the AA. Partly because the people who taught there were themselves wild men, who didn't actually build, they, I don't know whether they would regard building as a sort of treason because the compromises you have to make when you eventually build something, not only with bye-laws, like, you can't have a window that size there, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 146 you must have more staircases there, and the height is controlled, and all the materials are controlled, all those compromises you see, which an artist would giggle his head off, if he was told he couldn't make it this size, or he wasn't allowed to use Chinese red or something, which the architect is. And, so that the people who are the, the most experimental and, to young people, particularly exciting, tend to be people who have actually never built a building, and so the, they would not be very good if the student said, "How do I keep the wet out of this?" They'd say, "Oh, you'll learn that soon enough when you leave, in the offices you go into. Don't waste your time learning that now, because you should be spreading your wings into, into fantasy." Well, that was all very well, but the answer was really given that way, very often, because they didn't know themselves how to keep the wet out, and I was brought up, of course, in the period when you, you've got to learn to be lucid before you're crazy, if you're going to be helpful. But that I don't think is, is necessarily generally accepted. But the AA continues its wild path and students come there from all over the world, and we had one or two fugitives from the AA who found it too loose-ended for what they wanted to do. And it's always this conflict, you see. If you're too boring and you go to somebody's drawing board, and you look at the stair he's given to a house, and you see at once, because you're 100 years old, you couldn't get a coffin down it, or a piano up it, say, for instance. Does it matter? There's always a way of getting a coffin out, there's always a way of getting a piano up, so don't fuss about. And I tended to fuss about because I'd been in practice, and was in practice, because I was always dealing with my partners, with such issues, and I suppose, was trying to put over the discipline of being a designer, as opposed to being an artist.

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I think in 1990, the pressures from the Government to, to push into educational attitudes, the practicalities of life, of course, has terrible dangers too, because you meet the practicalities sooner or later, and if you're too logical too early, you, you stifle imagination. I think Bernard Shaw said that, "That facts, facts stifle imagination", and if you're always listening to what the bye-laws say, or always thinking about precedent, then nothing ever gets different or improved, or gets worse, it just stays the same. So you must have, you must have the, the spirit of innovation, even if it appears to the sufferers, the citizens, terribly self-indulgent and hideous. So the balance is always a difficult one. But, you see, if you're a fine artist, it doesn't matter, because artists do what they have to do, and they're always walking about on the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 147 boundaries of invention, or should be. But designers, the moment they leave the place where they've been pleasing themselves for a long time, they do have other things to worry about.

Is it possible to say succinctly, what the differences were between the course you did at Cambridge, and the course you taught at the Royal College?

I think the, I was a product, you see, of the 1930s, the early 1930s, when the architecture course was straight stuff. First you did the classical orders, you learnt the difference between Corinthian, Doric and Ionic, and you learnt how to draw them, and you learned the correct mouldings, and you learnt accurate and attractive drawing techniques. And all the jobs you were given, mounted in complication as you went through the course, obviously. You might start with a small cricket pavilion of two rooms, as a project, and then move up, till at the end of your course, you might be doing a national theatre on a real site in Liverpool, with a very very complicated programme. And you went, you went slowly up the ladder in a perfectly normal way. Wildness wasn't discouraged, it wasn't really introduced, because all the people who were teaching us were practising architects, part-time teachers, which was very important, that, I mean, they would come to us in the mornings and do their practice in the afternoon, so they were deep in, in life with a capital L. Now, by the time it got to the sixties, when I was teaching at the Royal College of Art, I was a product of this, and I'd just been doing two ships where the constrictions of designing within the limitations of naval architecture, are cripplingly difficult, and it's no good being wild on a ship, because it sinks. So my, my daily life was involved in, in battling with constrictions, and limitations, which I rather like, actually. It helps in making decisions, anyway! But we did have wild people on the staff, and I thought we'd, we'd do better to have lots of part-time people if they only did one morning a week, because they brought in a new attitude which would be counter, possibly, to mine, but at any rate, would enable the students to, to, to go to their right drinking fountain if they ever wished to. So I think my course was much looser than the Thirties one, which was pretty deadpan stuff. And you could have, at the end of the Cambridge course, or the two years that followed it, you could really have gone out and built a house without making a total fool of yourself, which, I think, probably, it may not be fair to say this, but it would be difficult for some of the brighter young students at the Architectural Association, but I think the Royal College of Art people could still do it, because the, all the teachers there, I think, virtually now, are practising architects as well.

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And while you were teaching yourself, were you teaching in the way that you had been taught, or were you teaching in....?

Pretty well. It's a, it's a difficult thing to, to teach, in fact, because, you see, the university system, which is the direct one-to-one almost tutorial, or it's now two students to one tutorial. I mean, if you go and have a tutorial at Oxbridge, there would be two in it, at least two students in the room with the tutor, not heart-to-heart with one, and the, it's an extravagant system, and a very good system, and it's an extravagant system. But you're appointed to a tutor, and it's not too easy to change him if he's unsympathetic, or sees himself as there to change your ways, which he often does. So, I think, I had the strength of my weakness, which is, and not being a dogmatic person, means I'm probably not tremendously convinced about style or anything, which means I'm a pretty middle of the road designer, and I've never really done anything spectacularly good, but I was skilled, I suppose - it sounds the most dreadful thing to say about anybody - I think I was skilled in compromise, if you're not in a consultancy, because I was consultant from time to time, at Salisbury, and Chichester, and Bath, all of whom wanted me as a lightning conductor, you know, if somebody wanted to do something in Salisbury, the planning people were eager to get the, if it was a new shop or something, in. The local residents couldn't stand it, so call in a lightning conductor, who can be blamed. Your advice is not taken, necessarily, or is taken, and you're advice is not necessarily any good, so it's a very hazy field from the citizen's point of view, but you, of course, have got all the ... you're hired really, to, to take the bullets, and you put on a suit of armour as you got out at Bath station. luckily. Bath wasn't so difficult as some, because there were two amenities societies who hated each other, and spent most of their energy in arguing with each other, rather than about the City, so Bath managed to get by. They hadn't, they had some narrow squeaks with a huge new road going through it, and a horrible hotel, which was built at a time when the Government was giving grants to people who built hotels, however awful, and so you lost battles as often as you won them. But I enjoyed it, actually. I found the, the disputes interesting, always.

Were you part of the team that Mrs. Thatcher gathered to discuss design? I can't remember who it was, it was people like Conran, wasn't it? Quite recently.

I went to one dinner she gave, but, and she's always, she's always been, I think, quite polite about, and I've had one or two jobs from the Government through her. I suppose she thinks Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1091-B Page 149

I'm a middle of the road man, and won't offend people too much. She, herself, is, realises design matters, but, because of her, her Methodist childhood, of course, she didn't have very much contact with the arts, which is, I know, she's found a, she regrets very much. But, on the whole, the, the Conservatives are not so good on looking after the arts as the Labour Party, if you look back at the last fifty years. And I suppose that is because they recognise that they're not tremendously knowledgeable, whereas the Conservatives believe they are, and aren't.

End of F1091 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 150

F1092 Side A

Can you say that again?

This sounds ridiculous and offensive, and a generalisation, but, if you think of the three, shall we say, three major architectural mistakes made in London in the last 50 years, I would put the loss of the Euston Arch, which was due entirely to the personal decision of Macmillan and Hailsham; the arrival of the Hilton Hotel, which was turned down by Westminster City Council, it was turned down by the Royal Fine Art Commission, and was, was given permission by Anthony Eden on the threat from Conrad Hilton that he wouldn't come to London if he wasn't allowed to build it. Well, a more sophisticated person would have realised that he couldn't afford not to come to London and that he'd have gone to another site, but the political decision was that he should, he should have it. So those are two major decisions which, I think, were major errors and personal Tory decisions. And the third one, I think, is Mrs. Thatcher's, which is the selling off the County Hall opposite the Houses of Parliament into a hotel and commercial offices. And there, there is a fine building, magnificent building, which has been empty because the, the, the original occupants for whom it was designed have been disbanded, but, but the Government owns, I should think, 20 or 30 large buildings all over Central London - housing departments, traffic, or agriculture, or whatever it may be, they're all sitting in the most dreadful spec blocks put up just after the War. And they could've flogged them off to do whatever they wanted, and with the money they could've converted County Hall, which hardly needs any conversion at all, into Government offices just across the bridge, so that the MPs could have offices there, they're within reach of division bells. But because of a political objection, I'm sure, to the sight, even, of County Hall, as a symbol of local government, which this Government can't stand its being flogged off. And I think it's a national scandal, and I don't know whether the citizens of London have taken heed of this, or whether they would mind. I think they would mind if you, if you picture that fine building facing Big Ben, full of people on package tours, there's something rather dispiriting about it. I don't think most cities in the world would allow that to happen. I'm sure Paris wouldn't.

You were involved in all the controversy with the National Gallery extension as well weren't you? Because that was another major one.

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Yes, that was an interesting one. It's a longish story. The National Portrait Gallery which is just behind the National Gallery, had been given that site for its own extension. It was then asked by the Government, to withdraw, because the National Gallery wanted the space, and the National Portrait Gallery Trustees agreed on the condition that they went to the top of the priority list for the next extension that came along. And the Government said, "Well, we're going to build this in an ingenious way, self-paying", but, I can't remember how many floors it was, I think it was about six floors, four of the floors would be commercial offices, and the top two would be the extension for the National Gallery. Now, this was a, regarded as a great commercial good sense. The National Gallery accepted it on the grounds that any space is better than nothing, and hoped, I suspect, that they'd ease the commercial users out. And a national competition was, was instituted. A very large entry, and some extremely interesting - it was an international competition - extremely interesting. And Michael Heseltine was the Minister in charge, and he appointed five assessors, two insiders - the Chairman of the Trustees, and the Director of the National Gallery. And three outsiders - two architects and a real estate man. So there were five of us. And we narrowed it down to about three or four from one hundred and whatever it was. And then came an impasse, because the two insiders, the people who were actually going to live in it and run it, didn't like the design that we liked, who were the outsiders.

Because of a real response to the plans, or because of politics?

No, I think it was a genuine preference on the part of the Director and the, his Chairman, for a more deadpan, traditional gallery layout. It was quite good, it was by an American firm, Skidmore Owings and Merrill as far as I remember. And the outsiders wanted a more lively one, which had a curved internal courtyard between the extension and the National Gallery, with a sort of cortile round, so you could come out when you were fed up with looking at Botticelli, to see whether it was raining, or watch the buses go round, and then go back into the ... and the Gallery said you couldn't have pictures hanging on long curved galleria, so to speak. Anyway, we, we, we agreed to differ, and went to Heseltine and said, "The argument is that the people who are going to use the place want this one, and we think, from the point of view of distinction, architectural distinction, it's hopelessly second-rate compared with this one." And Heseltine said, quite rightly, "I hired you to come to a decision, go away and make one. See you another day." So we toodled back, and we said, of course, that three is more than two, they said, "But if the two live in there, surely that's equal to three who don't." It was Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 152 very interesting, and very amiable most of the time. It got a bit irritable at times. Anyway, then the, the insiders, the two insiders said, "Well, if we've got to have it, we've got to have it, we do want, now we've got the one which you recommend, we want to change it to bring in certain things which we think have been overlooked." So the architects were introduced to the insiders, and, of course, the insiders wanted a lot of things done, which the architects had to try and manoeuvre into providing. And the result was a, not as good as the original, because the concept had been monkeyed about with, but the architects made a great mistake, of suddenly think, "Well we'll cheer this up because, before it gets too dull, by building a tower to respond to St Martins-in-the-Fields.

Sorry, these were the architects you wanted, or the architects the insiders wanted?

They were the architects we wanted, and very good ones too. They thought up the idea of having a tower,a sort of campanile, in the same sort of height as St. Martins-in-the-Fields, to respond to it. Now this was a major mistake, I think. I didn't like the idea anyway, although it was nicely designed. And it caused a terrible row, and everybody said, "Oh, we don't want this." And there was the famous carbuncle speech of the Prince of Wales, made at the time. And suddenly, Lord Sainsbury, as he became, said, "Look, stop the whole thing. I'll pay for the whole thing, on condition I can choose the architect. Let's pay off the architect the insiders wanted, and pay off the architects that the outsiders wanted, and we'll start again. And it'll all be galleries, no offices." Now, that was very very welcome, because it had been a terrible concept, the idea of Legal and General behind a lot of typewriters over most of the building, and then a couple of floors of, of prints, or something, it was ludicrous. So, Sainsbury went off on a world tour, and chose his architect, Robert Venturi and his wife, who was a very distinguished, individual, small office, quiet, a bit of a national guru in America, and widely respected. And as a designer, slightly odd in, I mean, offbeat. He wasn't, he wasn't a wild post Modernist, but he wasn't a deadpan Classicist either. He was a unique man. And he got the job. He produced his designs, which is now nearly finished, and I think, it's pretty odd in places, because for those of you who remember the National Gallery, will remember that there are lots of columns that run all the way along the front, hundreds of them, there seem to be. And these were flogged off, second hand, by the Prince Regent when he pulled down Carlton House, because Carlton House used to be where he lived, and he decided to go and live in Buckingham Palace, so he pulled down Carlton House, and Carlton House Terrace was put in its place, and all those columns were going in the second-hand market. So they Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 153 were, they were, I suppose Wilkins would have, the architect who put them up there, would have done something like it, but he got them free, and they look all right. And what, what Venturi's done, which is quite ingenious, is that he lets them fade out into the new building. The last, you finish with the Wilkins ones, which are formal, same distance apart and correct. The next one's a little bit further apart, and the next one further apart, and the last one is vestigial. And it's, it's quite saucy trick, and some people think it's wayward. And some people think it's ridiculous, and I think it's just a fireball lark, in that position. So we shall see. It's got a fine staircase inside. But, thanks to Sainsbury, we have, I think, got a, what I think is going to be a very good building.

Do you think it's good to have a private person taking that role, or do you think it's necessary because of the way our Government behaves?

Well, I, I don't think you can make a general rule about that, because Sainsbury happens to be a man of considerable aesthetic experience and taste. He has a fine collection of modern pictures. Very knowledgeable about architecture, because he builds a new store every day, and a number of them are very experimental. And the family tradition is, is sophisticated in visual matters. They've always had good designers for packaging and that sort of thing. But I wouldn't put every tycoon in charge of that thing, I think it's a bit risky.

And the last question for today, you're going to be 80 tomorrow, what does it feel like?

I suppose everybody who's 80 says exactly the same thing. If they're lucky enough to be healthy, not too deaf, still able to see their way across the road. Not spending half their weeks in hospital for treatments of some kind or another, and I've been very very lucky in that. I've been very very lucky, with an extremely happy family background, and that all the children and the grandchildren, all live within about a hundred yards of where we live, like an African kraal. It doesn't mean to say we see each other every day, it wouldn't be difficult if we wanted to. So I've had terrific luck in my life. And I had a, I think if I was going to a psychiatrist, people would say that, that I'm too friendly to be really any good at anything, and that may have been due to the fact that my parents lived in India, and so one was always, as it were, ingratiating oneself with aunts and governesses and boarding schools, in search of being liked. And being liked, the wish to be liked, or, perhaps, not to be disliked, is maybe more accurate. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 154

Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?

No. I've often thought whether that was the reason ... I am, if I was honest, I suppose I would say I was likeable, in the sense that I'm, I hope, thoughtful about other peoples' difficulties, polite in the sense that one asks after, or tries to remember to ask after people when they're in difficulties and that sort of thing. That may be just goodish manners, but I think the best artists don't waste time being likeable. I don't think that would ever be true. I think if you're a good artist, you really have to be very self-obsessed, you have to be, and you have to be careless of other peoples' interests, and comforts. I mean, you would never, a good artist never, as a rule, never answers letters, or, or replies to ... I mean, this is a ludicrous exaggeration, but you know, they're busy, what they're doing, what they want to do, which is an extremely self-obsessive exercise. And they don't waste their time giving lectures or going to committees if they can help it.

Do you actually enjoy committees?

I quite enjoy them, because I regard them as a sort of art form, because the, the sort of interplay between the bully, and the, and the sycophant, and all the sort of minor levels in between, is very interesting to watch, and, indeed, to take part in. People who are persuasive, and people who aren't. Or people who are right, but are totally unable to give their cause over, because they put it over in a way which it makes it sound unacceptable. But it's not what you might call a, a way of life. But I never minded them too much, as long as they didn't have anything to do with money, because I'm innumerate, and I can't read balance sheets and things. And now, if you ask me what I feel like, being. I'm lucky enough to feel well, and be well, and be very active, and very busy, but in things like committees, no, because I am getting, finding it difficult, in a big committee, to hear what people say, so I think one should bow out of committees.

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INTERVIEW WITH SIR HUGH CASSON 1990

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 155

... at the time, i.e. 1975, as you stopped the Royal College, you seem to have become President of the Royal Academy. How did that happen?

Well, that was the purest turn of fortune. Sad for the President at the time, who died of a heart attack, and I was the, there isn't a Vice-President, but the Treasurer, which I was at the time, is a sort of stand in, so I became temporary President, and then eventually was elected President. So, it was a wonderful opportunity, because, although I'd been a Member of the Academy for some years, and knew a lot of the Members, and enjoyed their company, I didn't know very much about the administration or the, or how the thing really worked ...

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..... involved with the Academy at all?

Well, the, the Royal Academy is a form of society to which you have to be elected by the existing members, and there's a maximum number. So there's always a sort of waiting list of artists and architects, and sculptors, who have agreed to be members, because quite a lot of people don't want to be members of any institute, and you usually have to wait until somebody retires at 75, or the, or somebody dies, and then vacancies occur, usually two or three a year. And then there are two elections a year, at which all the names are stuck up, and sometimes you make it, and sometimes you don't. It's by popular vote of the membership. Membership is restricted to 65 total, which is quite small. And I'd been elected round about 1953, '4, I suppose.

On the strength of the Festival?

Yes, on the strength of the Festival, because I'd done very little architecture. And I suppose I was a sort of generalist, indeed, still am, in that I don't know a lot about one thing. I know a little about a lot of things, instead. And so they found that, I think, quite a useful qualification. So I, I sat in on, I was elected to the Council and the Council changes every year.

What does .....

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 156

And they're the governors, you see, the place is a self-governing thing. The artists govern it. There's no, there's a very very small administrative staff, of a secretary and a, a chap who runs the schools, and a chap who runs the library, and they'd just got somebody to run the public relations and press, and appeals office, and things, a very efficient girl called Griselda. And they were building it up into a more modern outfit, and so it, I came in at a very interesting moment, because the Royal Academy's, having been founded by, interestingly enough, a group of artists who included two women, who were full members of the Academy in 1768, which is quite something, having women as full members. And then they got rather stuffy during the 19th Century, and got very very powerful and bossy. And the line was that if you weren't a member of the Royal Academy, you were not a serious artist. And they all became very grand and had butlers and broughams, and houses in South Ken, and soirees, and the Government twice investigated them, not quite for pomposity, but for being over powerful in their influence on the art world. However, we survived those things, but all through the early 20th century, the best painters in the Royal Academy were rather modest and quiet people, and the, the grandees began to die out gradually. And, but up to the First War, it was still more of a, like going to Wimbledon, or Henley, you put on your best clothes, and you had to be seen, and there were receptions still. And that went on, and then in between the Wars, it began its first series of Winter Exhibitions. They only had two exhibitions a year, you see, they had the big Summer Exhibition which had been going since 1768, which is an open exhibition, and most work is for sale. And a Winter Exhibition, that was usually a big foreign exhibition, like the History of Persian Art, or Medieval Italian Art, you see. And these were major winter, scholarly, exhibitions, and they ran right through the winter. And there were no rivals, you see. None of the national museums were doing anything like this, the National Gallery or the Tate, or the Victoria and Albert, they didn't run exhibitions, they showed their properties, so to speak. And so we fulfilled a very useful service, and we, we survived financially, on these two exhibitions a year. We had a tiny staff. The President would only go in about half an hour every two days, sign a few letters and drift off, and there was one secretary. And, in fact, in 1931, when I was just leaving university, the Royal Academy only had one telephone in the whole of that building, for those two huge exhibitions. And only one typewriter, and both were operated by one man - Sidney Hutchison - who eventually rose to become a Secretary, and when I became President, Sidney Hutchison was the Secretary. He was a very methodical, hard-working, splendid man, and a real Mr. Memory man, and if you asked him what Alfred Munnings had for lunch on Thursdays, he could remember! Munnings would always order, I mean, it was something to Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 157 remember, because apparently he always ordered raw kidneys at the Athenaeum, which he would then wrap in a paper handkerchief, put into his pocket for his wife's dog, and gradually the blood would seep down his leg, and go on over his shoe, and members of the Athenaeum apparently used to get rather cross with it. But, Sidney was a mine of these wonderful gossipy stories. And they were full of rows, of course. Stanley Spencer had a picture turned down for alleged obscenity. And Augustus John resigned through that. A lot of Academicians resigned because when the Epstein statues in, in the Strand, were condemned as obscene by Westminster City Council, and they asked for the genitals to be removed, the Royal Academy President at the time, was asked to protest on behalf of the artists of England, and he refused and said he couldn't speak for every artist, he could only speak for himself, so he wouldn't do it. So one or two members resigned over that, the sculptors. Henry Moore, in fact, said he would never speak to the Academy again, and it wasn't until I went on bended knees to him, years later, that he agreed to come back, and said that he thought we were now doing good work for art in general. However, when I, as I was saying, in those days it was still very amateur, and after the Second War, we carried on with the Summer Exhibition, but, by now, the building was beginning to fall to bits, and there were very bad attendances quite often, and the place, we could, if you opened a treasure chest in the cellars to see if there was any gold left, you could see the floor of the, the bare boards at the bottom, and what had happened, really, I think, was that the artists who are a curious mixture of being crazy about money, and always hanging about royal courts, and Popes' palaces, in hope of patronage, are also very reluctant to discuss balance sheets, and liquidity, and all these things, which the poor Secretary used to bring up. Their eyes would glaze, and they'd look out of the window until the subject was over. So, one inherited a place in crisis. really. on. within, really, sight of bankruptcy.

How was it that you were Treasurer, since you've always said you were innumerate?

Well, I think the Treasurer was, although you were the Treasurer, the Treasurer was really Sidney Hutchison, again, who did everything. And I think quite a lot of people don't understand balance sheets, in business even.

So you're putting yourself in both categories in a way?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-A Page 158

In a way, yes. So Roger de Grey, who became my Treasurer, so to speak, and one or two cronies, we formed a little sort of agony committee to see whether, what we could do to save the place. In those days, the School was free, and students paid no fees.

Can we just talk a little bit about the relationship between the School and the rest of the Academy. The rest of the Academy really exists for the School, in theory, doesn't it?

Well, the three aims of the Royal Academy in 1768, as presented to George III, because, in those days, you couldn't get anything done unless you had royal patronage.

George III was always regarded as a dotty old silly, was, 1n fact, quite a competent artist, and an extremely good architect. He's done some very good building designs, which are all in the library at Windsor. And he also played the harpsichord, and I mean, he was a sophisticated character, although mad as a hatter. But anyway, he, he was the chap who launched it, and said he'd pay our debts.

End of F1092 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 159

F1092 Side B

... The days when the Sovereign paid your debts had long gone. And although we are responsible to the Sovereign, and not to the Government, I mean, the balance sheet and the accounts and the Annual Report all go to the Queen, and not to the Prime Minister. They, they offered moral support, but they didn't offer any cash, not since the Napoleonic Wars. So what we decided, sorry, the aims of the Royal Academy were three. One was to start a school, the other was to start a gallery where artists could see each other's work, and the general range of work which was being done in the country, by people who have sent into the Summer Exhibition, and thirdly, to look after the indigent artist, who fell on evil times, through illness or his work going out of fashion, which is quite often the case. And suddenly, you find that although you've sold everything, year after year after year, and Medici made prints of your pictures year after year, suddenly, the fashion changes, and nobody wants your work at all. So those were the three aims, and those were still ours, but the School was free. Now that, at the time, I think that was costing us something like a hundred thousand pounds a year, just drained out.

What was the income? Where was the income coming from?

I can't remember. I'll have to do that on another occasion.

Well, not just, sorry, the amount, but, I mean, where would anyone get money from?

The only money that, we had been rich, so we had a few investments, and we were living on the remains of our investments. We were living on gate money from exhibitions, but we were rather like the Royal Opera House, because the cost of exhibitions was now rising so high, insurance, and transport, security, artificial humidity machines, and all that, the, the cost was getting absolutely out of, out of reach, and the, you couldn't charge a proper rate of entry, which was rather like the Opera, because if you charged the rate for a big Winter Exhibition, then it would have been about 15 pounds a head, you see, so there was no hope of doing that. So, gradually, we were living on our capital, such as it was, and dying. So we had to take some action, and we, we were fairly ruthless. We, we started fees for the schools because, after the War, the system of student grants had been started, and students got grants from Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 160 local authorities, and it was daft, really, that they shouldn't use them. So, I mean, it wasn't a popular move, and many of the members were very upset about it, but we had to, we couldn't, we could not have that drain. The second thing we decided to do, and equally unpopular was, we didn't charge any commission on sales in the Summer Exhibitions. Now, the commission on sales, we started with 15%, at the time when the galleries were charging 30% - Bond Street - so we thought that wasn't unreasonable. Again, that was very unpopular, but there was no, there was no falling off in submissions, because people were accustomed to paying commission. So that healed another escape, money escape. We then decided to found an Association of Friends of the Royal Academy who, for a regular subscription, got free entry for themselves and their friends, and various other things like parties and a room where they could meet their friends and read newspapers and things, and very very quickly we got 25,000. I think we were the largest Friends in Europe. I mean, most ...

Was that very much your thing?

I don't think any of it was really my thing, because we had this little sort of cabal of conspirators of Sidney Hutchison, and his assistant, the financial man - Ken Tanner - and Roger and myself, and one or two other members who came in from time to time, when we thought these things out, and we now have about 50,000 Friends, and they pay about 30 pounds a year now, each. So that is quite a decent sum. And they, with their money, it's their money, they give us some of it, and keep some of it for their own activities, like paying for lectures, or organising trips to Rome or Edinburgh or whatever it might be. So the Friends was a great, splendid invention. And I think the last major thing was that we decided we would not have any exhibitions unless we had a sponsor to help us, from outside. Now we were the first gallery in London to do this, and while we had a clear field we did very well. Everybody had their own sponsorship agreement. Somebody said, "Here's a sum of money towards your expenses. Spend it sensibly, and we'd just like our name mentioned." Some said, "We'll pick up any loss. We won't give you anything, but if you lose 50,000 pounds on the exhibition, we'll pay." Others said, "We'd like to share profit and loss." Each, each firm, whatever they might be, a bank, or insurance company, or an industry, negotiated their own sponsorship terms. By now, you see, the Summer Exhibition was losing at 15% still, we couldn't cover our expenses, and so the Summer Exhibition is now sponsored. And we had this rule that we would not have any exhibition, however wonderful, unless we had somebody behind us. So all those devices, which were emergency devices and had to be Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 161 immediately accepted. Did a great deal to put us on the upward roll, but we still had, one of the worst things ahead of us was the condition of the building. Now, the Royal Academy when it was founded, had no premises. George III said we could have a bit of Somerset House, so we moved in there. And then, later on, we moved to the, one of the wings of the National Gallery, so they had half of the Gallery and we had the other half. And this led to a great deal of scratchiness, because both sides wanted more space, and both sides thought the other one was a pain in the neck. And it got to a very sharp, ill-tempered state, when Disraeli said, "Well, look, we're having this complex of learned societies in the old Burlington House." Now, Burlington House originally was a 17th century two-storey brick house with a courtyard in front, and big gardens behind. It belonged to the Burlington family. This was acquired by the Government, and they built the, the big, the buildings round the courtyard, leaving this little two-storey thing, and they said, "This is a good place for you, but you'll have to make it three storeys, so that it all looks the same, architecturally, at your cost. We'll give you the site, you, you build one more storey, put on a decent classical facade, like any gentleman's gallery, columns, so you know you're going into a place of scholarship and learning. And you build your galleries on the gardens at the back." Which in those days ran up to about Conduit Street, or somewhere. So, we were, in those days, we were rich, so we did that. And that was how we eventually became residents of Burlington House, where we've been ever since. There was a great row about it, because Queen Victoria, Albert, shortly before this was all fully worked out, Albert died, and Queen Victoria wanted us to go down to Kensington, because that was where Albert wanted culture to live, where the museums were, and the Albert Hall, and the Colleges of Music, and mining and science, and everything. But the President at the time was called Francis Grant who was a, spent more time in the saddle than in front of his easel. He was a very tough old boy, and he refused to go, and he didn't want to go, because South Kensington was not regarded as London. I mean, you were really, as it were, in Mortlake, to any gentleman! And the Queen refused to knight him, because he was being obstinate, and Disraeli, whom she loved, as you know, told her she, she mustn't be prejudiced, it was the custom to knight him, and he jolly well had to be knighted. So she knighted him. She said she'd do it although she understood he'd never been to Italy, and therefore was no gentleman. So we're all grateful to old Francis Grant, for keeping us in Piccadilly, where we're very very central. All this took about, I suppose, all these negotiations, took about ten years, and then we were there and, and prospered, and then declined. But the building, by now, you see, which was 17th century in the original, and then modelled up in the Victorian period, was really getting very decrepit - roof leaking, badly Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 162 decorated, drains hadn't been touched, still only one telephone, almost, not quite. And absolutely impossible heating and, I mean, no air conditioning, of course. So we had a huge, ghastly load of, as the museums in England are having now, in 1990, they suddenly find they've got almost to rebuild them, they're all getting very very decrepit. So then we had to decide again, how we were going to raise money for that. So we, we had some of the Friends' money, we had our gate money. By now we'd also decided to rev up our exhibitions from two to twelve a year, roughly speaking, but really the average, so the intake of the populous was much more frequent. Of course, you spent more organising any exhibitions, but you got more in, so we gradually began to become, not prosperous, but, what's the word? Solvent. And so we felt rather pleased about that, and we were lucky because we had no rivals. The, the other big galleries in London, still were not having exhibitions. But they suddenly saw that there was money to be had in them, and within two or three years, they were all having them - the Victoria and Albert, the Tate, and the National Gallery - they were all having big exhibitions. They were all clamouring for sponsors. They were all finding Friends. I mean, we were the loss leader, or whatever you call it. Rather a good phrase for us at the time, we were, we were the first there, and we had a very good run for about five of my years as President, say, I think, and then the rivals moved in, and the competition hotted up, and it became fairly difficult to keep, keep on the sort of rising graph of prosperity. But the two problems remained. One was the condition of the building, and another was the related one, that people who lent us pictures from the Prado or the Louvre, or the National Gallery in Washington, were beginning to say, and private owners too, that they would not lend works to the Royal Academy, because they had no artificial climate or humidity controls, or any sophisticated atmospheric conditions in which they would like their pictures to go. Now that was something which was absolutely out of the question for us, because there were a couple of million pounds to do this, and we simply hadn't got it. And I used to, when people used to say this, I was, I've a sort of congenital reaction to fusspottering about art. I thought art should be able to live dangerously like we do, and the constant solicitude was bad for art. Not bad for the actual fabric, bad for attitude to art. And one liked Italy where if the sacristan wanted a recess in the wall to put his candles in, he took out a hammer and chisel and knocked a couple of square feet off a Leonardo fresco. And although that's an extreme example, I rather liked his attitude, because he thought that life is part of art, and art is part of life, like Ruskin. And the moment, the moment you start being over-solicitous, then it becomes another sort of thing, and it's now reached, we're talking in 1990, it's now reached a stage where the people who say what's done with pictures are not the directors and the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 163 historians, but the men in white coats with Geiger counters and thermometers behind their ears. And it's really got very unalluring, the whole thing, because it's led, in a way, to these great auction house prices, millions and millions of pounds for famous works of art, and it's significant that when one of these big prices is announced at the end of the auction, people clap. They're not clapping the artist, because, of course, they're always dead artists. He's never got any money, he would probably have died poor. And certainly he never got any applause, they're clapping money, aren't they? They're clapping money. And that, again, is, I think, I can only think of the adjective "unalluring", but it's not quite the right word for it, but it, it seems wrong. So we, I used to say to these people when they say, "Well, we'd love you to have this Rubens portrait but our scientific advisers say that it can't qo to you because you haven't got air conditioning." So I would write back and say, "The Queen hasn't got air conditioning at Windsor. When she's hot she opens the window, when she's cold she closes it. And her pictures are in wonderful nick." As far as I know, Blenheim hasn't got air conditioning, and nor has the Duke of Devonshire's house, Chatsworth. All the big houses, they've got thick walls, and the pictures are all, well, not all, but mostly in very good trim, and they've just got to lump it, like we do. However, that didn't, that went down for quite a time, but not for very long, because the white-coated men were gaining strength, as they always do. They're like accountants, their power is, is tremendous, because directors are naturally frightened if the Trustees say, "What are you going to do about this suggested loan of a Modigliani?" And you say, because you have to say, "Well, the Director's very happy that we should have it, but his scientific people will not permit it to go." And so the Trustees, and the Director, are both frightened of the scientists, and say, "I'm terribly sorry, I can't have it." So we began to run into this thing. Now, luckily, the National Gallery and the Tate, and the Victoria and Albert didn't have air conditioning either, so they didn't, they didn't win on that particular score, they had the same struggles as we had. And it isn't, in fact, until this particular year, that we are now putting in, not full air conditioning, which we think is unnecessary, but improved climate control machinery, which has been very expensive, and has involved taking off the roof of Burlington House, and putting a new roof on, to take all the plant, which was needed. So those are the sort of main financial and technical problems which we had during my time, which, I suppose, was roughly '85, no ...

'75 to '83 sort of time, I think.

But you're still terribly involved, aren't you? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 164

Well, I'm involved, because, being a Past President, there are very few Past Presidents ever existed, because most of them died off, either in harness, if I can put it that way, or shortly after.

Why did you stop?

Why did I stop?

Mmmm.

Oh, there's an age limit. 75 you're off. And you become Past President, which means you can't serve on the Selection Committee of the Summer Exhibition, and you can't be on the Council, and you can't take any governing decisions, but you are usually asked, because it's assumed you've got time on your hands, to come in and help on various advisory committees or, and if you live in London, your successor, it's quite a lonely job, you see, because artists are, don't come to the Academy, except for occasions, or elections, or Council meetings and things, they're all at home painting and it's a lonely life really. And the, for the President it's lonely, because he has the, the administrative staff. But he doesn't have, usually, available, many cronies whom he can meet once or twice a week, to, to discuss things. And as Roger de Grey, my successor, and a man of tremendous enterprise and skill in, in every way, and a fine painter, and also very very good with, with people, and a good speaker, and a naturally attractive person. He has, of course, continued the same processes of trying to keep the place solvent, which involved starting, which we did, the, our American office, when we've, in order to do these physical improvements, we had to get eight million pounds, donations, and we've got over six now, of which two-thirds came from English sources, and one-third from American, very roughly speaking. A lot of people say, why do we always go to America for, for begging bowls, and the only answer is two, that they've got money, they have tax relief on the charity gifts, and they're very very generous people. And although they have their own galleries which they support very generously, they also, I think, you can almost say, genuinely enjoy helping European enterprises of one kind or another. But you do have to have an office in New York, to do this, and that, of course, costs money. And then you start American Friends, and if you start Friends, you have to have something for them to be friendly to. So you can't just have one exhibition a year, otherwise they all push off, so you Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 165 have to have an endless list of things for them to do, as I say, expeditions and lectures, and educational trips and that sort of thing.

In England is that more?

No, sometimes in England, sometimes, for instance, the Frans Hals, we took a party, I went, of about 30 Americans to Holland, to all the Frans Hals museums in Holland. We took another party to Holland again, for the recent van Gogh one. We took a party to Italy. We also, under our new exhibitions officer, Norman Rosenthal, who was hired in my time, we, we started a, a series of, I think, rather interesting historical exhibitions of 20th Century Italian art, 20th Century German art, 20th Century English art, and 20th Century Spanish art. So each, every alternate year, you take a country in Europe, and bash it through, roughly speaking from, from 1900 to the present day. And some of these were great successes and some of them were not. Because it's rather like being a theatre manager. In fact, running the Academy is rather like half running a university, and half running a theatre, and you back your fancy, and you think it will be wonderful to have a horse from the San Marco horses, which were all being repaired in Venice, and therefore were off their pedestals and sitting in workshops, so we managed to persuade the Italian Government to lend us those, and that was a huge success. We had great success with the Japanese Exhibition too. But then you have an exhibition which doesn't, for some reason, attract. You can always get people to come to French Impressionists. I mean, you could have a French Impressionist non-stop. It's like the Windmill Theatre, I mean, everybody will always come and look at Monet, Renoir, Degas and all those people. You'd think they were fed up with them all, but their appeal is, is undying still. And so, usually, those are slipped in from time to time, either in small private collections like we have on at this very moment, a private American collector, a fantastic collection of 19th Century French paintings. And he's lent it.

20th Century. is it?

20th Century. Well, I suppose the old boys were mostly alive in the 19th Century. -You mean their most prolific period was certainly 20th Century. So, the Academy struggles on. It is virtually, I found, full-time, when I was President.

It's unpaid isn't it? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1092-B Page 166

It's unpaid. You get a small, I think the expenses allowance is about 600 a year. There was a time when he, the President, was given a car and a driver, and everything, but that's all gone long before I arrived. It is virtually full-time, and therefore, if you're a working, active artist, it's quite difficult to find the time to do it. Roger de Grey who's doing it now, he's head of the City and Guilds School, and he works at City and Guilds two days a week, and he goes there, of course, quite often, every day, according to what's cooking down there. But City and Guilds is a small school, and it's in London, so he can, he can manage it. But, if you were a painter in Newcastle, say, head of a school of art in Newcastle, it would be very difficult to be President it really would.

When you took it on, did you realise how much time it would take?

I think I took it on really, because I knew it would take rather a lot of time, because I felt, being rather, luckily, active still, I dreaded inactivity.

End of F1092 Side B

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 167

F1093 Side A

... taking it on because you knew it would take up quite a lot of time and you didn't like being inactive.

Oh yes.

So you could afford to do it, you didn't need to earn any money?

Oh no, I had to earn money, but I'd retired from my architectural practice, but, being in private practice, one, one doesn't get a huge pension from anybody.

Okay.

Start again?

Just say the bit about the pension.

No, I was, I still had to go on earning money, which I was lucky enough to be able to do, by, by lecturing, and, and selling watercolours at exhibitions, and I suppose I was making not all that different from, from my architectural practice, because, as I got older, in the architectural practice, the graph of earnings for the older members fell as the young ones rose, you see. It was, we had a system by which, so that the oldest member was not the richest, he was the poorest, roughly speaking. There's a sort of junction where you cross, and you all earn the same. And we've always been a small office. And we'd never had, I think, more than about 20 people in it. And this is what we wanted. So we were never in big building, huge enormous office blocks, or speculative work. And so the, the earnings were, were all right, but they weren't, they weren't terrific. But the, so I, I carried on working. I didn't, I went to the Academy every day, but I didn't stay all day, naturally. I used to, I used to, I suppose, do quarter of a day.

Given that, I know there wasn't ever one, tell me what a typical day at the Academy would have been? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 168

Well, I used to go in the mornings. I'd get there about half past nine, and would go through the correspondence with Sidney Hutchison, and go through anything which he thought needed Presidential level answering, as opposed to administrative answering. And there were reports which had to be drafted. There were, I did a great deal of lecturing and travelling.

For the Academy?

For the Academy, both here and in, in America.

And was that unpaid, or would you get paid as well?

Well, money went to the Academy, because it was an Academy chore, and I enjoyed that very much. I mean, once you've got sort of "the lecture" on the Royal Academy, it wasn't a tremendous effort to keep it up to date. And, and, of course, you get in a great deal of semi-social things like, I suppose it was three dinners a week, probably. Not necessarily where you had to make a speech, but where you were expected to turn up at the annual dinner of the Chartered Surveyors, or whatever it might be. And it was regarded as, as part of the job, to show the face of the Academy, wherever you could. And you served on scores of, of institutional committees and trusteeships, and things that were always required of you. And I've always been a great letter writer by hand, because I think people don't, if they get a pile of mail in the morning, they look through it for something that's handwritten, as likely to be of more interest, not necessarily that it is, people feel it. It looks as if it's going to be more interesting. And I found that I could do the ordinary administrative work in the Academy very quickly, because I didn't dictate ever. I feel self-conscious dictating, as I am now, I suppose. But by the time you've dictated a letter, and then it's typed, it's got all the business, "Dear So and So", and references and things, it's become a document, and all you really wanted to say was, "I can't possibly do this. Terribly sorry." Or, if people wrote in and said, "The coffee is cold in the restaurant", and all you have to do is to scribble a note, saying, "Terribly sorry. We'll see to it that it isn't in future." The only trouble then was, people, you got into a correspondence. People would write back and say, "How nice of you to answer your, yourself. Do join me for coffee next time I'm in", and then you had to, well, you didn't write back, but, but it takes no time at all to do it. The secretary can get on with things which are much more valuable. And I think people got to like it. But it is a habit which I still have, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 169

I've had it always. My writing is very difficult to read, which doesn't help, probably! So, I mean, I still write about 8-12 handwritten letters a day, which are, roughly speaking, business letters. Now you've got copying machines, and faxes and things.

So, by the time you'd finished at the Academy, the staff had, presumably, increased quite a lot.

Tremendously. Tremendously.

Who was employed?

Always, it, well, Sidney retired, and we found that he was such a sort of kingpin of knowledge and experience in the place, that we felt we'd make an exception with him, we could make an exception with him and that we kept him on part-time in an office, as Mr. Memory Man. And he used to be Librarian, so he knew the Library from top to bottom, and he comes in about two days a week, as a sort of "oldest inhabitant". We got a new secretary called Piers Rodgers, who was ... very distinguished background. He was a merchant banker and also had lived and worked in the Monuments Historiques in Paris, and so he spoke, he was bilingual, which is very valuable because a lot of our work is in foreign languages. And he has a university degree, of course, which in Sidney's day, didn't exist. And he is the, he is the, as it were, Director-General of the outfit now, I mean, he is the Head of Administration. So we now have, in our enterprises, we have the restaurant and the shop, that, I forgot to say, that one of the first things we re-, re-born, was the shop, which was just selling postcards in the hall, and one of the first big art gallery shops in London, we, we took the restaurant back from the catering firm that had been running it, and ran it ourselves. We reorganised the Library, built the Friends' Room. So the Friends had their own administration, from which the expenses of that were from their subscriptions. So they paid off their, their costs, before they gave us any money. So they were a sort of self-supporting outfit as well as being a generous fund to us. We had a much bigger Press and Appeals Organise Office, with about three people in it. Our charity, the Artists' General Benevolent Institution, had about three people. The Finance Department had about four people, and, inevitably, the more you do, the more people you have to run it. And, in the old days, when people were, like Sidney, ran everything, didn't any longer work, because the thing had got too big. And so, I mean, some people think we were over-staffed, and Humphrey Brook who took over from Sidney, I mean, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 170 was before Sidney, before Sidney became Secretary, and he was another of the, so to speak, Eton and Oxford type of Secretaries, and also very intelligent, financially, and a scholar and a sort of, to outside eyes, I suppose, looked like a cultivated country gentleman and knew all about Rembrandt, you know. But he was very efficient. And he never, while he was still alive, he never used to cease to, come in and see me, and say, "You're the worst President that the Academy has ever ever had. You're ... You're doubling the number of staff, you're turning the place into a sort of Disneyland", because we had, we arranged Cushion Concerts for young people, with W.H. Smith, where students didn't have seats, they hired cushions as they came in, and sat on the floor. We're still having those. They have about six a year now.

To raise money, or just to get the place used?

No, no, no. Well, it's both, actually. I mean, you don't make money on it, but you get people used to coming into the Academy. Because what we wanted to do, was to reinforce what we'd been trying to do since the War, which is to make the Royal Academy something totally different from the national museums with their trusteeships, and their civil service organisation, and the curators. And it is a different atmosphere there. It's partly the quality of the staff, the uniformed staff, and the ... but I remember seeing, and one of my earliest pleasures was seeing a baby being suckled in the restaurant, and a dog tied to the door handle. Well, you'd never get that at the Tate, you see, people would be too frightened. Because the thing about the Academy, in a funny way, after all those many many years of it being, really, a branch of Goodwood or Ascot, it for the last 30 or 40 years, I suppose, has been a place, one of those rare galleries, where you don't feel despised when you go in there. I think that's a very important quality. And lots of galleries, international galleries, where you feel that everything in the place belongs to the curators, and if you don't walk the right way round, you'll be tapped on the shol~lder and asked to leave.

You actually like people, don't you. I mean, you positively enjoy being with them.

Yes I do. And I found that very helpful, because, I mean, just ordinary ... absurd things, like seeing to it that everybody in the staff ... say "Good Morning" to everybody, that people got a scribbled note saying "Thank you", if they'd run some particularly boring tiresome party very well. It takes no trouble at all just to scribble a note to the Head Porter, just asking him to thank the chaps for staying on a bit longer and moving the piano! You know, which, if you Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 171 don't like people, you don't, or if you're nervous of people, or if you're very very shy, which is a form of affliction, in many ways, of any sort of public contact jobs, you do find it difficult to do this, and there have been Presidents and directors of museums, who are totally incapable of when they come into the place saying, "Good Morning", to the man on the door. I mean, I've seen it. I won't name the ones that I know of, but they, they simply are unable to do it, from some form of inhibition, and it's a great drawback you see. I think it's particularly one to which scholars and dons are subject. Because if they're living the life of the mind, the physical world is non-existent for them. But I never found any trouble with this.

Did you see most of your staff most days?

Yes, I think so.

Because you made a point ...

I doubt whether you'd be able to do it now, because there are so many of them. Yes, but in the, in the days when I was there, I think I could say that was true. But I enjoyed this, I mean, it wasn't ... it wasn't a sort of active chore, you know, "I must go and say 'How do you do?' to the Librarian this morning".

But you also enjoyed the social life and the fund-raising events, didn't you?

Yes, well, not always, but most of the time I didn't, I didn't usually find it a terrible chore. I'd been, I had another useful thing in that the, the links with the Royal Family and the Royal Academy have always been close, and I'd been working as an architect to the Queen for about 20 years, and so the Royal Family were very, always very helpful at turning up and opening things, or coming to exhibitions, or becoming trustees, or whatever the thing might be. And that was an advantage which one, I suppose, exploited for the Academy's sake.

You knew Anthony Blunt quite well, didn't you?

Not really well. We ... we did a, round about in the early sixties, the Queen said that Windsor had suites of rooms done by subsequent sovereigns - Victorian or Edwardian, George V and Queen Mary, and she hadn't done anything except occasionally buy some new pictures, or Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 172 furniture, or something. She wanted one suite which was done in the fifties, however funny or dotty, or hideous or what it was, she wanted it as a monument to the fifties. Now, the fifties wasn't a great period in the history of English design in furniture, carpets and textiles. That was the time when I was still working at the Royal College, and we made, really, a Royal College flat, I mean, the, the carpets and the curtains were designed by members of the staff or students at the Royal College, and the furniture too, and the ... the light fittings. It was two bedrooms, one sitting room, two bathroom flat in one of the towers, and the time came, of course, when we had to get some pictures for it, because Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, when Kenneth Clark had been Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, she had been encouraged by Kenneth Clark to buy work by living or recently dead artists, I mean, she had Graham Sutherlands and Paul Nashes, and Matthew Smiths as well as what you might call the more traditional portraitures, landscapes and things, which either had been given or had been bought. She, she, in fact, liked pictures, and changes them about. And you can always tell when people like pictures, because they haven't got them on the walls, they keep them leaning against the wall, two or three deep, or lying on the sofa, or ... and they're sort of picked over, and wonder whether, "Shall we change this and re-hang it somewhere else?" which she still does. But anyway, the point of this story was that Anthony Blunt was the Keeper of the Queen's Pictures in those days, and he, exaggerating slightly, believed English art was a very minor activity compared with French art, and his influence, when he was a teacher at the Courtauld, where I believe he was very brilliant, was that French art is the only art that matters. And that influence still, I think it's fair to say, is quite a legacy in the teaching tradition of the Courtauld. And so when the time came to have fifties painting, English, he was deeply uninterested, so the Queen asked my wife and I, myself, to find a van load of stuff, bring it down, and have a one-man, one-woman selection committee. So we took down a collection, I suppose the larkiest was Alan Davie, but there were drawings by Barbara Hepworth and Ivon Hitchens and by various ... and people like Robert Buhler, Carel Weight, and what you might call the romantic fifties school of English painting. And we set this up in, at the Castle, and Blunt was, as a matter of official courtesy, was in on the meeting. He sat there but he didn't contribute at all. He thought, I'm sure, the whole lot was junk, compared with Poussin, I mean, simply, the thing, the trouble with the, that that particular job, is, it runs a risk of being a scholar/historian job, and they incline to be buying pictures in the market to plug gaps. We've got nothing between 1614 and 1619 of this particular artist, so when it comes on the market, they scurry off and get it. And, on the whole, I think, historically, they've been more interested in, in historical painting, if I can put it that way, than in current Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 173 work. And certainly he was. But the Queen and Prince Philip chose, I think, a very good selection of work, and Blunt, I personally respected as a scholar but did not terribly like as a person. I found him very chilly, and not exactly unfriendly, but coldly polite, and I think he thought I was a ludicrous little upstart architect who didn't know a Renoir from a Mercedes! Which, indeed I was! But Kenneth Clark had been such a tremendously wonderful influence, it was, it was tragic in a way, I think, that he, as it were, undid that, that period, with his particular frosty scholarship.

When you took all these pictures down, would it have been quite fun, or would everyone have been being very serious, apart from Blunt?

Oh no, it was great fun. I mean, you can't not have fun with, with Prince Philip and the Queen, because they're tremendously ... argumentative ... about everything.

With one another?

Yes. But I'd been working in Windsor Castle for some years, and I suppose, in and out of it for about 20 years. I did the Britannia, the Royal Apartments on Britannia. And I did some work at Sandringham, and as always, if you have a married couple client, sooner or later one has to side with one or the other in disagreements, because there are always disagreements, you know. "Shall we have the pantry door here, ... or would it be better if the ...If the lavatory basin was put in over here or..." Because how ... your own home is such a personal thing, and I always find it a bit, a bit nerve-wracking, because, by her position, the Queen wins the arguments, so to speak, because the house is hers, and ... but her, I mean, she's, she's an extraordinary mixture of firmness and conciliation. And it was a really very instructive and interesting period. Prince Philip, in those days, had started learning to paint himself. He had a big studio, and still has, at Windsor Castle, and he, like Prince Charles now, he took artists when he went round the world in Britannia, or went to Galapagos, or the Arctic, he would, he would often take a painter with him, and get lessons. And he, I don't think paints quite so much as he did, but he, he still has his studio. But like all the Royal personages, they, they have a very difficult time. It's like being millionaires, too. Nobody knows whether you're loved because of your money, or because you've got a nice face, say. You really never know, and if it's ... they're doomed with that. And Prince Charles has the same problem, but he's, with his paintings, he can't sell them because he knows they'd fetch thousands as curiosities, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 174 which is an insulting attitude to a serious attempt at painting. I mean, he's either dismissed as a sort of silly amateur, or people are too deferential and think, "Isn't he wonderful considering ..." you know. I think they, they do find it difficult to get any grips with the art world, I think.

What do you feel about his involvement with architecture?

Prince Charles'?

Mmmm.

Well, several things. I think, I remember his early conversations, really, you could sum it up by saying, that what he felt, considering the effort put into a new building, the planning regulations, the Local Authority Committee which decides whether or not they can put the thing up, the contractual systems, the skill or non-skill of the architect and the builders, so many hundreds and hundreds of people pushing their creative powers and skills into the erection of even the smallest building, is not as good as it should be. And you could argue that it was because so many people were putting in a contribution, that it can never be anything but a ... but a sort of camel, put together by various veterinary surgeons. But what you, I think, he said, really, it's not as good as it should be. And it's no good arguing that it's impossible to get it better, because you can go to Holland where there's hardly an ugly building been built since the War, in my observation, Scandinavia, Germany. France is beyond belief - hideous! All the cities of France, there's a great belt round them of bia shopping centres and car parks. And in a way, it's a solution, because they take all the potentially awkward buildings and stick them out on the edge of Tours, or Lyons, or wherever it is, so you actually enter a French city through a girdle, which might be the heart of Costa Rica at its worst time - shacks, tin, asbestos, signs, graffiti, overhead wires, everything - and that will enable the centre of a city to keep what looks like a traditional French city. So when you go into these towns, in France, you do feel that nothing has changed.

This is you talking, not Charles, yes?

This is me. This is me talking. What I was trying to say was that we don't do it well. It's no good saying that everybody does it badly, because they don't. And in Holland, which is my Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-A Page 175 particular example where, I don't know quite how they do it, or why their architects are better, but it's very difficult to see an insensitive building anywhere in Holland, cities or on the edges. France has horrible edges, and old, nice old centres. Holland has nice old centres, full of new buildings, very carefully, beautifully knitted in, not imitation, not scenery, totally modern buildings, but beautifully knitted in. And we haven't been very good at it. Anyway, that was what he said. "It's not as good as it should be, considering the amount of time put in it. And isn't it time we, we tried to do better?" He then made this great speech at Hampton Court, which is roughly what he said, he said, really, he thought that post-War architecture in England, had really been, apart from a few distinguished buildings, had been a disaster. End of F1093 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 176

F1093 Side B

The architects reacted to this with, with hysterical, spinster-like cries of "How dare he?" and "Doesn't he realise how difficult it is to be an architect, and all the regulations and everything?" But the, most of the hysteria, I think, had a strong guilt backing to it, people, I mean, architects know just as well as anybody else that, that most of what we see around is not very good. But what, the main result of this was not just stirring up the architects into a state of agonised self-examination or sort of haughty disdain, was the fact that for the first time, in this country, people actually thought about architecture. Before you knew where you were, newspapers were full of architectural critics. Every week there was a programme on telly on architecture. People talked about architecture at dinner parties. In the days when I was, in the fifties, and I used to be on The Critics, quite often, and I always used to tease them by choosing a building, I used to do the Arts Section, and normally they all trot off to some West End Gallery and talk about Jasper Johns or something. And I would always choose a building. And it was very interesting that these highly-educated, and sophisticated critics, who could talk for 25 minutes about an obscure stained glass artist, or fifth-rate poet, would find it hard to name a single building, and certainly no architect, they'd never heard of any architect since Christopher Wren, or Corbusier. They were absolutely baffled by the whole problem. They simply had no critical sense. It was rather like I found with students, art students, who had been to the, as it were, the Courtauld mill, they could compare the early work of Sisley with the late work of Pissarro until the cows came home, but if you asked them to compare two teapots, they were dumb. I mean, they were totally unable to make that sort of judgement. And so the main, I think, constructive result of Prince Charles' speech was to raise the Point that architecture should be better, and could be better, and why isn't it better? And I think that was a tremendous thing to do, because it wasn't easy for anybody else to do it. It's no good architects saying it. It's no good dons saying it, or politicians saying it, because nobody takes any notice of, of them. But they did take notice when he said it. And the mistake I think he made was, to believe that, I suppose, slightly taking what he thought might have been an Italian or French attitude, is that when you're in an old town, you build in an old style, but if you're, if you take, say, the whole of Lower Regent Street, Haymarket, Carlton House Terrace, St. James' area, he would say that the one building, as I would too, actually, the one building that has totally destroyed that area, has been the New Zealand House, which is at the bottom of Haymarket, because, everywhere else, people have behaved themselves, kept down to the ... as they would in Paris, keep down to the general overall Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 177 height. New Zealand House, claiming diplomatic immunity said they wanted to go high. They were turned down by Westminster, they were turned down by the Fine Art Commission, but they claimed diplomatic immunity, and went high. And that building is, although not a bad building itself, has ruined that area. And the same thing with the Hilton in Park Lane. That was a political decision that Hilton said he wanted to come there, everybody turned him down. He went to see Anthony Eden who said he'd been advised that it was not wanted there. And he said, "I'm not coming to London unless I have this site." And Eden crumpled and said, "Oh, can't have no Hilton, so off you go." Well, you don't have to be very sophisticated to know that Hilton couldn't not be in London, and to threaten that he would only go there or nowhere was ludicrous. Macmillan was the same with the Euston Arch. You see, the Tory Governments have always been very bad on that sort of thing.

But, I mean, that's not really Charles' point of view.

Charles' point is exactly that. That you would not put up the Hilton in that Particular Place.

Yes, but he's not linking it to Party politics, particularly, is he?

No, he's not. He's just saying that he was on the side of, of propriety, I suppose you'd say, as were all the, in fact, the entire of the architectural profession, and the Fine Art Commission and all the rest of them.

Did he ever consult you and talk to you? I mean, does he

Yes, oh yes. He did in the early days, but I think he, he is the sort of postbox for an enormous number of people with sparky new ideas, as they believe, good and bad, for the future of the environment, and he's very thoughtful about it. But he is, I think, unfortunately, or was, is getting more relaxed about it, to the 18th Century and early 19th Century, as the time when architecture was the most agreeable, and the most flexible, in that, if you walk down Gower Street, which, in the 19th Century was regarded as the most hideous street in London. If you read the critics, the whole of Bloomsbury is regarded as an absolute hell-hole of boredom. And yet, when you go down Gower Street, some of the buildings are hotels, some of them are teaching tropical medicine, some of them are offices for publishers, they, those little houses in their repetitive form, are fantastically flexible, but they, of course, they don't work any Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 178 longer now, because, so well, what with the need, well, not the need, but to claim that you must have air-conditioning, and under-floor, horizontal communication systems. And what's happening now is that buildings are now put up for short life, like, like a Boeing. So if a Boeing lasts thirty years, say, and you don't mend it, or adapt it to another use, you just saw it up, and stamp on it, and build another one. And I suspect that in the famous Lloyds building, and the Pompidou Building, people say it's rusting and beginning to look shabby. I suppose the architects would say, "Well, so would a Boeing be, or a liner." The life of a liner is 25 years, I mean, a thing like the Queen Mary, or the Queen Elizabeth is 25 years. You build that enormous great shuddering monster for 25 years, and then you just saw it up.

What do you feel about the Rogers buildings?

He, I like to see any building that has conviction behind it, and that has a passionate attitude to architecture, and not something which is done with a half yawn as so many buildings look as if they've been, "Here we go again. What do the Authorities say we can do? Five windows. Right, five it'll be." You know, that sort of attitude which is fatigued. And you don't find that very often abroad, that sort of attitude. He's a very, he's a very convinced and excited architect, by the, every problem that comes to him. I personally am not tremendously excited by technology. Maybe it's a generational thing, and maybe it's a personal thing. But he, faced with a, a duct, or dials, or elevators, adores them, you see. In the Lloyds Building, rather significantly, you know the elevators in most places, the hand-rail that goes up with the stair, and the hand-rail itself is on a solid wall, isn't it, of, of, of cladding. Rogers takes the cladding off, so you see the cog wheels, and the straps that hold the hand-rail, so you see, you take, you don't case anything in. Everything's interesting. And he likes the, the, the excitement, the visual excitement of, of exposed technology. Therefore all the technology you need in a building, is not as it is in a normal building, hidden, cased in, forgotten about, it's pulled out, and either put on the facade of the building - he put the lifts outside, not inside where most people put them, because he likes the feel and look of lifts going up and down. The drawback, it's partly an age thing that I find it in an office, if I worked in the Lloyds Building, I wouldn't like it, because when I'm in an office, I like serenity, and I don't want to see three elevators' exposed works, so that if it was an engineer's diagram, going past me. I love it to visit, because I can see the fun of all this going on. It's like getting inside a clock. But if you're trying to do some work, I don't think I would, I don't think, it wouldn't excite me after about three or four weeks, I don't think. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 179

So who are the very contemporary architects that do excite you?

I think the best, the best architect in this country today, at the moment, is Norman Foster, who is the same sort of generation as Rogers. He's equally hypnotised by technology, but he handles it in a different way. He likes very sleek, quiet, sheer finishes, and his latest building, for instance, is just like, in a way, Stansted Airport that you, you reduce the thing to be absolute minimal of structural ingenuity, so it looks exciting. The whole thing looks like an exciting object, but the sort of public demonstration of your intestines, I think, is much more reduced. I don't think he's as passionate, I mean, he flies a sailplane, and he flies a helicopter, so he likes machinery. He's a child of his age, and can understand fax machines, and computers, and can take cameras to pieces and all that sort of ingenuity. But I think he's a much more subtle architect than Richard Rogers, and I would put him top of the pops, probably not of the pops, but the top of the design skills in this country. Because it's very very serious not solemn ever, but very serious.

And what do you feel about things like the Mappin and Webb building?

The Mappin and Webb building it was, it was a listed building wasn't it, and you mean the, should it be pulled down, or shouldn't it be pulled down? I used to think it should be kept because it was such an extraordinary eccentricity on that point, that funny sort of Gothic castle, but I don't, I think, really believe I would fight for it now. I think, although I've been, I suppose, all my life, involved in various protective Societies, and I was consultant for, for many years to Bath and Salisbury and Chichester, hired as a sort of lightning conductor, because there are always rows in those places, terrible rows!

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

So are we still talking about ... he used to say, "Leger today but never legerdemain", he used to make them up all day, as he was drawing, and he'd collapse with giggles. Yes.

Kit Nicholson?

Yes . Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 180

And what was the Blunt one?

"Poussin Boots". I think one of the values of Prince Charles' entry into the field of argument, is that he is convinced and has persuaded other people to think about it, that places to live in, are places, rather than buildings, and what architects should spend more energy, ingenuity, and love on places, rather than individual ego trips. Traditionally the architect is the last, since the last, I suppose, 50 years or so, is to go on ego trips, and do your own little personal monument, and the hell with everybody else.

If you were now to build a house on the site where you built your first house, what would it look like?

What would it look like? I think you could hardly say, you'd have to say, "Where is it?" because every house is affected by where you are, or where it is, and, or who it's neighbours are. I mean, I would no longer, I wouldn't build, probably, for instance, except by the sea, I might, I could build easily with pleasure, a little white sugar cube, by the sea, which would be like a navigation mark, or a Greek shepherd's hut, in a sort of rocky terrain, because that would be, I could also see it as a series of stratas, horizontal sort of BLT sandwich, with layers and windows and floors. But if I was in an urban place I would ...

But supposing you were on the site of that very first house that you built, when your father gave you the money. Exactly the same site, exactly the same situation.

I think I'm still a prisoner of my period, which would mean that, although I, all the work I did at architecture school was sort of flat roofs, white walls, and strip windows, and Vita glass and aertex pads, and, you know, the belief that sun poured in through the windows, and you pulled your aertex shirt open, a sort of funny romantic idea. I wouldn't have anything to do with that now, because I think it was false, and had a sort of Weetabix quality, which I don't find attractive now. No, I think I would, I would ... the houses I think I really like now, tend to be white or strong coloured, with probably slate, shallow slate roofs, cut possibly into interesting geometrical shapes, so it wasn't just a lid on a box, that it made an interesting silhouette. I mean, I could see myself designing somebody else a glass box, as indeed Norman Foster lives in in Hampstead, and so does Richard Rogers, except that Richard Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 181

Rogers has now moved into an 18th Century house in Chelsea, where he's taking, which is always rather nicer, is taking an old house and mucking about with it rather than starting new, I think. And I like, I like the maturity of old, of old things to start with. But I'm not a very adventurous designer, never have been. Too nervous. I haven't got the convictions, you see, that's my weakness. Or one of my weaknesses. I have many.

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON ON 31st JULY 1990

... a bit more about the Royal Academy. Can you tell me, really, as far as you were concerned, when you were President, what involvement did you have with the School that's attached to it?

Very little, unfortunately. For two reasons, I think. One, because I'm an architect, and I had taken part about eight or nine years previously, with Basil Spence and Maxwell Fry on trying to restart the Architectural School, which used to exist, and hadn't been active for, I should think, thirty years or so. And the, it didn't work really, because the Architectural Department studios had been commandeered by, I think it was the Engraving School. Anyway, they'd moved in because they didn't see much going on, so they thought they'd use this nice room. And there was no advertising and we, we had about three or four students and it simply wasn't worth the effort. So the architects were supposed to teach in the Architecture School, and as there wasn't an Architecture School active, there wasn't the opportunity for me to take part in the School. I was naturally very shy about going into the Painting or Sculpture Schools, with professional painters and sculptors, except as a student. And I meant, in fact, to do a lot of life drawing, but there was never any time, sadly. And the second reason, the first reason was my ineligibility. And the second reason was the tradition in the Royal Academy, which has grown up over a hundred years, I suppose, whereby the Members who used to do a lot of the part-time teaching, don't any more. But the Head of the School is always a Member. And he's full-time.

An RA you mean?

Yes, he's a full-time RA Member. And he runs the School, and he gets in part-time teachers to help with the teaching load, and there are usually about, I suppose, three or four, or five, part-time teachers come in every day, of which usually two are Members, at least. And the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 182

Head of the Sculpture School is also always a Member. But on the whole, the tradition of the Members dropping in and doing a couple of hours teaching has gone, partly because painters have become much more professionalised, and they have dealers and galleries, and contracts, and they live, usually, quite a long way away, they live in Yorkshire, or Kent or something, and traditionally, it's unpaid, and so that, of course, is not a great temptation, because most of them are teaching at other art schools in the region where they live. So, sadly, I had very little contact with the School. The Head of the School throughout my Presidency, was Peter Greenham. A lovely painter. And sculpture started by being Willi Soukop at the beginning, and then became Brian Kneale, and Philip King, who is the present one. So, as I say, the contact with the school was, was, sadly minimal. One used to go to their exhibitions, and open their exhibitions, and just present their prizes and things, but that was all ceremonial.

[BREAK IN RECORDING ]

It's got a slightly different character from our other art schools, hasn't it?

Well, yes it has. It, there are one or two schools which are almost as old-Heatherly's, and ... which are private schools, Heatherly's and Byam Shaw, are pretty aged in time, but the whole of the school, art school structure was totally re-drafted after the War, by the, the Summerson, Coldstream Committee, which set up a new educational structure, and system of departments and, and finance, and everything. And that took over in about the fifties. And most art schools then followed the same sort of thing with a head of a department, sometimes an assistant head of department, if it was a big enough school, and then parttime. And that, of course, was exactly what is wanted, because part-time artists are happy to come for two days a week, interrupt their painting to teach, because they're all hard up. And you don't get lumbered with, with a lot of extinct volcanoes, who really haven't painted much for years as happened in the old days, with the old heads of schools. So often, they just became administrators, and either they became famous old things, like the, the old boy who was head of the Slade, who was, in fact, a remarkable teacher, but

You mean Tonks?

Tonks. A sort of famous figure. But most of heads of schools, before the Summerson reforms had ... Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1093-B Page 183

This is John Summerson, is it?

Yes. He was put on to this because he was a clear-headed and knowledgeable teaching professional man, and very very bright, and sensible. And Coldstream, of course, was head of the Slade, and he was a very experienced and a really splendid, sensible man. So the, but the Academy, of course, being independent of the State system, you see, we were, as we got no, when I became President, we got no help from the Government, with our teaching costs, and as we didn't get any help with anything else, very independent, we were like a sort of public school in that sense, we got tax, tax relief as a charity, we were an educational charity. And the ... we'd always had a long tradition of drawing there, as indeed had Heatherly's and Byam Shaw and most of the art schools had begun to drop, in the fifties, they'd begun to drop life drawing, or life drawing was becoming unfashionable. And in the Sixties, it became so unfashionable some schools didn't have it at all. The Royal College, in the Sixties, as far as I remember, they hired models, but nobody bothered to turn up to, to draw them. But the Academy had always felt that the importance of life drawing was really, not an old-fashioned concept, but was a discipline which could hardly be bettered.

Do you think that?

Well, I'm, I'm a great fan of drawing, as a discipline I mean, quoting Robert Frost, you remember who said, "You don't play tennis without a net." I mean, it simply isn't worth starting, and unless you've mastered the disciplines, and the ... and the rules of the game and everything, you can't be, you can't be liberated really.

End of F1093 Side B

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 184

F1156 Side A

I think it's a myth, which I suppose grew up, really, very largely, in the fifties and sixties, that self-expression is what mattered and not the ability to be lucid or anything, and it became, it became very modish to be inarticulate, and to tear your paper crookedly, and pin it up with one drawing pin instead of four. And all this sort of casual ... the theory was, I suppose, that it made you more sincere, and if you couldn't speak, and you could only grunt, you were obviously concealing deep thoughts.

But actually that's something, it's a slight tangent, but that I wanted to put in, because when we talked about the problems at the College during the sixties, it made it sound as though it was a period you didn't enjoy at all, which actually isn't the case is it? I mean, in your private life, you had quite a nice time in the Sixties, didn't you?

Well, I'm lucky, as a person, because I'm very difficult to depress, in fact. I enjoyed, I enjoyed the College, really, throughout, mostly because my teaching colleagues, were or became very close friends. The students in my department, had a discipline, they weren't free expressioning all the time, they had to know how to, how to draw, and to measure, and to put things together. And they had to master these things, and, of course, they were lazy about it, as students can often be, except those who were fascinated by the problem of problem-solving. And so ...

But, I mean, in a wider sense, you enjoyed the Sixties, didn't you?

Oh yes. I mean, in life, you mean?

Yes.

Oh yes.

Because when we talked before, you rather gave the impression that you didn't.

Ah well, I did get depressed sometimes, not for very long, at the College, at what I felt was a, was a, was an ungenuine attitude that had somehow grown up among the student population, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 185 all over the Western world really, of what seemed like artificial disillusion. But they weren't really disillusioned, but they felt that they had to be disillusioned. But I remember when I was a student, going through a similar period, that it seemed to be sophisticated to be bored, and I suppose every young person, you musn't look as if you're having too good a time, but it looks as if you never had a good time, except very rarely. So you go round pretending, "Isn't this awful!", "Oh dear, what dreadful people. Ghastly subjects", and all that. So one always does it at that sort of 18-25, but, in fact, I think most of the students, living with their own generation, and doing the work they wanted to do, they enjoyed themselves, and that rubbed off on us, and on the staff, and I was full-time in the sense that I went there every day, and so I knew who they were, so to speak. And I see now, thirty years later, I still see quite a lot of them, I'm glad to say. And they remember us, my wife and I. We didn't, we didn't sort of take them on many, we had only one expedition a year, where we hired a bus and went to look at something, or have a swim on the Isle of Wight, and go and see Osborne on the way back, that sort of expedition. So we didn't, what shall we say, coax their affection by constantly having them round for beer and sandwiches at number 33, or whatever it was. Although I think some teachers find it easier to do that, I never did really. But it was interesting, the other day I went out to dinner with some people, and there were four, four undergraduates from Oxford there, about 19, I suppose, and I did, I felt quite at ease with them, perhaps easier now I'm so old, I don't know. But they were very polite and nice, and funny, and enquiring and that sort of thing. So I did enjoy the sixties really, but I, I disapproved of the, or was upset by the, the mood of the times. You see, it was the time of Vietnam, if you remember, and the Baader-Meinhof people, and the student riots at Berkeley in America. It wasn't a very happy time in the educational world.

Okay, can we go back to the Royal Academy School?

Well, the Royal Academy Schools, you see, had been outside this general swim, as you know, in ... in most educational establishments where the, where there is an upset or a rebellion, or a take-over or something, there are usually only three or four students who, were usually foreign at the Royal College and Hornsey, and various other art schools, I remember, most of the students who started the troubles, if I can call them that, were foreign, because in the countries from which they came, they were used to their universities and schools being in the streets and cafes, and they were the people who got agitated about causes. And the English are politically very lazy, or used to be. I'm inclined to say, if the door had burst open and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 186 some American girl had burst in and said, "Come on, there's a meeting down in the Common Room, on the future of the grants system", or something, most students, I think, certainly in our department, would say, "Oh God!"

But the Royal Academy wasn't particularly affected by all that?

The Academy, of course, is out of the stream, it was a private school. It was a small school, they were buried in a great building, doing their own work, and they didn't, as far as I remember, apart from minor things about some hopeless teacher, "It's time he left", or something, they were very, well, they were very hard-working and serious, and more interested in painting than in politics. I think that's fair to say.

But, in terms of the teaching there, and other differences from other schools was the life drawing a crucial ...

Well, there's always been the tradition of life drawing there, although it goes through periods, depending who's the Head, Head of the School. If you get an abstract painter as Head of the School, in some schools they would be rather so unenthusiastic about life drawing, that they would spread a sort of cloud of anti-life about them, as they walked about the place. And students began to be uneasy that they were caught drawing an ankle, you know, but the Academy being the Academy, of course, nearly everybody on the permanent teaching staff, at any rate, one or two, were, in fact, wonderful life draughtsmen. And if you do something well, you like doing it. It doesn't matter whether it's swimming or, or drawing ankles. It's a great pleasure to do something you do well, and the danger, of course, is that you become lazy about it, and slick, and don't sort of struggle with it any more. So the Academy, I think, was a separate school, but as a non-teacher, I really can't speak with much authority about them. It goes through phases of great enthusiasm where I think the present Head of the School, Norman Adams, is a sort of abstract expressionist, mostly working in watercolour and prints, and I wouldn't have thought he was permanently nailed to a stool in the life class, probably, but, I mean, he doesn't try and stop it like some very hard-liners did at some art schools in the country.

And, going back to the Royal Academy itself, before you became President, how much had you had to do with it? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 187

Well, not very much. I was, I was elected about 1952 or so, '53, I think, and they always liked having one or two architects, because they think architects can read balance sheets, and aren't frightened out of their wits by an agenda, or matters arising, and all that. And so they like to have an architect around in the government side of the place, and Tom Monnington, who was President when I arrived, had started a little inner cabinet of about four people, who were alleged to go through the agenda and sort of think up a policy, or an attitude to the points which were going to be discussed - not so much the price of coffee, or should Members be given a discount in the artists' material shops, and that sort of thing. It was a sort of minor think tank, I suppose. And Tom made me a member of this, which was nice of him. Jim Fitton was another. And we used to meet before Council Meetings, in an attempt to try and make the meetings shorter and more sensible. And then he made me Treasurer, which was a very unwise appointment, because I simply ... am very nearly innumerate. And we had a, the Royal Academy had and still has a Financial Advisory Committee of fairly grand bankers, you know, the Governor of the Bank of England, and the Chairman of the Stock Exchange, who would come in two or three times a year and look, purse their lips over the books, have a glass of sherry, and disappear again. They were all charming and nice, and helpful, told us what to do with what money we had. But, I mean, I don't know anything about liquid assets or ... and I can't understand ... the City pages are simply ... might be Sanskrit for all I can understand them!

What did being elected to the Academy mean to you?

Well, I was brought up in a generation where everybody had divided feeling. The art world had divided feelings about the Academy. One, that it was covered in dust about six feet thick, in that everybody in it was so old they could hardly move, and painted terrible portraits, which is so ludicrously untrue when you think of the people like Stanley Spencer and, and, indeed, in those days Lucien Freud and Bacon, and people who were under no circumstances under dust. But the tradition was that the building looked Italian, it looked like a bank in Genoa, and you tip-toed as you went in. If you were new to the place, you didn't realise that the nice thing about it was that it was like a rather shabby old country house, you know, with thousands of dog leads in the umbrella stand, and sweet old servitors, highly-polished boots. So the atmosphere wasn't at all what the general impression was. So I think the answer to your question was that one was, thought is this a sort of death sentence? Is it a sort of mark Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 188 where the doctor shakes his head, and puts away his stethoscope and says, "I'm afraid you're a Member of the Royal Academy", and you went home and lay down for a bit. But there was a slight, a slight sort of feeling of that at first, but much more of a feeling was of enormous pleasure. And I think largely, if not entirely, because by then, I knew such a very high proportion of them, they were mostly my generation, and a large number of them were either teaching or had taught at the Royal College of Art, and I'd met them all through the Festival of Britain on various art projects, and I knew, of course, the rebels who wouldn't join, like John Piper and, and Henry Moore, who wouldn't join because of principle, or because they'd been involved in some huge academic row, because there used to be rows, terrible rows in the 19th Century and the beginning of this century, where people wouldn't speak to each other and all sorts, so people were resigning left, right and centre, and coming back again! But I wasn't a painter, so I hadn't been involved in any of that. But there were a lot of dear friends, and most of them very high-spirited and, if I remember, it was about, it was a hilarious time, really really hilarious. And we were kept on an even keel by a Secretary, Sidney Hutchison, who was about 60 then, and had come to the Academy as a 17 year old office boy, and who'd been through all the presidents you could think of.

[BREAK IN RECORDING. Next few lines refer to story S H had thought he was joining the Royal Academy of Music and not the Royal Academy of Arts]

As an office boy. And after he'd by ......

How did that happen?

Well, he'd booked, he'd got, applied for a job, and they'd said, "There's a job going at the Royal Academy for an office boy." So he turned up, and after, by lunch time, you know "Why is it so quiet?" He discovered he'd come to the Royal Academy of Arts. But he didn’t change, because he’s, he was trained as an organist, I think. And he's got stories about his predecessors’ secretaries, and a lifestyle of presidents who, you know, would turn up for 25 minutes once a week, sign eight letters which he'd typed, you know, I mean, and all within my adulthood. Extraordinary.

And can you remember your first Academy Dinner?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 189

Yes, I think I can. My first Academy Dinner I asked, who did we have from the Government? Lord Lever, I think it was, because it was the Labour Government. He made the main speech.

Hold on. Are you talking about your first one as President.

Yes.

No, I meant your first one you ever attended.

Oh no, I can't remember that. But one didn't have any responsibility for any of the guests or anything you sent in names of people you thought ought to be asked.

Can you describe them?

Well, they're rather curious. In a way, they're rather sort of provincial. The tables are, a long top table with spurs off it. And sometimes you get ...

And where did they take place?

They'd take place in the main, biggest gallery, among the pictures. And it is a white tie and orders dinner, which is, there are hardly any of those left now. But some people ...

Did you like that?

Some people rather like dusting them off, because they're, in the old days, I mean, you ... quite a lot of white ... I mean, people went to them when I was a youth, and people went to the theatre in white tie not a black tie.

But do you like all that still, or not?

No, I personally, being rather a sort of shambling dresser, and not very good at formal things, but I think it's quite spectacular to see the men all looking like peacocks, you see, and so many of them, people like archbishops and sheriffs and vice-chancellors and, and, covered with gold and black, and scarlet and, which men always rather like occasionally. But there Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 190 weren't any women in the old days, you see, except women Members who came under their own right. But then we instituted women coming without their husbands, distinguished women. I mean, you'd, you'd take a distinguished woman author, but you wouldn't ask her husband, because you don't ask wives. Occasionally you'd ask a husband and wife, both of whom were active in, in the arts in some way, like, for instance, John Carey and Iris Murdoch, for instance, who would both be justified guests, and preferred to come together.

Why, I mean, tell me what made it justifiable, because you're obviously not asking just people in the visual art world.

No, the guest list, the guest list is a very amusing occupation really. What happens is that any Member can send in any names he likes, I mean, some Member may be crazy about somebody who plays the violin very well. The next one may be crazy about somebody who's sailed twice round the world single-handed or something.

But, can they be crazy about their next door neighbour who doesn't actually do anything outside the house?

No. Everybody must have done something to justify being there, because we only have room for about, I can't remember what it was, about 150 people, and the mix is, it's fascinating. You dot the Members among them, you see, so you ... I remember, I sat once between Evelyn Waugh and some splendid lady, I'm ashamed to say, I've forgotten, I think she was Head of a women's college in Oxford. And the next time, you might sit between, again, someone like Peggy Ashcroft and Huw Wheldon, say. I'm just picking names at random. Because everybody sends in names, and the President's, the President's fun is to juggle them around and chuck out the ones he thinks are boring, and there was, there's great public competition to be asked to the Royal Academy, because it used to be, and I think, in many ways still is, one of the few public dinners where everybody allegedly is creatively interesting. You have, the number of official guests is tiny. You have the Lord Mayor of London, who's an official, but he comes under his own right. You have a representative from the Cabinet, who is appointed by the Prime Minister if he or she doesn't come himself. And you have the Archbishop of Canterbury and/or the Archbishop of Westminster. And those are sort of established figures. Two or three.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 191

You don't always have a Royal?

And they are asked every year. And they usually come.

You don't always have a Royal?

Always, yes.

You do.

Yes. We always have a Royal, because ever since the foundation ... because when our, by our funny Constitution we report to the Royal Family and not to the Government. My first Royal was, was an architect, the Duke of Gloucester. And I had, as far as I remember, Sir John Maud, who became Lord Redcliffe Maud, who was an old friend from the College, and he was Head of an Oxford College then, ex-civil servant. And then one, I think the next year I had Princess Margaret and Mrs Thatcher.

Did Mrs Thatcher tend to go to them, or does she just put in the odd appearance.

Not very often. I don't think she's been to the dinner more than twice in the last 20 Years, I should think. She usually sends the Minister of Education, or the Minister of Town and Country Planning, or somebody who's known to have an interest in the creative arts. Of course, in those days, there wasn't a Minister of Arts, but she usually sent a Minister of Arts as a sort of token representative.

And when she was there, do you remember her making any kind of particular contribution, or being ... I mean, was she rather ... out of place?

No. She was, she made some interesting contributions to me when I was sitting beside her, that she'd been brought up in a very primitive Methodist household where she was not exposed to the arts. They never went to the theatre or an art gallery or a concert, and she, really, never hit the arts at all until she went to Oxford, and then she found one or two of her friends occasionally went to concerts, and took her. That was her first brush with the creative arts, and so she was very modest about this, in saying that she knew she was totally uninformed, and she was beginning to get better Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 192 about music, more, more selective and interested, but she, so far as the arts were concerned, she was also trying to learn about them. She said something like that in her speech, really, that she was out of her depth here, but I can't remember actually what she said. We could look it up. Sidney Hutchison would probably remember word for word ... about the Government support for the arts, and was it stifling or was it helpful? And, did you immediately get a drop in creative adventure, because the people who doled out the money, if you didn't look out, were likely to be conservative in their attitudes. No, I think she, as far as I remember, she made a good speech. She told me not to be funny in mine, I remember that!

And were you?

Just as I was getting my notes together, she said, "I hope you're not going to be funny!"

And did she mean it?

Yes she did, because she said, "I do find it a terrible waste of time and energy going to a dinner, and listen to twelve very familiar anecdotes about an Englishman, a Scotsman and Irishman or something, it's really a waste of an evening. And I like to learn something from after dinner speeches, and not just have amiable waffle."

That must have been quite a paralysing thing to have said before You stood up?

Well, by then it was the end of dinner, and I was sort of quite relaxed, I think, I mean, one's never quite relaxed about speaking, because it's quite a lot of tremor about speaking. And one of the difficulties is, if you're President for quite a long time, and I was nearly ten years, you have the same audience every year, you see, the Members are the same pretty well, quite a lot of the guests are sort of ex-officio guests, and, by the end of dinner, everybody's a bit, hoping to go and look at the pictures instead of listening to a lot of oratory, there's quite a lot of speeches, you see, because you have, you have somebody proposing the health of the Crown, and the Royal replies, then you propose the health of the Government, and the Crown replies, and then you give, you ask, I mean, you give a sort of state-of-the-nation report of what the Academy's up to, going to be doing, and what it has done. So all that takes quite a long time, and people are beginning to snooze in their chairs a bit. But I enjoy them very much and I think they, they're very unusual, because the mix is so absolutely extraordinary. And you Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/Fl156-A Page 193 might find Cheryl Campbell sitting next to a Nobel scientist, you see, and they never mix those sort of things normally.

And the sort of tremor you might feel before speaking, is that something you enjoy?

Well, I'd actually done quite a lot of speaking during the Festival years, because a lot of my work was whistling round the country saying, "Come on, what are you doing for the Festival?" and stirring them up, and giving talks on what we were doing. So I'd got used to public speaking, if I can put it that way, and I wasn't absolutely paralysed by fear of public speaking. And I'd also, as a teacher, and later on, with, having done the Festival and used to give lectures on how it was organised, and what was done, what you might call "ideas lectures", so much as factual - case studies of ... or the sort of giving away prizes at schools and that sort of thing.

Did you do all that just naturally? Nobody gave you any advice or anything?

Well, I never had any tips or public speaking instructions. I'd have been more audible probably, if I had, or more sensible. But I had, I had a ...

End of F1156 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 194

F1156 Side B

My family, quite a number of them were in the theatre, and so I suppose I got used to people speaking easily, and, and apparently naturally, and at ease, as actors always do. And I've inherited a bit of this from my parents, who, having worked all their lives in India, were dependent totally on amateur theatricals for amusement in distant parts of Burma or wherever it was, and doing a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, in a Hindu temple or something, you know. And so they weren't embarrassed by speaking, and my father used to, in his retirement, used to give a lot of lectures for the Workers' Educational Association, which was a sort of predecessor for the Open University, and so I was fairly articulate, and I learnt a lot at those Academy dinners, I think.

Like what?

Sensing when you've got to change the tone or the rhythm, or bring in some slightly unexpected comment, which wakes people up. You know.

You mean, you'd sense that at the time?

Yes

Or you'd have prepared it ...

No no, you'd sense it at the time. I think one does. But you see, I used to ... after the Academy, or during the Academy time, I used to do a lot of speaking. I should think I spoke two or three times a week somewhere, and so one got used ... there are certain people you see in an audience, you can spot them, clasping a handbag on their knees, and with an expression of "Now show me", on their faces, and you sort of worked on that old woman. You were determined to get her attention and her interest. It's funny how they stand out in an audience, it's as if they've been lit by an internal glow of potential disapproval, and I used to notice that. But I learnt to speak fairly fluently and not read, because you can always tell when people read in the House of Commons, listening to it on the radio, or watching them on the television. People who read a manuscript, you don't listen to for very long, because you feel they don't ... they're treading a path which they've already trodden the grass down, and if they saw Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 195

something unexpected like a snake, or a poppy, they wouldn't be ready for it you know it wasn't there when they went down first to prepare it.

But would the President's speech at the dinner, is it supposed to have a ...

It's pretty dull!

Is it supposed to be entertainment, or is it supposed to be politics, or is it supposed....

It's, it's pretty dull really, because it's what we've done and what we're going to do. And I used to cut the end of term report very very short, because I said, "If we've done it, we've done it." I mean, there's no point, unless there's been some terrible row and a picture's been removed or ....

Did anything like that happen in your time?

Nothing so fierce, no. Anyway, you don't poke to the hole in the carpet ever, on those occasions. And then, and we spent a certain amount of time on what we were going to do the following year. But most of the time, I suppose, one was vaguely state of the arts speeches. I mean, there's always something going on in the art world, some museum director having a row, or the re-hanging of some museum or something.

Who were some of the speakers you had that were particularly memorable?

Well, we had, one of the memorable people was Philip Johnson from America, the architect from America. He was the first American we'd ever had at the Academy. And my last speaker, I chose a very old friend from the Festival days, Laurie Lee, the poet, who was a very very funny speaker, and slightly unreliable. A bit of a risk, you know because ... he's extremely shy, but once wound up, he holds a whole room captive in his hands, because he makes up stories as he goes. And he's had a very interesting life as a wandering violinist round Europe, and marrying a Gypsy girl, and working as a building labourer, and, and he's a fine writer. Anyway, I asked him to do it, as my last President guest, and Prince Charles and Princess Diana were the Royal guests.

So she's one of the few wives that gets asked anyway? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 196

She came, well, she was jolly sweet, attractive girl. Anyway, I sat next to her, between her and, and Prince Charles, and Laurie was on the other side of Princess Diana. And she said that she hadn't met him before, and she was rather nervous about sitting next to a poet, and I said, "You won't find him anything but the most unfrightening man in the world." But, unfortunately, Laurie, unexpectedly to me, was frightfully nervous and he, he came in and, and had obviously stimulated himself with a bit of whisky or something first, and then didn't eat anything during dinner which was, I thought, a bad sign. So I asked Princess Diana to keep an eye on him, and if she saw he was making a fool of himself, to kick him on the shin, and tell him to sit down. Well, Laurie started off from a manuscript with a very good speech. In fact, the, the sort of Head Porter/Beadle man, Master of Ceremonies, behind me, afterwards said he thought this was going to be the best speech he'd ever heard at the Academy. And as Laurie knew a very high proportion of people in the room, he got over-confident from the laughs he was getting, and threw down his manuscript, you see, and started to extemporise. Well, he wasn't really sober enough for this journey, you see, and it wasn't long before Princess Diana saw her moment , and gave him a hell of a kick on the shin and told him to sit down. And so Laurie, of course, turned to her, and said, "Why are you kicking me?" And she said, "I'm kicking you because you've gone on long enough." And, I mean, in a giggly way, all very jolly. But with great resolution, and that she was very young as a princess, I mean, she'd only just become ... but she was, she did it beautifully. So he sat down, and everybody clapped, and said, muttered to themselves, "What a shame it was." And Laurie then, a few minutes later, got up and left, and then wrote me an abject letter saying he was deeply ashamed of himself, and so sorry that he'd wrecked the evening, and all that sort of thing. But it wasn't really like that, because, as I say, everybody knew him, and everybody was disappointed that he hadn't gone on, because he speaks beautifully. He's very very funny.

Didn't he go and lie in Hyde Park?

Yes. He told me he went and laid out on St. James' Park, on his face, with the shame of it. But I don't know, I expect he went straight to Chelsea Arts Club, and solved it with his cronies!

What is the relationship with the Arts Club anything?

The Chelsea Arts Club? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 197

No the ordinary Arts Club in Dover Street.

No, they're slightly different. The Chelsea Arts Club, is still what an Arts Club, or almost what an Arts Club used to be at the beginning of the century, they were practising artists, 80 per cent of them, who all lived in the Fulham/Chelsea area, and they'd go there for lunch, and they'd go there in the evenings, and they'd play billiards, and they were sort of ... a lot of them calculatedly Bohemian with, with rather artistic clothes and things, and they weren't terribly good artists a lot of them, I mean, as practising, because a good practising painter doesn't hang around pubs very much, on the whole, they're too seriously hard at work. It's a silly generalisation, because there's some one knows who, in fact, can spend a couple of hours at a lunchtime in a pub, or the Chelsea Arts Club, and not be the worse for it afterwards, in judgement. But it's, it was a bohemian and slightly raffish club, but then, as the years went by, they began to fall on financial difficulties, and they began to expand the-membership, and in order to expand the membership, you had to find people who were vaguely interested in the arts, like in the creative advertising field, or in the law, it became a rather sort of a slightly poor man's Garrick Club of ... I don't think ... I think there's a rule still that a proportion of the membership must not fall below a percentage of practising artists.

And have you been a member?

Well, the President becomes, automatically, an Honorary Member. I hate all clubs, and so I don't suppose I go there more than once a year, if that, because I dislike them all. I don't know what it is. I find that it's funny about clubs in England, that they are rather like the universities, they are designed to be exclusive, not inclusive. I mean, the purpose of the club is to keep somebody out, like Oxbridge. I mean, they want to keep people out because they get in the way of your work, you know, if you're a don, as opposed to America, where they want to get people in, which means, of course, the standards aren't so high, but it's less exclusive is the only word, in its true sense of keeping something away from you, and I think the whole of St. James' Street area, is, I find, very unpleasant. I don't know, I really don't like it. And, I suppose it's a ridiculous weakness of some sort. It's partly the fact that I find that their attitude to women, which is the same as the attitude of the universities to women for so many years, and men, when they haven't got women around, behave, very often, in a very infantile way, I think. All-male societies, and they have funny rituals and passwords, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 198

rules, and dressings up and silly traditions, which have absolutely nothing but embarrassment to meet, you know, that you must always touch the third banister on the stairs as you go ... you know the sort of thing. Which is, women wouldn't do and they wouldn't do if there were women around. And, of course, in the last 20 years it's changed, and they've all been forced to have women in for financial reasons. But many of them still insist only on certain days of the week, and certain hours, and sometimes, separate entrances. But I went to the University Club in New York the other day, which is based on the Athenaeum, I suppose, and up to a few years ago, women had to go up the stairs on foot, while the members went in the lifts, because women were not allowed in lifts. And that sort of thing ...

And there's a different staircase at the Garrick Club, for women, isn't there?

There's a staircase which you usen't to take, you were allowed to take women up, or you weren't allowed even to tread on a piece of carpet at the foot of it. Well, that sort of thing I find very very boring, really deeply boring, and, and sometimes with Livery Clubs, I was very discourteous once, because I remember, I joined a Livery, I was asked to join a Livery at the time of the Festival. And I remember the Master of it ...

Which one was it?

I shan't say which one it was, but I remember the Master of it saying, "Remember that if you're a regular attendant at the Court and the dinners sort of thing, you may become Master of this Livery, and a Freeman of the City of London." And I thought, "How awful that I think that, to myself, I thought, 'Is there anything I'd like less than attending the things, and becoming Master of the Livery?"' I mean, the whole picture of processions and maces and loving cups, that disgusting loving cup, which goes round at City dinners, with a little napkin, and you wipe the rim after you've drunk the wine, before you hand it on to the next person. I mean, I really ...

But you like ceremony in the sense of Royal ceremonies, don't you?

-Ish. I don't know what ... I think, in a way, I like seeing a couple of motorbikes and a maroon Rolls Royce sweep out of Buckingham Palace, than a golden coach.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 199

Because you think the golden coach is an anachronism? Or what?

Well, there's something, well it's spectacular. The actual object is wonderful, and the uniforms are wonderful, aesthetically. But I, it's ... it's not so much an anachronism as a ... it's been ruined by the most influential artist of the 20th Century, which is Walt Disney. You see that his processions, which he has daily in Disneyworld, it's so close, the footman on the boxes are so close to frog footmen, that I think there's a risk of it, not adding to the dignity of the, of the Sovereign, but taking away from it a tiny bit of that. And I'd rather the Queen opened Parliament in a Rolls Royce, I think. I would think, I think now, it would look more splendid.

And there's no equivalent at an Academy Dinner to these rituals at the Livery Company?

No, it's a straightforward ... loyal, Royal toast, and a toast to the Royal Academy, and that's pretty well it.

And again, the relationship between the Arts Club and the Royal Academy?

Oh, in the Arts Club. Well, I don't know very much about the Arts Club, I don't know how old it is. But I think the Arts Club is largely publishers, I think, originally, but I'm not absolutely sure about this. There are a lot of publishers there now. And quite a lot of artists and they have, they have regular shows all the time, they are an art gallery, as well as a club. It rather depends on the energy of the Chairman of the Club at the time, and the Secretary who runs it, the present one is a practising artist as well as the Secretary. And they've got rather nice premises, just off Piccadilly so they get a slightly less raffish gang off Piccadilly than you'd find off Old Brompton Road, I think, so the, the atmosphere in the Old Brompton Road is billiard cue dust and, and tumultuous laughter from the bar, which is not the atmosphere of the Arts Club, which is much more soft carpets and ...

Do you prefer that?

I don't like either. Nice members, but I don't, I don't like the system.

But the but, I mean, the Academy holds some lectures or something there, don't they, or not? Have I got that wrong? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 200

Well, the Academy, we started that round about my time, which was to have an education department, because all the museums and galleries, of course, had an education department. But, you see, when we founded the Friends, in, during my time, the Friends have to have something to be friendly to, otherwise they don't remain Friends, because they pay whatever it was, 25 pounds a year or something, and they get to the exhibitions and they look around and say, "Well, what else is there?" ..See? So then you have to give them a, a club room where they can meet their friends.You then have to have organised lectures. You have to organise trips, both in England and abroad, to museums and galleries and stately homes and things. So you have a whole enterprise department to keep the Friends happy. And it paid off that, because the ... we very quickly had the largest number of Friends in Europe, of a gallery. We're around about 50,000 Friends, and they now pay about, I suppose 25, 30 pounds a year, and they get free entry into every exhibition. Plus these other things. I mean, we're all asked, every summer we have the cushion concerts which are sponsored, and bring in the young things who have to sit on the floor. And so we had an Education Officer who organised talks on the exhibitions which were running at the time, and visits and that sort of thing, and would deal with school parties, and, because, you see, running a place like that, it's like running a sort of repertory theatre, and a university college.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

I mean the Arts Club runs their own lectures totally.

But there's no particular relationship between the two?

I think quite a lot of RA Members belong to it, because it's two streets down, you see, so it's very convenient, and it's nice, the food's slightly posher than the Academy restaurant, I suppose.

And during your time as President, who were the painters who became RAs?

Oh Heavens! How can I possibly remember.

Tell me some of them. I mean, how were they chosen? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 201

Well, the election system hasn't changed for two hundred years really. Of course, when it was founded, there weren't all that number of painters to start with, and they were driven to have two women in the initial foundation, which is quite extraordinary. And then during the 19th Century, they all would, I mean, the RA meant virtually that you were a, a success, and you'd sell every picture you painted, so you became very rich and glossy, and you had butlers and broughams to take you to soirees and things! But the system has always been the same - that you have to have, there's a book, rather like an ordinary club, and you write, "Mr. Tom Jones - Painter." And you as the proposer say, "Hugh Casson - Proposer." Then the proposer has to find five supporters in the painting discipline. It's no good asking a sculptor or an architect, there have to be five people.

And the painters must be among the RAs?

Yes, and you have to find, if you're a sculptor, if you're proposing a sculptor, you have to find five sculptors in the RA, who would support this particular character. Then, after that, it's free for all. Once he's got the five, sort of supporters, he then, anybody who likes him, or admires him, can add their names, so if you, and then you have two elections a year, and there are usually about six or eight names waiting, and that then is open voting. I mean, it's written voting, but it's done in one room, on one day.

And there's always the same number of RAs are there, or not?

Yes, there's a maximum number of 75.

So you only have two elections a year, if there's an empty space.

Two elections, so the ... and you can't go over that unless somebody dies or retires. If you're 75 years old, you don't count, so to speak, it means you leave a vacancy on your 75th birthday, you leave a vacancy and that can be filled.

Well, how is it Eileen Agar's just been elected, and she's 90?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 202

Well, if you're old enough, and really old, you have various branches of honorary academicians who were missed out by the ethos of the time, that everybody thought you were ridiculously advanced, or mad as a hatter. And, "We can't have him or her." And then suddenly you realise that the years have gone by, and he or she was really rather wonderful. And so, humiliatingly, you crawl along, and say, "Would you like to be an Honorary Academician, because you're now outside the voting system?" So there are usually two or three people, and, and foreigners, of course, become Honorary Academicians, distinguished foreigners.

So, I mean, who were the ones that you nominated?

I can't remember a single one.

Was Tom Phillips one of yours?

I really, yes, Tom ... I'm ashamed to say I simply can't remember. I think they were all, they were all, as I remember, non-trad, if I can put it that way. They were all in full ... people like Kitaj and Hockney, and one of those bright young things from the College coming up, and the ruralists like Van (??) and the pop boys, like Peter Blake, there was a sudden surge forward of that generation. But, -of course, the argument, you're not allowed, you're not allowed to persuade people to vote for your candidate. I mean, you're not supposed to.

Can any Member come up with a candidate, or just the President?

No, no, any Member can put the name down, and he, but he has to persuade the five to, and sometimes it's neck and neck, and then little cabals build up, you know, the people who love so and so, and the people who don't love so and so. And you hear whispering in the voting chamber, "We can't have him. Look at that ridiculous picture he sent last year", you know, sort of ... So, on the whole, I don't suppose it's any more ridiculous than any other election system really. I mean, I think a lot of people have become Members, who shouldn't have been. A lot of people who should have been Members, who didn't want to be Members.

Why do you think some have become Members, who shouldn't have been? Because you think the quality of their work isn't good enough? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1156-B Page 203

Yes. I mean, either they had a temporary burst of fame, which died out immediately, or they were victims of the English, well, "Poor old Ted, you know, he's been on the list so long, and his wife's not very well. It would give him such a lot of pleasure...." You know, the sort of what's called the "he's terribly nice" syndrome, really.

And what about the ones who turned it down? Why do you think they do that?

Oh, well, a lot of them, but actually fewer and fewer turn it down now. There are certain people who had fundamental rows with the Academy on some public issue...

End of F1156 Side B

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 204

F1157 Side A

For instance, you get people who have fundamental rows, you see, for instance, Stanley Spencer, who was a Member, had a picture hung, which, in the view of the Council, which is the final arbiter, walks round the gallery just before it opens, they said was obscene, and it had to be taken down. And that caused a terrible row. I think Augustus John resigned, as far as I remember, over that one. And then there was the scandal over the Epstein statues on Rhodesia House, in the Strand, which again, public clamour in the newspapers said was too explicit in the genitals, and they were to be chipped off, Westminster City Council again. And Henry Moore resigned over that. He wasn't a Member, but he said he'd never become a Member of the Academy, because they didn't support him. And the then President, Sir William Llewellyn, who was a rather cautious man, correctly maybe said, "I can't, I can't commit the Royal Academy, because I don't know what everybody feels. It's no good my saying 'The Royal Academy believes ..."

But he could have found out what the Royal Academy believes.

I think, I think he could've found out, and I think he should have said it anyway. And if they didn't like it, he should have resigned, and I think he behaved ridiculously. But Henry Moore was our main casualty, and I didn't manage to persuade him back for, until about 1960.

What made him come back?

Funnily enough, we had an exhibition of Benin bronzes, and he came, and he was in a wheelchair then, and I pushed him round, and he said, "Well, if you're doing this sort of thing now, I would be honoured to have an exhibition here." By then, of course, he could become an Honorary RA, which was slightly different.

Did you know him quite well?

Not very well. I'd met him over the Festival, because we commissioned work from him. And I'd met him after the Festival and we worked on the Time Life Building, with Sir Misha Black, and Time Life wanted some Henry Moores in the building, and ... which are still there, built into the structure, facing Bond Street, and also in the terrace Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 205 behind. And I met him quite often. And I saw him quite a lot, because his children, his child Mary was at school with my girls, and when my wife and I went down to Speech Days, and seeing children off at Waterloo, you know, sobbing our hearts out, he was a very loyal and attentive parent. So there were those sort of rows. I mean, they weren't physical rows. In the old days, I mean, people would hit each other over art, strike people in the face.

But were there some people you would very much have liked to have joined, who wouldn't? Not over a row, but just ...

I'm sure there must be. There were quite a lot of painters that particularly I'd like to see as Members.

For instance?

But funnily enough, the architects, I think it's probably true to say that virtually all the, all the architects of very high quality, because architects, there are fewer of us, of course, as a number, I think. But the architects ... the painters and the sculptors don't interfere with the architects much, they don't know one architect from another, and so don't, don't have little pressure groups for Mr. A or Mr. B. And so the architectural elections usually went fairly quickly and painlessly, and I think we got very very good people. Sculptors and painters are always a bit harder because, I think artists tend to be rather wary of each other's disciplines. They're quite happy to talk about other painters if you're a painter, but perhaps not so much about another discipline like engraving, or sculpture, particularly. But there are not many painters, I think, outside the Academy by their own wish. I would say Bacon and Freud would be our sad omissions. But, you see, there are certain artists who won't join anything, under any circumstances. They think it's clapping handcuffs on them, and they become the victims of policies which they may not approve of. And Francis Bacon, for instance, will not accept any honour of any kind, and if you made him a peer, he'd send it back. He doesn't believe that, that artists should have these sort of appellations, he thinks it's a ...

Do you know him at all?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 206

Not really, no. I used to see him quite a lot at the College when he was there, when he was friends of the teaching staff there, but I don't know him. But he's a, he's a very traditional artist in his lifestyle. He lives alone in a studio, paints all the time. He doesn't like going abroad. He won't accept medals, he, he just gets on with it. There are though, there are a few of those left. And there are one or two people who are old enough to remember the Academy when it was really rather silly, or retrograde, or ...

And I mean, what can the Academy do for it's artists these days?

Well, the first thing is, they've got to be solvent, which I think they're managing now.

What the RA?

Yes.

But what can it do for the artist?

For the artist ... well, they show his work once a year. He's allowed to show six pictures a year, more or less free, and the, the percentage charge, I think, is still 25%.

This is in the Summer Exhibition?

Yes. Which is half the commercial galleries.

But can the RA people choose which six pictures, or do they still have to be selected?

Yes, they can. They send in six of their own choice. It's very seldom they're turned down. Sometimes one or two are turned down, but or they can, I think, yes, I think ... no, they can't send in more. Six is the maximum they can get hung. I tried to reduce it to four, because I thought the proportion of, of wall space used by the Members was too high, really, particularly if you're ... if you're a painter that works on the size of a hearth rug, you take six hearth rugs, you see, you, you probably knock 20 potential exhibitors off the walls. But I never managed to get that through.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 207

And what's the principle of the Summer Exhibition?

The principle? It's a state of the nation report, I suppose, what's cooking now. Not probably the most experimental, but it's a terrific cross-section of what people are doing, and I think, for that reason, it is absolutely ... the reason also that amateurs and professionals are together, and are compared. I think that's what makes it such great public interest, because we get huge, huge crowds to come and see it. The other thing is that it's being a mixed exhibition, anybody that goes there has to work jolly hard. He can't go into a room and take one glance and say, "I don't like this", and leave, but you can in Cork Street, because you can see the whole oeuvre in one go, can't you? "I like this chap's work", or "I don't." But, if you go to the Summer Exhibition, you really have to go about like a pigeon, picking in the gutter, so to speak, finding something that you like, passing over ones you don't like, and finding another one. And that, that sort of personal spotting, I think people enjoy.

Was it something you ever went to before you became involved with the Academy?

Ever sent to?

Ever went to?

I used to go, when I became an architect, I used to go to the architecture room every year, but that was only one room, and, but then one couldn't avoid walking through the other things. But in those days, I'm talking about 1931/2/3, it wasn't, to me, very exciting. There were hundreds of portraits of Lord Mayors and, you know, which are only interesting to Lady Mayors!

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON, AUGUST 7th, 1990

We talked about nearly everything except the exhibitions that actually went on while you were President.

I wish I could remember them. But one of the first ones was the horses from Venice, supported by drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, of horses, and the Venetians were good Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 208 enough to lend us one complete beautiful horse. Well, all exhibitions take, roughly speaking, I suppose, two or three years as an idea, shifting around in correspondence between various museums and the Governments and Authorities."Suppose we had an exhibition of this kind," they would say, or we would say, "What's the likelihood of getting this, that and the other?" And then when it gets friendly and serious, you then try and find an actual date, and go through the logistics. We had a very big variety of exhibitions. We were just starting the policy of having half a dozen exhibitions a year, instead of the old two before the War. And they were various sizes, because the Royal Academy is lucky, it has its big main galleries, which are sub-dividable into smaller ones. We have the top floor, which is called the "Diploma Galleries", which is for smaller exhibitions, usually for smaller paintings, and then we have the front rooms over the courtyard which, when I became President, were still offices and social entertaining rooms. They were the old Lord Burlington, as it were, state rooms, where he gave parties and concerts for Handel to play, and they're very very elaborate grand rooms. One of them is a permanent Committee Room. One of them is the Secretary's room. The other three are, in fact, available for much smaller exhibitions, or for extensions from the big galleries backwards. So it's a wonderfully flexible building, and you can accommodate something of any size. The first exhibition I was immediately involved in, was one of holography. One of the students in our department at the Royal College, was a boy called Anthony Furst, and he was, in fact, a very spectacular designer, whose interests were in film and theatre, largely. And he had colleagues who were working in the science of holography at Leicester University and other places, and so we thought we'd have, try an exhibition of, of laser beams and holography. And this was a fantastic success. It only ... it was a small exhibition, it was about half the Galleries, but they had laser beams crossing the courtyard, and picking up Sir Joshua Reynolds' statue, and these extraordinary rods of clear, thin light, criss-crossing the courtyard. And then we had a sort of ballet of these rays in the main gallery, about every three minutes, had some music and the, the rays all interlaced like searchlights, but very very thin, and of course, as you remember, with laser beams, they never get any wider. Most beams get wider as they go away from the source. Laser beams stay the same wonderful, thin, rodlike form, like a line drawn in space. And this was a terrific success. There were long long queues every day. I don't think there was anybody in those queues over 30, probably. But that was exactly what we expected, and, indeed, hoped for. And we got a huge attendance. And then we, we Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 209 jumped about a bit. We had an exhibition of treasures from Pompeii, lent to us by the Italian Government. We had a wonderful exhibition from Venice, on the venetian horses of San Marco.

Whose idea was it to actually borrow a horse?

Well, I think that had been sculling about for some time. We didn't think we'd ever get it, although the horses, as you remember, they came from Istanbul originally, Constantinople, in the 15th Century, trundled across Europe, and then Napoleon took them to Paris for a bit, then they came back to Venice so they, they've had quite a lot of trips, and they're pretty strong. But we didn't expect we would manage to get a real horse. We thought we would just get a plastic cast, but the Italian Government were very co-operative and we got this magnificent horse. Getting it in to the place was quite a problem.

How did you do it?

Oh, all sorts of ramps and pulleys and ropes, and, and the Italians, of course, who helped with all this, are used to hauling giant things up on to monuments, and you know, think nothing of it. But it was quite a problem, and we had also all the Leonardo drawings of horses to support it. A lot of what you might call historical material, graphic historical material, and that was a huge success too.

How much did you know about it all before the exhibition?

What about running exhibitions or having exhibitions?

About the horses?

Or about the horses? Didn't know more than any architect knows, having read about them and seen them, if he's lucky. I mean, I'm a terrific superficial generalist, which is, in a way, part of the advantage, because if you're a very terrific expert on 15th Century ceramic Turkish tiles, it means you really haven't had time, as a rule, to think about anything else, and so you're, you can hire people who, who are good at specialities, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 210 this is what, of course, one did for cataloguing and things. But ideas are ideas, and anybody can have an idea, who is interested. As I think I said before, running the Academy is rather like a mixture of a repertory theatre and a university.

But, I mean, did anybody teach you what you were going to have to do in terms of running the exhibitions for the Academy?

Well, we had the very experienced Secretary, Sidney Hutchison, who had been there since the year dot, as we spoke about before. And he'd run, oh, 20, 20 years worth of exhibitions, and he knew most valuably the timing required. And he was pretty good on estimating budgets. But one of the problems we had, you see, was, we'd taken the decision in Council, that we couldn't have any exhibition unless we had a sponsor, and the sponsor wanted to know how many people a day we thought we'd get, what the entrance fee we could charge was? Would the catalogues pay for themselves? And I didn't know anything about that, of course. And Sidney had it all from looking at past records, and allowing for inflation and that sort of thing. Because it is a complicated job, and having these, more and more of these exhibitions, meant we did have to expand the staff to help Sidney with them. Our most ambitious one, in fact, I think, at the time I was there, was the Japanese Exhibition, and that filled up simply the whole of the Galleries. And this was a very tricky one, because the Japanese who, who were extremely helpful and generous in the end, have a habit of being rather slow in decision. You always think, when you read of their tremendous business success, that they're barking down 28 telephones with decisions. Well, they don't work like that. They work on, on consensus. Very much on consensus. And they rather like old people, so old, the old bosses of museums and businesses and banks, and people who were paying for these things, and when they were all sort of, by English standards, they'd all have retired, but they still have a voice. And the negotiations which, I had one trip to Japan to meet them all, my first visit, and stayed with our Ambassador, Sir John Pilcher, and he'd been there a long time, and he'd learned his Japanese, what you might call rather old-fashioned Court language, and so he was, he was much loved by the Japanese, because he knew all the paraphrases and the sort of courtesy words you put in and that sort of thing. He was extremely helpful and, and took me around to meet all the museum people. And also they have a thing rather like the British Council, called the Japan Council, which handles the arts, both their country and abroad. But the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 211 negotiations of, detailed negotiations were carried on by Sidney, who went out. And Sidney, being very English, got a bit irritated by the slowness of decisions and, and I remember one day, he told me, he rose to his feet, and said he didn't think there was any purpose in anybody sitting there any longer, because obviously they didn't want to lend him anything or have anything to do with the exhibition. And that, of course, started a terrible scraping, and giggling, and "Come, come", and "Don't ... don't take offence. This is the way it goes." And all that business.

And were the actual meetings different from the kind of meetings you would have had in England?

I went to very few meetings. I had ... I was a sort of informal sort of PR character, who came on and shook hands and tried to be agreeable. Sidney was the one who had the bargaining about packing cases and, would the Japan airlines send them free, and all that sort of thing.

And did you have to attend social things in Japan with the Ambassador?

Quite a number of those. They gave a lot of dinner parties and lunch parties and that sort of thing.

And did you like all that?

Well, it was extremely interesting, because it is a very strange country. It really is, to a European it, it was then, anyway, very very strange. Very very formal.

In what way was it strange?

Well, the formality, and the, the fact that wives were not really involved in anything. They didn't come to lunches or dinners.

And were you allowed to take yours?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 212

Not often, no. I mean, it was usually boys, boys' dinners. But they were, they were extremely helpful and, and one of the problems was that it was an exhibition of Japanese artefacts, which are extremely fragile. I mean they are ancient - silk textiles and robes, and woven manuscripts and, and ancient ink drawings and, and a lot, of course, a mass of papers, work on paper, because they're marvellous working with paper. And all this was extremely fragile, and, of course, they were frightfully worried that the Royal Academy was not air-conditioned. And so we had to, in fact, get designed by Alan Irvine, a very good and precise, elegant designer, who worked with a Japanese architect, on ... everything had to go into a showcase which was sealed, and had little dials inside saying what the humidity was, and the heat was, and the dust content was. And they sent over inspectors who came to look at these every day throughout the run of the exhibition, which made it an expensive exhibition, because we had to pay their hotels and everything. But it was, it was a very very exciting exhibition, and again, got huge crowds. I can't remember what the financial result was. Usually, in exhibitions, they used to cost about, the big ones would cost about 2 million, which you can't get back in gate money. It's rather like the opera, you know, if you charged gate money, you would have to charge 30 pounds to go in, so if you're going to have those sort of exhibitions, you do have to find sponsors.

And who sponsored the Japanese?

We had help from the Japanese, and we had help from English banks, and we had help in all the exhibitions we did, also from one newspaper or another. The old rule of newspaper sponsorship is that the only exhibitions that make money are exhibitions dealing with gold and death. As long as you've got some gold, or as long as you're talking about death most of the time, it's usually regarded as a cinch. But that, in fact, didn't always work. In fact, Pompeii, which was full of gold, and had all been dug out of tombs, despite a lot of publicity from our sponsor, it was successful, but it, but it didn't make a profit. So what happens normally, you see, is that it's quite, quite a risk. It's like putting on a revival of Showboat, or something, is it going to be a success or isn't it? And the problem is, if you have, if you have a theatre show, you can take it off, if after five days it's clearly a flop, you take it off and say goodbye to the actors and actresses and goodbye to your money. But, if you've arranged an exhibition which is going to run for three months, or even longer, its got to stay there because all the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-A Page 213 arrangements for getting it back have been made, and what you've got to try and do is to whip up publicity to, to get the crowds in, because most of the publicity for any arts activity, I think, is word of mouth. It's no good writing "Smashing", "Terrific", I don't think, and those sort of extraordinary, tinkered about with quotes from critics, with adjectives left out. If a critic writes, "There is a sparkling, but interminable comedy," they would just put in the word "sparkling" on posters, wouldn't they? And that's the normal drill. So we were all children about this, you see. We had, we had an old publicity firm who'd done all our posters for years, and our publicity. And we took that in hand. We had a new public relations girl, who was a girl of outstanding energy and sophistication, and wonderful contacts. She had a good social background, and she could walk, with total confidence, into the Chairman of any bank's room, and sit down start talking to them without being too deferential, just being perfectly at ease. And she made a very big contribution to the time I was there. She was a great success. Griselda she was called, and she was marvellous. She was the ex-press officer. And then we went on, we, we had exhibitions of, of Benin bronzes, and then we had the idea ... our new Exhibitions Officer, Norman Rosenthal, was starting a series of 20th Century European art, taking each country one at a time. And Norman, who knew German painting better than any other at the time, suggested we started with German. So we started with a huge exhibition of 20th Century German and then also 20th Century British. The British one was difficult because it involved choosing who would represent the 20th Century British painting. And, of course, some of the Academicians were pretty keen that they weren't forgotten, you know. And this caused quite a sort of pursing of lips in the Council Chamber, you know, because, the idea was, if it's the Royal Academy's view of British 20th Century painting, the Royal Academy had already stated their view by electing a lot of people who they thought were the best people of the time, you see. But then, if you're going back to 1900, there were a lot of people who had fallen out of favour, or now looked faintly unlikely arrivals on the, on the walls. So we did have some fairly delicate moments with that exhibition.

End of F1157 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 214

F1157 Side B

How were they resolved?

By just being firm, really. I mean to say, by saying that nobody is excellent all the time.

And did you get forgiven?

Well, I don't know, you can't tell, can you?

Did you feel any ...

But then, you see, one sheltered behind the, I wasn't a, there was a small jury which selected them.

How was the jury chosen?

Well, they were chosen by, by the Council of the RA.

Were they all RA people?

No, we had, we had, in those days, I think, Lawrence Gowing, was, I think was a member of the British one, and he wasn't a Member then. And then we had a critic, and I can't remember ... and a historian, and ... so we had a little sort of bunch of experts who would draw up a list, and you'd cross names off, and put the other ones in. And I don't know, if one looked at the catalogue now, what one would think of the, the talent.

Did you feel anyone was missed out who shouldn't have been, or vice versa?

Well, I think the, the problem was that the people who know about painting also had to feel that they wanted to represent a school or a way of painting, even if you didn't like it very much. So and so was probably the best person around who did it. I don't think many of us in the Academy knew much about German painting at the time, but it made a great splash, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 215 because people hadn't seen much modern German painting. And it wasn't tremendously liked, a lot of it, because it was very fierce and expressionist, and broken plates.

Do you like it?

I ... I rather like understated painting, myself, I mean, and I'm hopelessly soft about painting, I think. I like painters like, who shall we say? Gwen John, and ... if I'm thinking of 20th Century ... understated, quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, and I don't like being hit in the face by paintings, and violent things. I always think of them as being in my own room, and would I really like having them there longer than about 20 minutes? So I was, my, my vote was so amateur, to be totally worthless. And so I kept clear of the selections.

But, as President, were you expected to be much more part of it?

Well, I was only really, I think, involved, as far as I can remember, it's so long ago now, you see, the expert committee of critics, historians and painters, said, "This is ... this is the selection we suggest. We've got one or two alternatives of various moods, or periods, or styles", or something, and everybody put forward a point of view, and the Committee would accept them or reject them. But they were really the, the arbiters. You couldn't do anything else once you've appointed your jury, you really had to leave them at it, because they're in the world of studying it, and writing about it, and reading about, and travelling round Europe. And I was, I mean, I was only an architect, I had to keep a fairly modest profile. But it was fun. Anyway, we, we'd bang on. The main problem I had really, I suppose, was, was not so much the selection of works in these huge exhibitions, but too, I suppose, trying to keep the Members happy, with the decisions that were being made, trying to get the money to finance it, and, of course, once the thing was open, a considerable amount of lunches and dinners, and lectures, and parties, what you might call roughly the ... the PR side of one's life.

What do you think the sponsors thought they got out of sponsoring them?

It's fairly interesting, because they'd never done it before, you see, in the arts, virtually. We'd never really done it, and the only sponsoring in the arts field was in the theatre and music, or opera. And those were quite often sponsored in the period I was in, which was the seventies, but they hadn't really pushed into the art world. With few exceptions they hadn't, and so they Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 216 were quite excited to poke their noses into this - the banks and the insurance companies, and the big industries. I mean, for instance, as far as I remember, the, the Venetian horses were, were sponsored by ...

Olivetti wasn't it?

Olivetti. And we had also a lot of help from Sealink, the ... who were running cruises to Italy for the Italian 20th Century things.

Whose idea would it have been to bring them in?

Well, any ... I mean, the Council, we were none of us very sophisticated about this. But we had a secretary who, when Sidney retired, who had been a merchant banker, who had, who had actually lived, for five or six years, in Paris, and he was pretty well informed where money lay. He could hear the distant chink of a gold bag being laid down, so he was, he was pretty sophisticated and advised us. And Griselda was sent off, like a sort of, I can't think what she was, it wasn't quite a robber, but she was a ... she bearded these distinguished bankers and chairmen of things, and she was frightfully enthusiastic about everything, and persuaded them that this was something which was a pioneering thing to do, and they really ought to get into it. And it was a fairly prosperous time, and then, of course, later on, about eight years later, virtually every national museum in the country was doing it - the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, Natural History and Science Museum, apart from the provincial ones. And they were all beginning to run special exhibitions which they'd never done before, you see. The difference between us, obviously, between us and the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the National Gallery or the Tate, is, we don't really have a big permanent collection. We've got quite a lot of pictures which have been given us by our Members, but we don't have a permanent collection.

That's something we didn't talk about. Everyone who is elected, has to give a picture, more than that, to the RA?

Well, in the old days they used to give silver as well.

You mean coins, or an object? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 217

Well, a spoon or a cup, or epergne, or a sort of ... rather like a ... Oxbridge College Fellows very often do, modern silver tankard or something.

With the thought that in an emergency it can all be melted down, and sold?

Yeh, I suppose! And it comes out on state occasions. Yes, but no, what you have to do ...

What did you give?

What did I give? I had a spoon designed and made, and I've still got it.

You mean you didn't give it to them?

No! I thought it would disappear into some green-baize box and it's the sort of thing I might leave.

Who made it?

It was made by a silversmith girl in Windsor, who was, in fact, the wife of one of the Queen's courtiers.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

But the main gift, of course, of every Member, is a piece of work by himself, and he, in fact, chooses what he would like to give, representative, presumably, of his best work. And on occasion, when it's sent to the council for acceptance, occasionally it's suggested that there might be another one, slightly of more interest, and so we hang on to it and ask for another one. And that's always a bit awkward to do, but I've known it happen.

Is there a great vault full of peoples' work?

Yes. Burlington House is built on a wonderful collection of huge, arched, brick vaults, which are stuffed with pictures ever since its foundation, of various ... given by various Members. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 218

And occasionally we used to pull them out. There's one going on now, in 1990, of the Edwardian period, as it were, roughly speaking, 1900-1914, which has some really very fine painting, which have been very out of favour for many years, but has some wonderful work in it. And, of course, would include things like, people like Stanley Spencer as well as people like Lavery and John, and, and the famous, a lot of them were portrait painters, of course, in those days - Gunn, Gerald Kelley and all those characters. And we have, of course, therefore, a collection of very, of valuable pictures which we, which are really our archives and therefore unsaleable, of which the most valuable is the Michelangelo Tondo, which is a, a large white marble rounder of the Mother and Child, about five feet across, I suppose, half finished, which is always rather exciting, because it, he hadn't quite polished it off, so the carving is vestigial in places. And that was valued, I think, in my time, at about 8-10 million pounds.

How does the Academy come to have it?

And that was a present, actually. It, it came from a distinguished benefactor, one of these old, early 19th Century collectors, who bought it in Italy when you could still buy these sort of things. Then, when he died, he left it to his widow, and she gave it to us, as a legacy. But, of course, it's a national treasure, and we wouldn't be allowed to sell it to save our fortunes. But, of course, it's, I don't know what the value is now, you see, if you, it would probably be double that, easily, if not more.

Stanley Spencer was the person you went abroad with on that British Council tour, wasn't he?

To China.

Mmm. What was he like?

Well, he's, he was an interesting man. He was, he was tiny. He was about, I shouldn't think, hardly five feet high, a grey fringe, thick spectacles, usually had an overcoat to his ankles, extremely voluble, rather impatient, read mostly The Bible, seemed to have endless wives, which we were all supposed to know about, and in which order they'd come and gone. He lived in Cookham, and he lived in a cottage. His studio was, was an attic. Most of his pictures he used to have to roll up as he painted them, because there wasn't room to spread them out, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 219 because he painted very very big pictures. I think he was one of the t best of the war artists of the First World War, and he went as a stretcher bearer to Gallipoli. And, fantastic paintings he did there. His father was an organist, and Stanley was a pianist and organist too, the Church of England hymn type. Anyway, we went on this trip. Have we done this before? I met him on a trip in 1954, long before I had anything to do with the Royal Academy. What happened was that, after the War, some energetic don in University College, London, suggested that now the War was over and China was stable under Mao Tse-tung, and General Chiang Kaishek had been pushed off to his island, taking with him most of the Chinese national treasures, where they still are. Anyway, this chap had written round to a lot of people, I suppose about a hundred or maybe less, of people to sign a petition to the Chinese Government, and the British Government, saying, "Isn't it time we re-opened cultural relations now, after this long gap, given by the War?" And it was one of those sort of things which nobody can think of any reason why they shouldn't sign, so there were a lot of signatures of everybody from Augustus John and J.B. Priestley, to Bertrand Russell and Iris Murdoch, or whoever it was, you know. I mean, there are always certain people who you see on every list of that kind, well-meaning and genuinely inspired, sometimes, people who feel that this can have an effect, as it did with the rescuing of Arthur Koestler from prison in Spain. Anyway, this letter went off. We all signed it and, and some months later we got a letter back from the Chinese Academy saying they were so much excited by this that they would like half a dozen of the signatories to come and present it in person. And the organiser then began ringing round saying, "Would you like to go?" And when he got to me, which was quite a long time after asking the more distinguished ones, he said he was amazed that such a lot of people said no, they didn't want to be bothered. The journey was difficult, because, in those days, the only way to get to China was across Central Europe, to Moscow, and then hopping across Russia and Mongolia, that way was the only way you could get there. And they said they'd take us for three weeks. And they, I remember the man ringing up and saying, "Do you mind who you go with?" And I said, "Of course not!" And he said, "Well, some people are rather choosy about, they'd rather not spend three weeks with him or her." And I said, "I don't care who, who's with me, I'll survive that for the experience!" So, when we assembled at Heathrow, none of us had ever met each other before. And it was a curious bunch. It was the philosopher, Freddie Ayer, who was Professor at Oxford; there was the poet and Greek translator, Rex Warner; there was a geologist, I think called Hodgkinson, or Hopkinson, a charming man; there was Stanley Spencer, the painter, and there was me. We had no musician. And we had a translator, a Chinese chap who'd done, who'd learnt Chinese Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 220 during the War, and who was, in fact, our sort of courier. So we all met at Heathrow, and eyed each other up and down like dogs meeting on the pavement, always in that sort of slightly bantering, hysterical mood, people adopt when they're going on a travel of any kind. And we flew, the first night, to Prague, and the second night we got to Moscow. And we'd had a slight briefing at the Foreign Office before, about what subjects to avoid with Chinese Government officials.

Such as?

Such as Korea, because the Korean War was in its final stages then, and it was an awkward thing between England and China. And I can't remember the other things, we took notice of this and felt very important. Then we had ... when we got to Moscow, they said "Well, I'm afraid there's no aeroplane to, going in your direction, for about a week." And so we all pursed our lips, and looked at our wrist watches, and said, "Well, we have very important professional engagements and you'll have to find some old aeroplane. and dust it off, and wheel it out, otherwise we shan't be able to stay the full time." Dreading they'd say, "Well, push off!" But, in fact they did, after about four or five days, they found us an aeroplane in some old shed and pushed us into it. They were two, they were two twin-engine, they looked rather like Douglas, and they seated about 30 people, so we had quite a lot of official passengers with us. We'd had a very good time in Moscow. We were taken round by the culture bosses of Moscow, and we were mistaken, at one stage, for a delegation of sheep breeders, and taken out to a sheep breeding farm, where we did our best to look wise about sheep, until it was discovered we were supposed to be listening to Pushkin! And the poor old sheep breeders listening to a lecture on Pushkin, while we were inspecting fleeces on the farm. That was the only sort of untoward incident in Moscow.

Did you start to get to like one another, or not?

Yes. We got into a sort of hilarious undergraduate mood of endless banter, really, by then, and luckily, we all liked each other very much. Stanley was a little bit aloof because he, he lived in his own world, rather, and was not, so to speak, a natural one of the boys, he was solitary. Rex was extremely funny and so was Freddie, and so was the geologist. They were extremely good company. But in those days, the aeroplanes landed for meals, and they landed at night to stay the night, and you droned across Siberia. This was in September, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 221

it was, it was not a very exciting terrain to fly over, because you flew low, of course, it was mostly lakes and forests, and low mountains. And you landed at small airfields for lunch, and then you landed at small airfields for supper. And then if, if darkness had fallen, you stayed there the night, and they were, each airport had a little dormitory for boys and girls. And you went up into this dormitory where there were about 30 beds round the room, and a table in the middle, and lights out at sort of, it was just like school. Lights out at 10 o'clock, and up at 6, with the dawn. And as we went further and further east, it got very very cold and quite a lot of snow lashing around. And we eventually got to Irkutsk, which is the border town with Mongolia, and then we were marooned in a blizzard, and Irkutsk had a piano, for some reason, in its dormitory, and Stanley would play ancient and modern hymn tunes to these astonished fellow passengers lying in their beds. A most grotesque figure, in his long ulster and a huge yellow woollen scarf wound round his head, against the cold, and his pyjama cord showing at the foot of his trousers, because he kept his trousers, pyjama trousers on, under his trousers, for virtually the whole trip, as far as I remember. And I was arrested for drawing, because I didn't know it was a military aerodrome, and I was drawing these aeroplanes in a snowy field, you see, and I was arrested by a policeman. Took me to the Commandant, who looked at the sketchbook, and said, "Is drawing really necessary?" And I found that was a philosophical question, too difficult to answer, but I said, "Yes, I thought it was, as far as I was concerned." So I was told not to do any more. And that was the end of that.

And were you quite well treated?

Oh yes, I was only there about 20 minutes. And then we flew on to Ulan Bator, which was notable because it was a tiny little airport, with camels instead of taxis, and in the hut, the airport hut, there was a round table with a book on it, and when I got to the book to see what it was, it was a girls, English schoolgirl story, by Angela Brazil, who was the famous schoolgirl authoress of the inter-war years, Tomboy of the Fifth, and Hazel of the Conamur, or whatever it was. And how it got there, I've no conception, but that was interesting. And then we flew over the mountains into China, and we landed at Peking, and we had a, we'd wasted a week, really, on the voyage, and we had a couple of weeks in Peking. We went down to Shanghai and Hangchow, and everywhere you went you were met by a cultural delegation of about half a dozen professors of this, that and the other. And Freddie lectured Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 222 on philosophy, and Rex lectured on translation, and the mysteries of language, and the importance of accuracy and that sort of thing. I lectured on architecture.

What particular?

What was going on in England at the time, which was quite interesting. It was all the, the new towns, and the new universities, and the pre-fabricated cottages and everything, which they were very interested in, because that was the sort of thing they were just beginning to deal with themselves.

You were lecturing to Chinese architects or who?

Students, yes.

But architectural students, rather than general students?

And we had our own translators, you see, so there was no, couldn't, I mean, our English one, he translated our lectures, as far as I could ... they were all scribbling away like mad ... what they made of it, I don't know. And we had, of course, quite a lot of social life. We went to a ball given by Chou En-lai, and one with the Dalai Lama, where we were all handed dance programmes.

Didn't you get his autograph?

Mmm?

Didn't you get his autograph?

Yes, I did. I asked him to sign my dance programme, but, of course, dance programmes were printed in France, but the name with the writing going horizontally, and the Chinese write vertically, and, of course, he signed it, and covered every dance with his signature, so I didn't have a single dance! Not that I'd have had it very easy, because in those days, all the girls wore the same suits as the boys, they all wear blue boiler-suits, boys and girls, and little scarlet ribbon pigtails. And the, we went on ... we saw an enormous amount of sightseeing - Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1157-B Page 223 palaces and tombs - and we were taken everywhere. And they had National Day when they all processed, all the army, and the ... it went on all day - tanks and guns and things. And we, the British delegation, which was us, decided to boycott it, and we got out of our seats, and went and sat below the stands, and said we hadn't come to China to look at tanks, we'd seen enough of them. That caused a little bit of a fuss, but not much. We stayed in a very comfy hotel. In those days, Peking was still surrounded by a wall, it still had its gates, and the architect in charge of the city, who had been trained in Liverpool, and he was insistent that these walls and gates should be kept, that the city should remain as it was, and all extensions and high buildings should go outside the city. Well then, years later, when the Red Guards came, he was dismissed, of course, and sent to the fields to hoe cabbages for, I don't know, about ten years, I suppose, and the walls were pulled down, and the gates were pulled down, and horrible high buildings arrived in Peking. And it was a tragedy.

End of F1157 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 224

F1158 Side A

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON. 22 AUGUST 1990

Picking up where we left off last time, we were just talking about your trip to China, and we talked about it quite a lot, but, apart from boycotting the Army demonstrations, did politics appear in that at all? Or was it all a political?

It was pretty a-political, because we all gave lectures on our particular subjects, might have been philosophy, or literature or architecture, and all of that could, of course, been given a political angle, but, as we were talking through interpreters, our own, he translated accurately what we said, he didn't translate it into political versions of it. And everybody took notes, but, of course, one doesn't know whether they were all forced to tear them up afterwards.

But, in terms of having been briefed by the Foreign Office not to talk about Korea or something, no difficult moments?

No. No. We had a, we had a, we had no ambassador there. We had a Chargé d'affaires, called Humphrey Trevelyan, who, who looked after us, but he was much loved in China, as far as we could see. And, no, there was absolutely none of that at all. It was regarded totally as a cultural event, and it was before the days of the Red Guards, and the very strict regime that they introduced. It was really quite relaxed.

And Stanley Spencer acquitted himself well as ...

Apart from talking about Korea non-stop!

He did?

Yes. Because what none of us had realised that, that in Cookham where he lived, there was a little island in the middle of the Thames which was called, by ill luck, Korea, and as he never talked about anything but Cookham, he couldn't avoid talking about Korea, and some puzzled Chinese couldn't think why we were talking about this funny little island with willows on it. That was quite a lark, that! Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 225

And you mentioned signing a petition to get Koestler out of Spain, in prison in Spain. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Yes. Well, it was ... it was the time of signed letters to the newspapers in aid of this, that and the other, or against this, that and the other, and when in, I suppose it was '37, '38, the Spanish Civil War was still on, the, the news came that Arthur Koestler who was well-known and widely-read in England, was in prison, under sentence of death, and there was a huge petition got up by what you might call the literature and artistic establishment of the country, and Arthur always said that this, when it was sent off to Spain and he was, in fact, released, because he was a working journalist, and allegedly not on either side, although, of course, he was ... a pretty active communist running a cell in Paris. But, to the outside world, he was, he was a distinguished author and journalist. Anyway, he thought we'd got him out, and in gratitude to England, used to say, he gave the royalties from his Spanish books to alleviate the lot of prisoners in English prisons, by giving prizes to work of merit in any creative form - it could've been pottery, it could've been writing poetry, it could've been painting, it could've been woodwork, any creative work which was done and worthy of attention. And it was organised under a committee of trustees, of which I was the Chairman for about 25 years, I suppose, and the, the system was very simple. The Home Office co-operated with us. They had the preliminary sieving to take out what they considered to be not worth sending in to be judged, which is a risky thing, but you couldn't do it otherwise, and then the prison would frame the pictures and pack up the stuff, and you'd all go to one single prison, which was, to start with, we used to change the prisons, usually in the London area, but eventually we fetched up in Portsmouth, which is a small prison of about 150 male murderers, all life sentences. It looked like a little nursery fort with battlements, and arrow slits, and a sort of portcullis, it was a sweet little prison. And all the men had done the same thing, so they had a sort of, how can I put it? Sort of ... companionship of crime, that they'd all done a murder, they were all, obviously one-off murders, they were spouses, or family murders, or not done for money or anything, but either done because you were slightly dotty, or because you'd lost your temper over a lover or something. And the interesting thing about the whole prison was that the Governor was a woman called Muriel Allen. She was a comfortable lady of about 50, I suppose, with an untidy bun, and she was of rather generous proportions, and she looked rather like a country village sweet shop proprietress, smacking childrens' wrists for pinching toffees! And she had total control over that prison, and the, she was greatly respected, and all Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 226 the prisoners, I think, like all men, are used to having discipline from women in their early life, and so it wasn't anything new to be told to "stop that", or "time to go to bed", or "shut the door", or ... because all those commands come from, to every child, come from women rather than men until you're about ... well, sometimes really, all your life, because men are very non co-operative about discipline, you know, with their children, they're rather lazy about it as a rule. They're getting better now, I think, because they have to take more responsibility. Anyway, so we used to judge this pile of work every year. There were about four judges. We had two painters, Julian and Mary Trevelyan, and we had somebody who knew about pottery, and somebody who knew about, what you might call "general aesthetic issues", like, was it a good model of an 18th Century galleon or not? You know, which was for, sort of, on handicraft. And we had, the music man was the music master at Uppingham School, and we got the BBC to record the works all over the country, and then he judged the music. And we had one joker, Bryant and May the matchmakers, used to give free matches to the prisoners, because they loved making very very elaborate models out of dead matches, I mean, really elaborate, sort of huge square-rigged ships, sort of 1800 date, all made out of matches, or caravans, or railway engines, or Houses of Parliament or something. And Bryant and May helped to judge that. They were rather interested in doing the judging, so we left it to them. And, of course, the women had, in addition to the normal artistic creative work they did, they were, they had prizes for tailoring and embroidery, and knitting and so forth.

I thought you said this prison was a men only one?

Ah yes, but all the work came from all over England, to the prison, to this particular prison.

So it was exhibited there, or what?

The prison was a sort of judging centre, that's why we went there every year for about 25 years. And then, when the judges had finished, and the prizes were awarded, then we had an exhibition in London of the Prize winners.

Where?

Well, we, we started in a big motor showroom in Piccadilly, near the Ritz, which was given us by the firm, and then we moved to BP's big show windows and showroom down by Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 227

Victoria. And finally, we fetched up in the Festival Hall where we are now. We're just arranging, at this moment, it's now the end of August, just arranging the judging, I think, in about two weeks time, and then the exhibition will be probably in October.

And what, how do you think it helps the prisoners to do it? Do you think it's a good thing?

Well, I think it's very interesting, but I think the main interesting thing is, you see, they've got nothing to do much, are fed, and the rain doesn't hit them. I mean, it can't be described as comfortable, but it's ... you don't have the worry about finding the money for a meal or anything. And they don't have televisions in the, in the cells. They have a television room in the prison, but they don't have them in the individual cells, so when they're locked up, which is fairly early in the evening, and indeed, these days, they're locked up for a good part of the day, and the Education Officer in each prison, is responsible for assisting them, in giving them help to do this creative work, and we used to get some extremely interesting work. You see, they're not worried by wives asking for some housekeeping money, or children asking them to go for a walk or anything, they can concentrate on what they want to do. And you got some really very interesting work. Some of it was fairly obvious stuff, they would copy photographs of their girlfriends, in oils. Or they would draw their favourite puppy, or something. A lot of them would be straightforward nostalgia, rose covered cottages with a sort of Constable horse standing up to its knees in water. There was a certain amount of wishful thinking, of page three girls, but not much, actually. A certain amount of very disturbed drawing and painting, of the sort that one used to see in mental establishments. Some of these were absolutely extraordinary. Very, sometimes, very very detailed and meticulous. And it was interesting, and as I say, I did it for about 25 years, and I'm still a trustee, but I'm not, I'm not a judge any more.

And did you get to know any of the prisoners?

Yes, we did. They, they were a funny lot. Not the, the ones in Kingston Prison, as I say, were all life sentences, so they were slightly a set apart. Most of the prize winners were usually straightforward robbers, or thieves, and we had one very good boy called Bob Farquhar, who was a car thief, and he was an illiterate gypsy. And his first sentence in prison, they taught him to read and write, and he got very interested in reading really quite serious books. And he developed into a very good painter when he was released we got him Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 228 into Croydon Art School, where he took his Diploma, and he went back once or twice for more thieving, because as he explained to us, the problem with being an ex prisoner, is that your friends aren't usually all that interested in going straight. And so they would come round, bang on your door, and say, "look, would you drive the car tonight, because George has got flu, and all you've got to do is to wait at the corner of the street. There's three hundred quid for you or more." And they're people you've worked with in thieving before, and so it was always very difficult to say you wouldn't. You'd say, "well, I'll do it just this once", and then you might be caught. So he did go back to prison twice, as far as I remember. But he now, he now lives as a painter, and we still see him quite often, and he's alright. And there's another one who lives in Newcastle, who is an ex sailor, he used to paint battleships, prided himself on getting every tiny piece of rigging and armament correct, all the signal flags correct. I've got three of his paintings which are absolutely wonderful. They are not primitive, they are very careful and affectionately done portraits of First World War ships. And he occasionally writes to me and says, "do you want another battleship, because I could do with some money?" He only asks about thirty pounds for them. So, I think it's been a fairly valuable work and the Home Office have been very good and supported it.

Does it give you any insight into murderers?

Into the criminal world? I never got to know them really. I mean, I used to do a bit of prison visiting before that, giving lectures in, in Winchester and Pentonville, and places. I suppose, you know, sort of late thirties. And, I don't know, it's, it's a hopeless ... it's a hopeless problem. It did, in fact, have a rather depressing effect, because you felt that the... the lack of amenities, and the, and the really marvellous work done by most of the staff, particularly the probation and education officers. And, we went to, only once, to Holloway, the women's' prison, which was planned as a hospital, and had a doctor as the Governor, on the grounds that women are not natural criminals, I suppose, and were inadequates rather than criminals. And that ran very peacefully until the drugs explosion arrived, about 10, 15 years ago. And there's a very high proportion, now, of South American and West Indian prisoners. It's very, it's very overcrowded now.

So what, if you were in charge of the prisons, what would you do?

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Well, there are two things which really want to be done. One is a very simple one, except that it's expensive, which is to deal with the sanitation. Because, to live for 23 hours with a bucket and three of you in a room, I don't know, 10' x 6' is not, it's an extra sentence, isn't it? It's a real extra sentence. So that, I mean, can only be described as unacceptable by modern standards. And the other one, I suppose, is more opportunities for social mixings, more leisure time, and more opportunities for working in workshops, and watching the telly, or whatever it might be, so that you're not treated as battery hens, so to speak.

And how did the prisoners react to you?

Well, we really only saw prisoners who were interested in doing it. I mean, they were interested in doing some creative work, and they were helped by prisoners who put the exhibitions up for judging, and made their own. They were always baffled by our judgement, always! I mean, they simply could not understand the prizes we gave, and they'd sort of bring their friends' pictures of ponies' heads, or puppies playing with a ball of string or something, and said, "look, it's wonderful." And ...

Would you judge their work exactly in the same way as you'd judge anybody else?

Yes. We judged it really rather on, as one does with children's' art in schools, and, and you know, I used to judge, in fact, the National Children's' Competitions which were run, as far as I remember, by a big food firm. And you'd get thousands and thousands of sendings in, and they were winnowed out, and you only had the last 100 to do, so to speak. No, you did it in exactly the same way. But then, of course, you did have the great pleasure, every now and again, of finding a real natural, a really original natural vision. And who wasn't copying it off the back calendar, or tyre advertisement.

So how do you judge a children's' competition, then?

Well, it's not terribly easy, because all children draw naturally, up to a certain age, and then they get self-conscious, and begin sharpening their pencil and, and doing a picture of Black Beauty, very very carefully shaded, when they're about 15, and then they've had it, I mean, that's the, that's the end of them, they never touch the thing again. But I think they're wonderful poets, children, and the difficulty, is always that, there's always something rather Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 230 exciting about a naive work that is sort of totally naturally observed, without thinking about any symbolisms or anything. And then they get self-conscious and they, they get destroyed because, I mean, parents are worse than schools in discouraging art. I mean, they, they think art's a waste of time when you ought to be doing computers. And, and "don't muck around writing poetry or doing a watercolour ... you ought to be doing maths", you see. And the school teachers get all the blame for this, and schools are told they're philistines. But, in fact, it's usually the parents desperate for their children not to become artists, and layabouts. Because artists are always regarded as layabouts and drunks, and disreputable. Always seen in the company of naked women, and, and sitting up too late and drinking.

But, I mean, in the end, if you're judging a children's' competition, surely it has to be an instinctual judgement on what appeals to you, doesn't it? Or not?

Well, I think you can, I think you can ... you can, as it were, give marks for certain, you can give marks to somebody who has been very very painstaking, and done a sort of Durer picture of a rabbit's ear, say, because that, you, you would get marks for precision and observation, and skill with your pen or pencil, or whatever it is. But it's a skill of, of imitation rather than vision, and children do have a most wonderful naive way of looking at things, which is very very rewarding.

How did you come into contact with the little autistic boy that you were working with?

That came through the BBC. They were doing a series on this particular affliction, which is associated with brilliance in something else. Somebody who can hardly feed himself, but if you play him a quite complicated two or three pages of music on the piano, he can immediately repeat it faultlessly. Immediately, from one hearing. Or you get somebody who can, who can tell you what day of the week it was on July 7th, in 1843, straight off. But would find it difficult to find his way home. And they were doing a series of programmes on these particular diseases. It afflicts musicians, particularly, apparently. But nobody quite knows what the problem is, and nobody quite knows how long it lasts, and whether it will take, suddenly twist its course, and go in another way. And this little boy was the one I was dealing with, and he, he was about 9, 8 or 9 when I first met him, West Indian.

What's his name? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 231

Stephen Wiltshire. And his mother was a widow. His father had been killed in a motor accident, and this little boy had become totally imprisoned in silence. He wouldn't speak, and he couldn't read or write, and he went to a special school in Hammersmith, with a very good Headmistress, called Mrs Coles. And she suspected that he could speak if he had to, and she discovered that he liked drawing, scribbling on pieces of paper. And then she wouldn't give him paper or pencil unless he asked for it. She was very tough with him. So he asked for it. And he's now, I saw him a few weeks ago, he's now about 16, 17, and he reads and writes with fairly, fairly normal speed for a child of that sort of background and upbringing. But he has this fantastic and extraordinary skill in drawing and memory combined. He only likes drawing buildings, and he only likes drawing complicated buildings. And he likes standing in front of a very complicated building like St Pancras Station, or the Natural History Museum, and he'll stand there for about 10 minutes, his arms folded, looking at it, he won't take any notes, he'll just look at it. And then he goes home, and he draws it. Totally correctly. Right number of windows, right number of chimneys, where the sculpture and gargoyles, and everything, absolutely totally correct, from memory. And he always draws with a pen, he doesn't draw with a pencil. And he doesn't start in obvious places. He starts anywhere in the middle, and embroiders outwards from wherever he starts, left and right. Very very quickly, and with total assurance. Just works away at it, covers the paper. And he had a very good art master at this school, and Mrs Coles was very sensible and she didn't allow him to be exploited and have exhibitions, and have people buying his work and commissioning him to do calendars for electric switch gear, or something, which could easily have driven him into the ground. She was frightfully good about this, and they formed a small trust, and they rationed the, the work he's allowed to do. He's now at a secondary school, of course. But they also take him to places of interest. They've taken him this year to three cities by the water - Amsterdam, Venice and Leningrad, just to draw, for a week, and draw the pictures of these buildings. He's drawing more people now, and he's also got very fond of motor cars, and he draws lots and lots of motor cars in front of the buildings, and knows what they are. And if you say, "what's that?" He'll say, "it's an 8-cylinder Dusenberg, 1943", sort of thing. So he's moving away from buildings, slightly, towards motor cars. But the interesting thing is, what will happen to him, you see, he may suddenly lose it, as he now talks and reads, he doesn't need drawing as a communication. He may lose it. Nobody knows. Or he may continue with his skill, and make a living at it. If he goes to art school, will he be ruined? Will the sort of particular skill and vision and the passion that he has, be Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-A Page 232 sort of tidied up by curriculums and exams and diplomas, and that sort of thing? He's alright at the moment, he's, he's, as I say, he's about 16, and drawing like mad.

What's your actual involvement with him been?

Well, the BBC were doing this programme, and they asked me to go on an exercise with him. We went to St Pancras and…

Was this being filmed?

Being filmed, and then we came back, and he drew it, and, and we did a 20 minute little documentary about, with him drawing, and conversing.

How did he respond to you?

Very very cool, he was. I mean, he would … he would, he didn't actually say, but he obviously thought you were half-witted if you asked him why he did it this way, or, why he started here and not here. "You start here, of course", he'd say, scornful voice!

End of F1158 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 233

F1158 Side B

He's had family problems, of course, from this, because his mother feels that he's been removed by psychologists and doctors, and artists and broadcasters, who are sort of taking him away from his more modest beginnings. He had a sister who is very very jealous, that everybody's paying attention to him and nobody's paying any attention to her. But she's now become a graphic designer and I think is, she's about 18, I suppose, and I think is sort of settling down in her own life and not worrying about it so much.

But you've seen him, as well as doing this film, you stayed in touch with him, didn't you?

Well, I've only, I met him, as I say, a few weeks ago, to see how he was getting on, and he did a portrait of me.

I thought you took him to bookshops, and things like that?

No. I, I don't, I'm not a trustee and the, the, the ... the people who look after him, are people called Hewson, he's a literary agent, like his wife, and they take him abroad on these trips and sort of chaperone him, and see he's properly looked after. Yes, one of the interesting things about all children's' drawings, as everybody knows, is that they do draw quite a lot of symbols as well as objects. And if you ask a child to draw a house, up to a certain age, they nearly always draw it with a chimney, and usually with smoke coming out. Now, in England, there's, smoke never comes out of house chimneys, it's illegal. So you, and very few houses built since the war, have got chimneys even. But children still draw chimneys coming out of roofs, and smoke coming out of chimneys, because they're symbols of domesticity. Now, he would never do that. If there wasn't a chimney, he wouldn't put it in. But almost the last drawing he did at the beginning of the year, was of his doctor's house, which has no chimney, and he put a chimney in, and he put smoke coming out of it. And so this may be a sort of slight joky experiment, or maybe, in fact, a switch to thinking that symbolism matters as much as accuracy.

Do you think he'd have done it consciously? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 234

I don't know. They're very mysterious these afflicted people, very mysterious.

And going back to Koestler, when did you first know him?

I met him, I suppose, first, about 1945, '46, after the war, because he was a great friend of neighbours of ours in London, and we met him quite often at dinner. He was quite alarming. He was very compact, small, face rather like a lizard, and chain smoker. And he'd had a very extraordinary life as, as I say, he was a very active Communist, running these sort of secret cells in Paris, and setting up all sorts of little power bases all over Europe. And he went across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin, and he rode across the Urals on a donkey, and he'd done a lot of tough things. He was very fond of women, but fairly, not actually cruel, but, because he was a sensitive man, obviously, but most of them drifted off, I can't remember how many times he was married, must be about three or four times. He finally married his secretary, and they decided to commit joint suicide, because he felt he was getting old, and he'd done what he could in his writing, and he was getting, in his view, I think, fatigued. But I didn't think he was fatigued, because he was always extraordinarily interested in everything. I mean, he'd have theories on philosophy, or, or toads, or ... he was really interested, and frightfully frightfully clever. And I went with him and Herbert Read once, to a cultural three- day seminar in Berlin, I suppose about just after the war, because Berlin was pretty well ruined still. It must have been about 1946, '47. And it was an extraordinary experience, because he was a natural Central European, you know, you always saw him in a haze of cigarette smoke, at a cafe table, plotting. I mean, when you looked at him, you could see every Prague cafe absolutely packed with those sort of people. And I was actually rather frightened of him, because I'm not an intellectual in any sense of the word, and he, his brain was very very sharp, and he could be quite impatient.

Were you surprised that he killed himself?

I wasn't surprised that he'd thought about doing it and then did it, because he was a man of tremendous decision and resolve. No, I don't think I really was surprised, because he had such a powerful presence that you felt that if he decided to jump out of a fifth-floor window, on some reason that he thought was reasonable, he'd have done it. He was a very impressive man. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 235

Did you admire his writing?

I didn't go for, I'm not very good on philosophy, and so I only liked his autobiographical stuff, really.

And did he try and persuade you to become a Communist?

No. No. I never heard him mention that at all.

Was he a good listener?

A good?

Listener.

I think I could say, from my memory, he was a good arguer. He loved dispute. But if you'd started off on a long, spoken, mini-lecture at the dinner table, I think he'd have blown smoke in your face pretty quickly.

And when you signed a petition to get him out of prison, how much did you know about him?

I'd just read the books that he'd published about the Spanish Civil War. And he was quite a famous figure, in fact.

And did you know his wife quite well?

Well, I knew two of his wives. One was a sculptor called Daphne, who married a designer called Henrion, afterwards. And the other was his secretary, who was a sweet, gentle girl, but obviously had great inner strength, because she didn't look as if she was different from anybody you'd meet on the Inner Circle going to work every morning. But he was a very very powerful personality. I mean, he really stood in a room, and people skirted him like the Inchcape Rock, you know.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 236

What was the first wife like?

Daphne? She was a tough, like all women sculptors, she was absolutely made of iron, and she got on with her own work, very bright. And I suppose he must have been not easy to live with. Not that anybody's really easy to live with, I suppose, but he must have been particularly difficult, because I think he had a rather imperious attitude to women. I don't know enough about Central Europe to know whether that's the usual thing. I mean, the, you get the impression if you're in Hungary or Rumania, he came from Hungary, and he had the most extraordinary class in his gymnasium school, he was in the same, he was, sat on the same bench as George Solti, the conductor, and Kaldor, the economist, and Arthur, they must have been quite a formidable trio for any schoolmaster to face at 9 o'clock in the morning. Or, in Hungary, it would have been 8, of course! But I think they have an imperious attitude to women, which, of course, some women find attractive and ... and sexy, I suppose.

And you've said in the past that you consider yourself a Socialist and that other people think of you as being a Socialist.

I don't know whether people think I do, I mean, I don't think I've ever voted Conservative since I was adult. I suppose, because when one was getting to the age of political awareness, even in its tiniest form, which was, I suppose was about 1937, Spanish Civil War, but I've never been, in my life, to a political meeting. And I've never been to hear my MP talk in the local school hall. I don't suppose, I've been twice in my life, I think, to the Houses of Parliament, to listen to a debate, and was deeply depressed by the sight.

Why?

The infantilism of the behaviour of, particularly young Conservative MPs, with rolled up copies of the Evening Standard, lolling about on the benches, talking very loudly about going to Annabel's, all through somebody speaking on quite a serious subject, on prison reform, or whether we should declare war on Jersey, or whatever it is. And the, I don't know, the ... I do find that, listening to them on the radio, there's a terrible infantile streak about men in large numbers together, and there are hardly any women there, as you know, and, and if a woman gets up, there's a sort of ... immediate slight change in atmosphere. A sort of ... facetious jokes start being made, sotto voce, you know. And I remember Mrs Thatcher telling me once Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 237 that it's very irritating that people will criticise her for having an uneven hem, but they would never say that Michael Foot looked like ... as if he'd been emptied out of a dustbin!

But you've tended to vote Labour, or you've tended not to vote or what?

I'm lazy about local voting unless I get very agitated about some local cause. But I am rather shamefully lazy about that. No, I voted quite often in the days of, the grander days of Liberalism. I voted quite often. I suppose, in the immediate post-war years, after the immediate voting Labour in the first election after the war, I went over to the Liberals, partly because, by nature, I'm a ... I was going to say a trimmer, or a conciliator, on the one hand and on the other. And Liberals always seem to be slightly having the advantage of both - not throwing everything out of the window, but seeing that it's time we had some pretty sharp edged reforms. Which, of course, means they never get elected to anything, because, unless you're convinced, absolutely totally convinced, it's very difficult to get anything done.

If there was an election tomorrow, how would you be likely to vote?

Oh, tomorrow, I would certainly vote Labour, because the other Parties are not numerous enough to, to make any sort of contribution as far as I can see, sadly. Although I find, very often, they say very sensible things. I flirted, I remember, just before the war, with a thing called the Commonwealth Party. And the first speech, in fact, I ever made, was in a lock-up shop in a back street in Cheltenham, for the Commonwealth Party. Five people in the audience, and a yapping Aberdeen dog!

And what did your speech say?

I can't imagine what I could have thought to talk about!

And is there any particular politician that you've had more faith in than others?

Politician that I do what?

That you've had more faith in than others?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 238

I was a terrific admirer of Attlee. I admired Morrison. I admired Bevin, and there were sort of vaguely Fabian characters wandering about, like Greenwood, who was, had a slightly Welwyn Garden City, woollen socks side to their spirit, which meant that they were usually gentle and somehow spoke with conviction about ... but the Conservatives, you see, I was brought up really, first aware of the Conservatism of Baldwin, I suppose, and then Chamberlain, and then Churchill, and Macmillan.

I mean, the Fabian element was one your parents would have quite gone along with, wasn't it?

Yes, yes. Actually, my parents were slightly more Conservative than, than my father's brother, Lewis Casson, he was a very strong Socialist, and he drove the strikers in the General Strike about, and, and they always were very very strong Labour voters, and spoke at political meetings and things.

But you never wanted to go that far?

No. I find it difficult, I found it very difficult to participate in any of that really. Life was too interesting in other fields.

Is there a politician now that you have any faith in, particularly?

Well, there are quite a number in the Lords, I think ... Baroness Seear, for instance, I think she's a cross-bencher, whatever she calls herself a freelance, and I find her very impressive and convincing, and liberal-minded. But I find the ordinary, yah-boo, or the, "it may be awful, but it's much better than you were", "no it isn't", is so like a prep school changing room, that I can hardly bear to listen to it.

And one last question that's totally out of what we're speaking, I mean, not out of what we're speaking about. Were you surprised when Blunt was revealed as a spy, or not?

I suppose I was surprised, because I thought he was too established a figure to have become involved in all that plotting. I didn't know him very well, and I believe he's a wonderful Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 239 teacher, but he was very very chilly, I found, and difficult to get to know in any sort of way. And, of course, like all academics, that's a ridiculous generalisation, but I do find a sort of smell of complacency takes off from most academics. They believe they've got ... the life of the mind gives them a sort of shroud of dignity and the ability to ... to see truth when they find it. But, in fact, if you live the life of the mind, you, in fact, automatically dismiss the life of the world, and I wouldn't mind if they were monks and lived in cells on bread and water, but all that passing the port and ... and shaven lawns. You see, it could be argued as some people do, I think, that the whole of Oxbridge is a cunning establishment device for ensuring the status quo, because all the undergraduate students arrive in an irreverent mood, well, actually, they don't arrive in an irreverent mood because they're rather frightened at arriving in this sort of sudden adult world where they have to make their own decisions. But after, in about the second year, end of the first year, they're getting confidence, the argument is that they, by then they've had a jar of cream poured over them, and the status quo of this beautifully kept turf and this glowing stones partnering stained glass, distant bells, church music, and silver-haired men talking to them with a glass of sherry, in fact, pours this cream over them, which solidifies, and from then on they become senior civil servants, as a rule.

But it never crossed your mind that Blunt might be up to anything?

No. Actually, I ... he was a member of the Apostles, which is this extraordinary intellectual debating club, which was founded at Johns, and nourished in Trinity, and then was really sort of hijacked by Kings, and everybody ... it started with Tennyson. Tennyson left it very quickly because he said there was no love in this meeting, and "I'm not staying in it." But it had everybody, scientists and, and poets, and historians, and philosophers. They met every Saturday in a sort of mist of rituals and passwords, which men seem to need whenever they meet. And if you didn't turn up, your name was written in the Minutes without a capital letter, you know. Imagine people like E M Forster and Keynes, actually seriously doing this. It's unbelievable, isn't it? Absolutely unbelievable. And I ... I, of course, I wasn't a member of the Apostles, so God knows what they talked about! But ...

Were you ever asked?

No. But, well, it was secret, you see. Nobody was allowed to know who was a member, until long after, and then you can boast about it. Because you're asked to be a member, you Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 240 see, you don't suggest yourself. There are only 12 of you. And I suppose you could spend the evening saying, discussing whether this table actually exists. And they argued about doubt for the sake of arguing about doubt. And, in a way, I find that very irritating, because I ask myself, "who is at the gas works, seeing to it that your gas fire's on?" Because the total disinterest in the working life of the working people, which was absolutely total, was somehow rather unpleasant. So I thought, being an architect, I sort of excused myself by thinking that at least I was part of the physical world, and I knew the table existed because I ate off it!

Now, tell me how Casson Conder came to be established.

Well, my architectural career after I left school, well, the first design I ever did for anybody, was for my Uncle Lewis, in fact, when he asked me to design the set for Grand-Guignol, a one-act play he was doing at the Coliseum, when I was about 16 or 17, with a studio set. And the story was, somebody had murdered his wife, walled her up in a piece of plaster of Paris, or something. That was my first work. And the second was, my Aunt Elsie, who was a doctor, a psychiatric doctor, and she wanted a lot of mews garages converted into a community room for the nursing home she ran in Bristol. I wasn't qualified then, then Uncle Lewis came back, putting two bathrooms in a house in Wales, I still wasn't qualified.

But the bathrooms worked?

Oh yes, still there. And then the, and I took the exams and qualified, and I got a job for 30 shillings a week, with an Australian architect called Wilton Todd.

We've talked about him.

We've talked about him, and we've talked about Nicholson, presumably. And then you've... that's all familiar stuff. So I was doing mostly small houses like most architects do, alterations and small houses. Then came the war, and I was working on camouflage, and, but Kit Nicholson, my partner, was killed in a gliding accident, very shortly after the war, just when I was beginning to work on the Festival of Britain, because life was fairly meagre in architecture, just after the war, and so I did a lot of architectural journalism writing for House and Garden, and the women's page of the Daily, this and that, and the Ideal Home magazine, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1158-B Page 241 and what to do with the cupboard under the stairs, and, and I think it was my journalism that got to the eyes of Gerald Barry who'd been appointed to run the Festival of Britain in 1948. and Kit was killed almost the same week as I started work on the Festival. But I had two colleagues in the office - Neville Conder and Patience Clifford.

When you say "in the office", you mean what was the Kit office?

Well, we were partners, you see.

And those two were already working?

And they were our assistants. And they ...

Where had they come from, then? How were they chosen?

Well, they, when we, we had one or two jobs and they applied for work, and they both came from the AA actually. Both very good designers, and Patience I'd met in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. She was working in the Research Department where I was working, just at the end of the war. And she joined us, and we had a sort of two-roomed office in the Old Brompton Road.

End of F1158 Side B

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 242

F1159 Side A

I vanished into the Festival Office from, in, in 1948, and Neville Conder and Patience Clifford took over the office. There wasn't much work, it was mostly doing odd little shop-fitting jobs, and minor alterations in attics under roofs, and that sort of thing. However, they kept going, and then when the Festival started more strongly, they got quite a decent chunk of one section in the book of homes and gardens. No, they did, sorry, they did schools, the schools section. And then, when I came out of the Festival in '51, after it was all over, we were asked to compete for a collection of libraries and lecture rooms in Cambridge. A competition, there was only one other competitor. It was very exciting, because it was the first big job we'd ever done, and the office had to expand fairly quickly.

So where did you go?

We stayed in the same office for quite a time, and then we moved up towards South Ken. We always kept in that sort of area.

Did you have any doubts when you were given a commission as big as that, that you'd be able to do it? I mean, you always had Kit there before, who'd had more experience.

No, I don't think so. I think one was, had the confidence of inexperience, you know, because you, as a student, you'd done huge projects, sort of re-planning the middle of Manchester, or a new airport for Bombay, or something. I mean, you were accustomed to huge things. So the actual thinking up ideas and arrangements, and analysing the programme you were given, and all that exercising you'd done. So when it came to life, the only ... the nasty bit came, of course, when you were doing the technical side, and the management side, you see, because none of us had ever managed anything bigger than a chicken coop! Although I'd had some experience in the Festival with, with ... that was a 12 million pound job. And that was, but it was, I was at a distance, you see.

In the Festival?

You had minions who knew about contracts and ...

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Are you talking about in the Festival or in your practice?

Yes. But I'd had some experience, but Neville and Patience had not, they'd been doing fairly small stuff. Anyway, we, we, largely through Neville, we got these buildings up. And, in fact, this led to a lot of work in universities, in Belfast and Birmingham, where we're still working. And advice at various other universities, on layouts, and extension plans.

Did you make any mistakes like you did with the display cabinets with the melting contents. Did you make any on a sort of grander scale?

I don't think ones that would be immediately recognisable to the users. I mean, every, every architect knows that every building is a sort of battlefield, and his blood streams from every brick joint. And every time you go and see it, you wince, because you should have made it eight inches higher ... that's not the sort of thing that the clients worry about. No, we were very lucky, nothing fell down. And I don't think anything leaked much, and, because you're in the hands of, if you're lucky, with good builders, who just come along and say, "well, I wouldn't do that if I were you." And you learn as you go.

And if you were doing the same work on a Cambridge College, or in the Birmingham University campus today, would you make different decisions?

Oh yes. But so many things have changed, you see.

What sort?

The needs have changed. You see, we built an enormous student American system, really, more of a student house, you know, with a huge dining room, and billiard room, and squash courts and residential rooms, and things, where they were all supposed to go every evening. Well, you see, they did, because they'd come straight out of the war, and they were used to communal living. But it wasn't long, you see, before no one would go there, you know, they wanted to go down to, into Birmingham, to the local wine bars or ... you know, or into each other's rooms. They didn't want to go and eat in these great places. And, but this was a question of social habits, fast changing social habits, which, of course, would make the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 244 programmes different now. They're totally different. But we built lots, I mean, we built laboratories, and we built libraries, and we built study groups, and recreation halls.

And were you finding it all very exciting or not?

It was exciting, yes. It was exciting. And other odd jobs came our way, but, but the, I'd got a personal reputation from the Festival of doing what was called "master plans", so to speak. "How are you going to develop all this land in the future? What's the University going to do with it?" And, I mean, I was a total amateur, an absolute amateur.

Did you feel a fraud?

Did I feel a fool?

A fraud.

Well, I suppose I felt a bit of a fraud. On the other hand, one felt that one knew probably as much as the client did.

The client, presumably, was expecting you to know more!

Yes! Yes. But you don't necessarily know more than the client, because he's going to use the building, you see.

Don't you have to pretend to know more?

Oh yes, there's a lot of, a lot of brave confident talk goes on. But, luckily, my partners are much more sober and practical and better designers than I was, really. So they saved me. And gradually we got three or four more partners as the thing got larger.

Can we just do a sort of thumb-nail history now, of Casson and Conder, I mean, when you began with them, they were your assistants, so what happened….

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Well, Cambridge was our first big job, and that went on for about five years, I suppose. In fact, it's still going on occasionally, when any money comes in. And then we, I think, the next one was Birmingham University, and we did two or three big buildings, and the master plan for Birmingham. And then we did a big laboratory in Belfast. And we were always doing competitions. We went in for the Churchill Competition at Cambridge, didn't win it. And we did competitions for new college buildings at Oxford and Cambridge. We got one in Worcester College, Oxford. And then we began to ...

Were you worried that you weren't going to get work? Was it anxious. or not?

Well, things were getting fairly, I mean, we'd just finished with the Korean War, and the ... and the immediate post-war crisis. And there was a sort of faint smell of prosperity, and a lot of building to do. We didn't do any public housing, virtually, we weren't approached to do any of that. We got known as being rather, I don't know how to put it? Sort of, rather in the creative field. I mean, adding on to art galleries or that sort of thing, rather than public housing. There was a very very strong post-war move of young architects, into the Public Housing Department of the big local authorities. And that's where most of the best architecture was being done, in the sixties.

Did you ever feel you should have done that?

Don't think so. I mean, we had a sort of guilt that we weren't providing thousands of flats for the steelworkers of Sheffield.

But it wasn't the kind of guilt that kept you awake at night?

But it didn't keep us awake at night, because they were being made by somebody who knew more about it than we did. Then we got other sort of odd jobs, like, I got, with Neville, asked to do the plan for the extension of the Zoo, London Zoo.

How did you get that?

Well, that came, in fact, from the then Secretary, Solly Zuckerman, whom I'd encountered at various periods during the Festival, a scientist. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 246

The Secretary of what?

He was the Government Scientific Advisor, and he was the Secretary of the Zoo, and he had very ambitious plans for pinching more of Regents Park, pulling down a lot of the buildings, and re-building some of them. And Whipsnade. And we worked on that for a long time, and it was very interesting. But the money absolutely vanished down manhole after manhole, because everything was very expensive and difficult. But we did do the Elephant House.

Can you talk about that in some detail?

That was a very interesting problem, because the elephant, there were two elephants after the war, survived. And they'd lived in an air raid shelter most of the war, coming up for air in the mornings. And they wanted a place where they could be seen, and they wanted an Elephant House without bars, all the previous elephant houses had been, had bars in front of them, and so they said they wanted a moat in front of them, so the trunks couldn't stretch out and take a bun out of your hand, or, more likely, with the English people, a cigarette tin or something, but the public feed animals with absolutely anything - coke bottles, safety pins - and everybody laughs at the story about the zoos in the Middle East, where they sell bags of stones to throw at the animals at the zoos, and, "typical", one says, and then you go down to the zoo, and you see what, given half a chance, the British public will give an animal. It's simply unbelievable. Not just children. Anyway, we did a plan which involved a, quite an ambitious re-hash of the layout.

How did you research it? I mean, did you go and read up about elephants?

Well, we had, we had a committee, the Client Committee of people who ran the zoo, and we had Desmond Morris at the time, who was the sort of chief animal psychologist.

And was he helpful?

Yes. He was very helpful because he was so confident about what was wanted, and what the animals felt like, and animal behaviour, and recognition, and eye contact and all that business. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 247

What did he say the animals felt like?

Well, he'd just advise, he advised you all the time, you see. The concept we had was that we'd build the Elephant House in a series of semi-circular pens, each containing one or two animals, because it had to be for hippopotamuses as well. And they were strongly top-lit, these semi-circular, they were like cycloramas in the theatre. Then between you and the elephant was an orchestra pit, which was a ditch into which the elephant could fall, and be extracted, without coming out like a champagne cork. So that was quite a calculation. So that meant that the elephant could stretch its trunk across to you, but it just couldn't reach you, so you couldn't feed it a coke tin. The whole of the public area was, was in very deep gloom, and had radiating timber branches. The sort of romantic theory was that you were standing in a jungle, looking into a strongly lit, sunlit patch, where the sun's coming through, miles away, and hitting the elephant on the back. So you were in gloom, and the elephant was in light, and in between you was this ditch. And then outside, they walked out into a, like a motor tyre round a wheel, was their sort of play yard, which had shallow pools, and old tree trunks which they liked heaving about, and chucking in the pool, blowing water at each other. And another ditch, and then you, then there was the outer public, in the open air. That was the concept. And the Zoo seemed very pleased with it, and the elephants didn't get ill or die or anything, so we assumed they were quite pleased with it. But they got very, elephants are frightfully clever and they, they discovered that the ventilators in the top lights over them had bolts, which they could, with their trunks, in half an hour, they could unscrew and, and then they found that if they really went on tip-toe, they could just reach a coke tin. So then you sharpened the thing they had to put their tip-toe on, this brick coping, which had a sharp edge to it, we thought, so they'd say, "ow!" and go back. But, of course, they didn't, they're like children, really, you're just prepared to have a moment's agony to get a chocolate. So, but then gradually, the elephant experts told us that elephants were very unreliable and, and mercurially tempered creatures, and could get nasty. And so they put up, they've now put up a low, steel fence in front, which is a great pity, because the whole idea was you saw them between, nothing between you and them.

So, if you were doing it again, you'd presumably just make the moat wider.

Well we'd have to think up another solution. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 248

But would you do the whole thing completely differently if you were doing it again?

Don't know. Probably.

And didn't you say that you had been asked again for your plans for the Zoo as a whole?

Well, the, we went on working on various little tiny bits of the Zoo, sort of improving layouts and planting, and things. And then they appointed a Zoo Architect, a sort of in-house chap, and he did some very good monkey houses. And another architect did the Lecture Hall, and research labs. And then there were various workshops and re-doing the, re-planning the inside of the restaurant and things. And there was a steady sort of drip of stuff from the Zoo, which was very nice, because it was a nice place to work, and, and they were interesting, and the animals were beautiful. And then, gradually, the money went, dribbled away and they stopped.

Did you all work on the Elephant House, or was it really yours, or what?

No. My partner, Michael Caine, was the principal worker on the Elephant House. He had to work out the very difficult timber trusses, the sort of tree branches, in particular, which he was very good at.

So was it basically your overall design, and then he ....

Well, it's very difficult to say, because the ... the, I think the concept was mine, but we worked so closely together that it's really difficult to ... every week we'd pin things up, and criticise them. I mean, everybody would have a go, and say, "why don't you turn it round the other way"? And we were doing odd things, and we had a very good, and I thought one of the nicest buildings, was a huge bank headquarters in Manchester, which was coal black, rough, coal black, with a faint sparkle in it. And I think, looks terribly well. And then we were doing odd jobs. I was, by then, teaching at the Royal College of Art. And then that developed ... I was teaching interior design because the RIBA would not allow another school of architecture to come. Then that did lead to a lot of interior work, such as ships and trains and similar things. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 249

What were the trains?

Well, we did a buffet car for British Rail, and a first-class railway carriage. Pretty basic stuff, because British Rail was fairly poor in those days.

Which days are we talking about?

Sixties, I suppose.

Had British Rail brought designers in before, or had they done it in-house? And was this a change in policy?

I think they'd go for major things to outside designers, and they certainly go to outside designers, or did, for logos, and liveries, and that sort of thing. And I think the design of the trains is very good now, and excellent. But they do have their in-house architects. And then they took all their stations and development work away from British Rail, and made their own, what I think they called the British Rail Property Board, and they're sort of big developers.

If you do a buffet car for them, what brief would you be given and how much freedom?

Well, you'd be given the coach, the shell of the coach, and, as far as I remember, you were given the size of the kitchen, which they wanted to fit out themselves. It was really pretty surface, it's lighting and surfaces.

So is something like that interesting to do, or not?

Yes very.

Why?

Well, because the thing's moving all the time. That means you can't have joints, or two materials joined without some ability to move, because a train, like a ship, is always working, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 250 and squeaking, and working as it jumps, jumps over the rails, and, and the whole thing is like being inside a snake, you see. And so that was a great limitation on, on ... you couldn't plaster the inside of a railway carriage, because it would just crack into a ... and begin to look like the oldest lady in the world, you know, because the whole thing's moving all the time. Actually, I enjoyed, we did a very good ... a good little cinema, which got a prize, in St Martins Lane, which is still there. And, and we were very lucky, in little shops and things. And the things I really like working on best were ships.

How did you come to get the ships?

The ships, I was extremely pleased to get involved with, because we'd lived in Southampton most of my late childhood, and I loved ships and walked about on them, and had been on all the big ones, the Aquitania, and the Mauritania, and the Majestic, and the Berengaria, and the Leviathan and all these great ships, I knew them all. And, but I got to the, into the big ships through the small ones, because, roundabout, I suppose, '53, or '54, I was asked by the Queen and Prince Philip to consider the Royal Rooms on Britannia, which was building at Glasgow.

Why were you asked?

I was asked, I think, for slightly complicated route. Britannia was being built by John Brown's yard in Glasgow, and she had been paid for by the Admiralty, and the Admiralty had decided who should design the outside of the ship, who, by chance, was called John Brown, and did a beautiful job. And then there was the problem of the inside, because the Britannia is half a naval ship, and half to the back is the Royal Cabins, and dining room, and drawing room, and private offices, and all that sort of thing. And John Brown's yard asked the firm of McInnes Gardner, who was a local Glasgow firm who had done all the ships for John Brown for years, and all those Atlantic liners, and he was a very splendid man who was in charge of it, always wore a bowler hat, like all ship people. And he didn't do many drawings, he used to say, dining room, French 17th Century, 30 brocaded chairs, two pianos, and he'd specify things, you see, and then the contractors would produce ideas for him, people like Heals and, oh, the big furnishers, Waring and Gillows and things.

Who?

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Waring and Gillow, and all the big furniture people in London and Glasgow. And then he would make alterations, and then they'd do it. And his fee per ship was £1,000, I remember he told me. Anyway, he, he'd nerved himself to do some drawings for the state dining room, and the drawing room, and the aft, sort of verandah room, and the offices ... for Prince Philip and the Queen and their bedrooms, and everything. And Prince Philip didn't like them very much. He thought they had a ... too much like the transatlantic liner sort of decor ... sort of non- ... being a naval officer, he wanted something simpler. So he went to Gordon Russell, who was the man who ran the Design Council in those days. And Gordon Russell was a furniture designer, an advanced furniture designer. By then he was pretty old, he was about 60, I suppose. Could they, could he think of somebody who could handle this, you see? Which is tender really, because there were tender feelings involved. And Gordon was good enough to recommend me because I'd had very similar problems on the Festival, South Bank Exhibition - 27 architects, 27 acres, all very excited and determined to be the best thing on the site, you know. And it did require quite, quite careful treatment. So, anyway, Gordon suggested that I went to see Prince Philip, which I did.

And you knew him a little by then, anyway, didn't you?

Mmm?

You knew him a little by then, didn't you?

No. I'd never met him.

I thought you'd met him ...

I just met him when they were going round the Festival, South Bank.

I thought you met him in Topolski's studio.

That's true. But that was in a mob, you know. I don't suppose I spoke a word to him. So it was, it was a question then, of going to see the Admiralty, and saying, "Prince Philip isn't too happy about this". And they said, "well, it's too bad, because the whole thing's pretty well finished. You can choose the lampshades if you like". Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-A Page 252

And what was Prince Philip like when you met him?

Very beautiful, handsome, decisive. Rather nervous, it's not quite the word ... rather a lot of banter, a sort of relationship of banter, you know, so that every remark is a faint joke, which is a sign of, of slight nervousness as a rule, I think. I mean, I was frightened too! But anyway, I went to see the Admiralty, and they were pretty shirty about it. So then I went up to Glasgow and saw this chap from McInnes Gardner, and who couldn't have been nicer and, so to speak, understanding and professional, and I said, well, I was going to do a new set of drawings, which was really running a lawn mower over the Louis XVII adornments, and I was going to concentrate on one-colour carpet throughout, which was sort of lilac/grey, and all the walls would be white. And the only enrichments would be a bit of gilding on, in grand places. And the doors would be mahogany, polished mahogany.

How long had it taken you to find that solution? And why did you find it, how did you arrive at it?

Well, you had to do it pretty well at once. I mean, she was actually just a frame lying in a mud bank.

Did you do drawings, or paintings, or ...

And then I did about ...

How did you ...

I did perspectives of all the rooms, big ones, about, I should think 4 feet by 2 feet.

Were you using watercolour by now?

Yes. Of the main rooms. The sitting room, and the drawing room, state dining room, Prince Philip's study, the Queen's study/office, their bedrooms, and the Royal guest rooms, and the passages and landings, and things. And I sent them off to Balmoral where they all were.

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Had you seen what their private apartments were like in the buildings they lived in already?

No. I'd never met, I'd never met the Queen. I posted it all off.

End of F1159 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 254

F1159 Side B

And then I went down to see the old yacht Victoria and Albert, and she was a lovely old twin- funnelled, Victorian, huge yacht, just not a paddle-steamer. And she was lying on a mud bank, so thick, that they were growing tomatoes round her. And there was a wonderful old steward, a retired steward, who lived on her, and looked after her. And I had a wonderful time going through all the furniture and the pictures, and the china, and the light fittings all there, deciding what to recommend for re-use. We kept virtually all the pictures, which were a very very good collection.

What were they?

Well, they were all, obviously, nautical pictures of the King of Norway arriving for a State visit in 1911, or Edward VII greeting the Shah of Persia.

They were etchings, or something, were they?

No, they were oil paintings and watercolours, because in those days, they, they used artists instead of photographers. So there were some wonderful pictures. Wonderful. And we decided to use all the dining room chairs, which were in very good trim, which were, were vaguely, vaguely Chippendale. And we designed a new dining room table to seat, I can't remember how many it was, something like 80.

When you say "we", again this is the whole office joining in?

Well, I mean, there were two of us. There was a chap in the office called John Wright, who was the chief, he was a furniture designer really, although an architect originally, but he helped on the detailing of the panelling and the furnishing, and the Queen's writing desk, and dressing table and things, which they, and they were sort of sycamore, with silver enrichments. Anyway, I sent it all off, and then I got a message from Balmoral, where they all were, saying would I go up and talk to them about it? And would I bring a dinner jacket?

Were you allowed to bring your wife? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 255

No, no, no! And stay, stay for three nights and two days. So, off I went, to Aberdeen. I went by night train. Was met by a Royal Daimler, and swept off into Scotland.

Were you intimidated?

Well, I was very nervous. And I arrived about, they were still having breakfast, the staff. Prince Philip and the Queen were out of sight somewhere. And I hadn't met any of the staff either, so we hung about, and then, then I was asked to meet the clients, so to speak. And I remember the Queen was sitting on a bench in front of the fire, a stool thing, and Princess Anne was combing her hair with a plastic comb, and it was all very domestic and chummy. And they both expressed themselves absolutely delighted, wouldn't change anything, which was nice. And they were just off to church, and so would I, I was with Mr McInnes Gardner, he came too, in his bowler hat, and they said would I like to put everything out in a sort of exhibition, and they'd spend a couple of hours looking at it.

Your drawings?

Yes, my drawings. And they came back from church, and then we had lunch. And then they said, "well, let's go and have a picnic. It's a lovely day". And so we all piled into jeeps and Land Rovers, and drove off into the moors. Princess Margaret was there too.

What was she like?

And a young man called Lord Porchester, who was the Queen's racing manger.

What was Princess Margaret like then?

Very friendly. And the Queen and Princess Margaret, and Porchester and I went in one Land Rover, and Prince Philip drove the other one. And we drove off to a little sort of bothy by a stream, little sort of cottage, two-roomed cottage, which contained an absolutely enormous white horse, looking out of the window, and we all said, "oh, I say, look here, Good Heavens, there's a horse, what shall we do"? "Look, I say. Good Heavens"! By which time, we'd said this about five times the Queen was inside, and she, she and the horse had just about filled the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 256 cottage, and she turned it round and led it out. Gave it a smack and told it to push off! And then we had tea, and then Princess Margaret and the Queen washed up in the stream, refusing any help. And then we drove back, and, for drinks and dinner. And I remember very well, walking along the corridor in my dinner jacket, nervously pulling at my tie, and a footman appeared from the door, and said, "your shoelace is undone, sir". So he obviously knew I was inexperienced! And then I had dinner, I sat next to the Queen, and it was all very nice. And after dinner, after the gents came back after their port, Princess Margaret said, "would you like to talk to the Queen, or would you like to talk to me"? And I thought that was a real stinger of a question. And I was saved by the Queen, who said, "that's a really terrible alternative", she said. "anyway", she said, "I'm going to do some work, so you'd better talk to Princess Margaret or play Scrabble with her". So I went and played Scrabble. Went to bed early, and then I had my first experience of being unpacked for, and laid out stuff. And the footman was very funny. Have I told you this story before?

No, I don't think so.

I'd bought, I was wearing one pair of pants, I'd bought another pair of pants, which had been put out by my dinner jacket. The next morning he had to decide, am I the sort of person who wears the pants I'd worn during the day, the previous day, or the pants I'd worn for the evening? And he decided I was a slut, really, and I would probably wear the pants I'd worn yesterday. He then put the evening pants in the top drawer, and then he opened the drawer about four inches, and pulled the top of the pants over, and drooped it over the top. I pretended to be asleep all this time, because I didn't want to get involved in the argument, and, having made that tactful suggestion, but leaving the choice open, he left. And then ...

Which did you choose?

Well, I honestly can't remember now! I think, I think I chose the evening ones, because they'd only been worn for a couple of hours. It looked better, I thought! And the Queen said, "well, we've got to go and do something in the town, Prince Philip and I, why don't you go for a walk"?

When they say something like that, is it virtually a command?

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And McInnes Gardner had gone, he didn't stay the night, he went back to Aberdeen.

But is that virtually a command to go for a walk, could you say, "no, actually, I'd rather read my book"? Or ...

No, she said, "it's, there's a lovely walk round, up the hill here, and then down back by the lake". So I started off, and in those days I could walk about 200 yards without panting, when I came back, there was Princess Margaret, writing in her diary, on a chaise longue on the lawn. Her diary had a lock, I noticed, and she locked with a key. And we gossiped until lunch, together. I can't remember what we talked about. She was very sparky. And then, after lunch, they said, "well, as there's absolutely nothing to talk about, as far as we can see, we like everything, we might as well just get going, and what we'd like to see, of course, is a sample of the curtain materials, and the upholstery covers and ... and so you can push off this evening, if you like".

Perhaps they knew you didn't have enough knickers?

So I was given a brace of pheasants, labelled, "From the Queen", in huge letters, like princes in Alice in Wonderland! Which I conspicuously put in the rack in the carriage! And went home.

Did they ask you questions about yourself? Were they interested in what your life was like?

Yes. Yes, they were, they were extremely easy people. And she was very very young then, interested and excited about everything, and not worried by the ... the load of responsibility, it hadn't hit her really.

And did she and Margaret seem to be easy with one another?

Yes. The whole thing was extremely easy. I was very sorry to go, actually! Well that led, later, after I'd done that ship. I'll finish that particular story. They then went off on a world tour, round the world on a ship called Gothic, which was a commandeered, Blue Funnel Line, I think. And the yacht hadn't been finished, so they hadn't seen it. But while they were about half way round the world, it was finished, and they decided to come home in it, for an Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 258 intermediate stop, and decided to join her at Tobruk, in the Mediterranean. And so Britannia went out to Tobruk and met them there.

Were you happy with it all?

Yes. I thought it looked jolly nice.

And were there any problems? Did you change your plans at all?

Not really. They'd chosen all the fabrics and textiles, and cushion covers, and lampshades, and we'd been through all those things and that was quite easy.

Was there anything that you were sad about, that they wouldn't have, or vice versa?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I had long arguments about whether there should be a fireplace or not. Because under Naval Regulations, if you have a fire on a ship, fireplace, in a fireplace, you have to have a sailor stationed beside it with a bucket, in case it gets out of hand, so they didn't want a sailor standing in the drawing room all day. So we decided on an electric fire inside a marble, a simple marble frame. Anyway, then I got a telegram from Tobruk saying, "We love the ship. Please join us on the trip home, from the Isle of Wight." So that sent me into another tizzy! What do you wear? I knew enough about ships to know that you have to have soft-soled shoes on decks, otherwise you dent it. So the Admiralty fixed everything up. I was given a ticket to Waterloo, and told to report at 3 o'clock or whatever it was. And we arrived at Southampton.

Moggie was invited this times round?

No, no. But the most strange thing was, we stopped in Winchester and there was my mother, standing on the platform. She'd been to Winchester for the day, to see some friends. Wasn't that extraordinary! So I said, "actually, I'm on my to ..." so she was in a fever.

Would that have been something you'd have told them anyway?

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I must have told them, but she didn't know I was on that train. Anyway, when we got to Southampton ...

Who's "we"?

The train and I! I was met by an Admiral and an aide de camp, with gold rope round his arms, who seized my suitcase. And I was conducted to a naval car, a Humber, and I saw a tremendous sort of turmoil of flashing cameras going on up the other end of the train, and there was Winston. And he was in the party too, and he'd been in a separate carriage, because he was working. He took his secretaries with him. And he got in another car, and we both drove down to the harbour, and got onto motor torpedo boats. I got on to one, and he got on to the other.

Had you ever met him?

Never. Never set eyes on him. Oh yes I had, at the Festival. And off we went, roaring abreast down Southampton Water. Thank God it was a calm and sunny day! And he was in one, and I was in the other. The Commander of my little torpedo boat didn't quite know who I was, and what the hell I was doing looking rather silly in civilian clothes, and a snap-brim felt hat, sort of thing. Anyway, by the time we got to, off Cowes, we were all a bit matier, and we had tea on the bridge, and that sort of thing. And then we got to The Needles, at the west end of the Isle of Wight, and, where she was, the Britannia was due with her escort, about half an hour later. The whole of the Solent was covered with ships because she was going to review the Fleet, so they were all at anchor, like some old-fashioned print. And Winston arrived in a little motor boat, about 15 feet long, I suppose, with an admiral, and his aide de camp, a couple of sailors, a coxswain, and my aide de camp with my suitcase. And Winston had his male nurse/valet with him, because he used to have injections and things. And he was wearing his little taxi driver hat, and double breasted blue coat, smoking a cigar, drinking brandy, and we sat together in this cockpit. And the Admiral was up with the coxswains, giving orders in all directions, and Winston and I sat in this tiny little motor boat.

What was he like?

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Very friendly, but he's very very deaf, I mean, he was frightfully deaf. One ear was pretty well useless. And with very deaf people, it's very difficult to make small talk, because it's not worth saying, "lovely day", because after he's said, "what?" twice, he's not interested, and you're not interested in saying it. So we bantered away, and we, and then, suddenly there was a distant roar of aircraft, and a great sort of swoop of aeroplanes flew over us, and then two destroyers, and then Britannia, looking wonderful, dark blue hull, and wide yellow funnel. And she slowed, she didn't stop, she slowed down, and the Admiral gave orders to the seamen in the bows, to signal, by lamp, what he was going to do, you see. And the other one signalled back, and the seaman couldn't read the signal back, so he said to the Admiral, "I can't see". And the Admiral said, "ask for a repeat". So they repeated it, and a great scarlet blush came up the back of the seaman's neck, he said, "I still can't understand it". And by then, we were almost touching distance of the boat, he could have just said, "what are you going to do?" in a faintly loud voice, and it would have all been heard. So they abandoned the signalling.

Why couldn't he understand it?

Well, it's quite difficult, it's Morse, you see. Poor chap, I mean, there he was with the Commander in Chief of the Fleet, and the Queen, destroyers and everything, and he was nervous. So then we came alongside, and the ship was going about five miles an hour, I suppose. And they'd lowered an accommodation ladder, and the problem was getting Winston up on to it, because he's, as you know, he's an extremely heavy man, and very slow moving. I mean, he was crippled with, I don't know whether it was arthritis, or what it was, it was very very difficult. However, they hauled him up.

Was he good-natured about that sort of thing?

Oh yes.

Or cross?

No, he, he really couldn't be cross, because he's, it was, he was being watched by everybody. He didn't slap helping hands off, or anything. And the Queen and Prince Philip were standing on the top of the landing deck, and I went up after him, and we shook hands, and she said, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 261

"well, I'm just going up ... nipping up on to the bridge, to review the Fleet, you stand wherever you like. Enjoy yourself." And so she and Winston went up on to the bridge, as far as I remember. I'm not absolutely sure about whether Winston went all the way up. And Prince Philip. And by then I knew some of the staff - her secretary, and her equerry - and so that was nice, they were old chums. And they took me down for some tea, and showed me my cabin, introduced me to my valet.

A cabin you'd designed yourself?

No, they were done, really, by McInnes Gardner, because it was pretty straight, standard first- class Atlantic cabin, bed not a bunk, and a basin and a wardrobe, very nice. And then we, we all went up on deck, and they were still steaming past the Fleet, flags flying and signals, guns firing and everything. And then we went down for drinks, up to drinks in the drawing room, and for general sort of gossip. And then at quarter to eight, dinner was at eight, and I was getting frightfully alarmed, because it was quarter to eight before the Queen said, "well, meeting back at eight", so I was two decks below. They were on the same deck, of course. So I roared down the stairs, found my cabin, and it was all laid out, but there weren't any socks. And I thought, "Oh, Jesus", so I rang for the valet and said, "can you lend me some socks?" And he said, "well, I'll see what I can find." So I'd panicked by then, you see, it was about four minutes to eight, and ...

You were afraid your head would be cut off?

Yes, and he fled back, and I got them on, put my shoes on, and I found my beloved had tucked socks, my evening socks, in the toes of my evening shoes! So then I roared up, and I was the last to arrive. The Queen ...

Does Moggie always do your packing?

No, but she did this time, to make sure I remembered everything! But I arrived last. The Queen and Prince Philip were both there, and all the entourage, and the Captain of the yacht, and everything. And, luckily, I was at the back of the room, so, I'm sure she noticed, but I don't think anybody else did. So I thought, "that's a black mark". And then we trolled into dinner, and I found myself sitting on the Queen's right, and Winston on her left, so I thought, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 262

"well, that's really not bad, is it". I said to myself. When I told my wife after this, she said, "well, of course, because Winston's absolutely stone deaf in his left ear, so it's no good having him next to her, because he wouldn't have heard a word she said". So he had to sit on her left. Quite right, and that was what the reason was. Anyway, I sat next to her and after dinner there was, they said, "we're going to have a movie now". And there were four chairs, Winston, the Queen, me and Prince Philip, four arm chairs, and then a gap, and then the ships officers, and entourage behind. We saw a sort of, a film about Scottish fishing boats, sort of humorous film about some drunken skipper and how he won through. It was quite good, actually. And then we went on deck, and watched the bonfires all along the coast of Kent and Sussex. We were steaming, I suppose, about 10 miles off the coast. And then we all went to bed. And then the next morning, we woke up, off Sheerness, and by then, we were surrounded by hordes of motor boats and fishing boats, penny steamers, and all the banks were lined with people waving and cheering. And it was very moving. And the Captain had broken his ankle, so he had one leg in plaster, and was hobbling about, and he was on the bridge, and, with Prince Philip and the Admiral, because there's an Admiral in charge of the Queen's safety at sea. So he was above the Captain, but the Captain's in charge of the ship, it was very complicated. And, of course, Prince Philip, being a naval officer, he wasn't going to keep quiet either! And then we had a pilot. So all those lads were on the bridge. Then we reached, went up Greenwich and all the way round, and Tower Bridge opened. And Captain Dalgleish had told us at dinner that he was determined, there were two tugs, he was determined to moor without tugs. He had to moor the front end and the back end on two buoys, the tide going very fast, under his own engines, without being pushed and budged and ... which he did with great skill. And then, Winston secretly went off ashore, in order to greet them, as the Prime Minister, you see. So he pushed off, and then the Cabinet arrived, in a great Royal barge, you know, with oars up aloft, and the children. And Miss Peebles, it was, the governess, and Princess Margaret, and they all clambered aboard, and then drinks, and then lunch.

Were the children very disciplined the whole time?

Ish! They were scampering about all over. They were, I suppose they were about 9, 7, 8, Anne and Charles. And then …

And had you got the impression that the Queen and Winston got on quite well, or not? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1159-B Page 263

Yes, fine trim. They'd had a lovely time. A long voyage home, what, nearly a week.

No, but the Queen and Winston Churchill?

Oh yes, because he adored her. He used to, his eyes used to fill with tears when he looked at her. He was very sentimental about her. Then they all pushed off, the whole bloody lot - Cabinet Ministers, Lord Mayor of London, Winston, and then the Queen's luggage went off, all the suitcases with huge labels with "The Queen" written on them, it looked wonderful! And the staff, and eventually, they'd all gone except the Admiral and me, and the crew of the yacht.

So had you been forgotten?

No. And he said, "come and have tea with me". By then it was boiling hot, it was about 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the evening. Boiling, so he took all his clothes off, except his pants. He'd been knighted at lunch time, in the dining room, and we had tea together, and then he put his clothes on and we went down..

Did you have all your clothes on?

Yes, I kept mine on! And then we went down to the Admiral's barge, each with our suitcases, and our sailors, and our whistling bosons with salutes, and things, and we hurtled up to Westminster, and there was a black Humber waiting for me ...

End of F1159 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 264

F1160 Side A

And then what happened when you got to the Humber?

They drove me home.

And weren't you on the Britannia for the Queen Mother's 90th Birthday the other day?

Yes.

Or was it a different one? What did that feel like?

Well, I've had two trips on her since. One to Venice with the Queen Mother.

When was that?

Oh, that was about six years ago, I suppose, five years ago. And then to Sicily, two years ago.

Why were you doing those?

Why was I doing that?

Why did they happen?

Well, she rents it, if she can get it.

You mean for herself?

Yes. She has her own friends, and she has it for ten days or whatever it is. But, in fact, the ship actually, is in constant use. And I think she steams more miles than any other ship in the British Navy, up till now, until the war arrives.

And are your apartments still the same, or have they been tinkered about with? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 265

Well, Moggie comes now, you see, so she has her own cabin, and I have mine.

No, but I mean the ones that you designed, have they been left as they were?

Oh yes, we live in the Royal rooms, so to speak.

And have they changed?

We don't go into the Queen's bedroom or the ....

But, I mean, have they still got your carpets?

Oh yes, everything's the same.

So it's been replaced or it's the same.

No, the only change is, they've got ... the dining room carpet has been replaced because things have been upset on it over the years.

And it's an identical one or what?

The same. Identical. The pictures are the same. They've got a lot of trophies. Whenever they go abroad they get given a war canoe, or a Polynesian drum, or a Canadian tomahawk or something, which they have to find room for, because when they go back to those places, they look for them.

But, I mean, what's it like if you go to Venice with the Queen Mother?

Extremely enjoyable.

What happens?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 266

Well, what happens, usually, on both occasions, the Queen Elizabeth flies out to the nearest airport. The ship's there.

Where?

Venice, or Sicily, or Naples, or wherever it is. But they don't steam all the way round very briskly, they join her there. And you fly out. This time, when we went to France, we flew with them. Those other times we went on our own, and went aboard when we got there.

But they provide you with the aircraft, or are you just meant to …

Oh no, you go ordinary service.

And you pay for it, or they pay for it?

No, you pay for that. But if you go with them, you don't.

Okay. And then what happens?

The citizen doesn't pay. Well, much the same, really. I mean, you, you go on board about tea time, and drinks and dinner, and when she's there, she's semi-official, so she gives a dinner party every night. We didn't move from Venice, it was just a hotel, she just lay alongside. And she gave a lunch party every day, and a dinner party every day. And then in the mornings, the afternoons, you sight-saw.

In an organised way?

Yes. I mean, she had a chap called Peter Lauritzen who was a sort of VIP's guide, who takes you round, unlocks doors and …

When you were in France, you were looking at churches and things like that, weren't you?

Mmmm. Same, same in, same in Venice and the same in, in Sicily. Except in Sicily we went on car expeditions round the island, and to other places, because we went ... every night we Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 267 steamed off to another port, and then have an expedition, and then another port and another expedition.

And what was that story about being somewhere in England with either Charles or Philip and wanting to look at a house, and discovering George MacBeth was in it?

Oh, that was, that's in our Kings Lynn period. You see, what we do, oh, have done for some years now is, we go to the Kings Lynn Festival, of which Queen Elizabeth is the Patron.

The Queen Mother or the Queen?

Yes, the Queen Mother, and her lady-in-waiting, Ruth Fermoy, is the Chairman and Organiser of the Kings Lynn Festival. And so the Queen Elizabeth goes up for a week to Sandringham, she borrows Sandringham for a week, and she has a group of people to stay, who are interested in music, and you do various expeditions and picnics and concerts and things. And in the, at Easter time, she does the same thing again at Windsor, in her house. She has just a weekend, sort of cultural weekend, with somebody reading poetry, or playing the piano, or whatever it might be. So we're lucky enough to get involved in that every year so far.

So, how did it happen that you came upon George MacBeth?

How did it happen what? Oh well, sometimes at Kings Lynn, or, we usually go church calling, or visiting neighbouring big houses and things, generally sort of architectural tours of Norfolk and things. And one day, we went with Prince Charles up to see a church on The Wash, and, a funny little church it was, and there was an extraordinary sort of fortified house, very odd looking house, and I thought, "I must go and see what it's like". We walked up the drive, and banged on the door, and this lady came, dark lady came out, who is this Italian novelist, do you remember, she wrote a book about South America, I'll remember her name.

Lisa St whatever her name is.

Lisa. And we'd seen George MacBeth reading poetry the night before, and we thought we'd seen her there too. And anyway, she introduced herself. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 268

Was she surprised to find you all on her doorstep?

She was his wife. She isn't his wife now, but she was then. And that was it. It was a fascinating house, and she was a pretty extraordinary girl.

INTERVIEW WITH HUGH CASSON, 1990

... and I were teaching at the Royal College of Art. We enjoyed the experience tremendously, because it was fun working together in the same room, at the same desk even, and with the same students. And it was noticeable that both the men and women students treated her as a sort of counsellor and listening post, because the theory that everybody in the sixties and seventies was, was careless, and sophisticated, and had no problems with their love lives or anything, because that was all silly old parents. But they were just as, as uneasy at taking a girl out for the first time, they really were. Anyway, I say this to start with, because I had an extraordinary experience when I was sitting alone in our house in Kensington one night, quite late, about 9 o'clock, the door bell rang, and outside was a totally strange, rather beautiful girl, about 21, I suppose, and she said, "I'm in great trouble, can I come in?" So I said, "of course". So she came in, and took her hat and coat off, and I showed her into the sitting room, and then I said, "well, what's the trouble?" And she said, "I'm going to have a baby". And the husband, the father, rather, "who got me behind a filing cabinet at the office party at Christmas, then left for Australia, and I've written to him, but he's just sent a message back saying he wasn't interested. And my father's a policeman, and he's so upset by this that he's decided to sell his house, and we live down in the Thames Valley, because of the humiliation and shame of this. And my father, and his wife, they decided to move North, I'm abandoned, and I don't know what to do, because I'm just a secretary in an office, and, and I thought perhaps you could help me. " So I said, "well, as it happens, if you're a teacher at a, at a place of further education, these things happen quite frequently, and the Royal College of Art has various helpful lawyers, and helpful doctors and things who can sort it out for you. And I've got all the addresses here, and I'll give you these addresses, and letters of introduction if you wish, and, and then I'm afraid it's up to you as to what you do about what they advise you to do." So I did that, and then I said, "look, anyway, why, why me? Why my house? Why did you press my particular bell in this dark street?" And she said, "because the father is your nephew. The father of this baby." And I said, "I have no nephews". And she giggled, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 269 she said, "do you mean to say I've been telling you all this, awful story, to a total absolute stranger, who has no contact, connection, anything at all?" And I said, "I'm afraid you have. And I must apologise for continuing to listen, because I ought to have asked that question when you came in. I did think of asking, but it seemed rather unfriendly 'why me?' and then shut the door." Anyway, I said, "I have no nephew, and, have you got any further clues?" And she said, "well, he has an uncle in Hampstead", and I said, "well, no relation of mine. I've no person of my name living in Hampstead that I know of." However, we found one.

Was it someone who was called Casson?

Yes, he was called Casson, and he was an advertising agent in a quite well-known firm in those days. So I rang him up, and I said, "you've got a girl coming to see you shortly, with a problem. And she's very sensible and nice, and frightened, and, and in need of advice and help." So we said goodbye, and she vanished. I never heard a single word from her since. I've never known what happened.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

I remember coming up from Oxford one evening on the train, rather late at night, in the buffet car, which was empty except for me, drinking coffee in one corner, and reflected in a mirror, because it was night, pitch dark, you could see the reflection of a girl in a duffel coat, it was that period, and she was sobbing, and in the end, I said, by the time we got to about Didcot or somewhere, I said, "really, I can't enjoy my coffee with you sobbing your heart out across. Come and share your coffee with me, or have a whisky or something. What's the matter?" So she came across, and I said, "well, what's the matter, if it isn't cheeky to ask"? And she said, "I'm a biology student, and all my mice have died this morning". So I said, I wasn't expecting that! So I said, "well, surely if you're a biologist, your mice die every day, that's the point of working in that sort of place". But, eventually, after about 20 minutes, I extracted the fact that she was in love with her biology professor, who was about ... close on 60, and she was about a second year student, about 22, and he was in love with her, and they'd been away together to Colchester. She'd bought a wedding ring in Woolworth's, and it was wonderful, she said, "oh, it was wonderful". I said, "I suppose he's married"? And she said, "oh yes. He's got a wife." And I said, "I suppose she's horrible, and doesn't understand him". And she said, "oh, of course, yes. She's a very boring woman." And by then we were Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 270 rocking into Reading, I suppose, it took quite a long time extracting all this. And I said, "well, the only person I'm sorry for in this story, despite your sobs, is the wife. It seems to me that the husband's behaved extremely badly, because one of the rules, one of the rules in teaching is that you don't seduce your students, it's not an acceptable thing to do." In fact, at the Royal College if you were, if it was found out that you were, the College said "one or other of you have got to leave, and you make up your minds which one it is", which is a very good rule. And I said, "I really despise a man of 60 who's leaving his wife and his house and his family, and probably his job, for you, nice and attractive and as irresistible as I'm sure you are. But actually, I said, "I'm afraid he's not likely to do it, because it means he'll have to give up his job, and he'll give up his, probably his pension, and his emeritus and all that stuff for the sake of love. I think it's extremely unlikely that he'll do it. And anyway, if he's so nice, why are you sobbing your heart out?" And she said, "well, I'm going home to tell my parents that I'm leaving Oxford", and I said, "well, I think that's extremely foolish of you too". And then we were clinking over the points, going into Paddington, and she jumped to her feet, and she kissed me, very strongly on the mouth, and said, "I hope I never see you again". And ran away. And I don't know what's happened to her.

But that story gives the impression that you're rather sort of …

Strict.

Yes, which isn't really very true, is it?

Well it was. I mean I felt it very strongly.

Yes, but I mean, you maybe believe people.

No need to use it!

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Streak in me ... of priggishness. I think there probably is.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 271

But you, I mean, you don't believe, necessarily, that everyone should get married and be entirely faithful for ever and ever and, I mean ...

No, but I don't think you should take advantage of children, though, do you?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

... fidelity and marriage?

Fairly generous.

But it didn't sound generous.

But I think it's because we were ... I think it's partly the experiences one had at prep school, where form masters would call you up to their desk, and run their hands up your thighs, inside your shorts, and fumble away, and ... I think most boys didn't really object to it very much, except they objected to it being seen by the other boys, because it looked ... undignified. So one got into the habit of thinking that masters and mistresses should try and not do that.

But surely, I mean, if he hadn't have been her tutor at Oxford, if he'd worked in a pharmaceutical company, for instance, would you have thought it was alright?

Perfectly alright.

Which bit? For them to have an affair, or for him to leave his wife?

Oh, for him to seduce her. Because I think, mind you, I think this is an old-fashioned attitude, because dons no longer take the line that they're in loco parentis. You see, when I was a lad at Cambridge, dons were supposed to be your loco parentis people, you know. You went to them with your problems, and you saw them every week, and read your essays to them, and either you liked them or you didn't like them. And obviously, if you didn't like them, you didn't confess things to them. But nowadays, you see, with these young dons, like David Lodge, in imagination, I'm sure he's a very nice man, but he ... they're always tumbling on the floor with their girls, you see. And I suppose there's no harm in that so much, except that they are, in a Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 272 way, supposed to be looking after you. And he would say, the seducer, he would say, "well, this is part of life's great experience".

But would you think that, in a bad marriage, it's better for children to have the bad marriage continue than to have a break up with the possibility of one or other parent being happy?

No, but I think, you see, when you're 60, marriage has been, doesn't really suddenly become bad at 60, and if he was going to leave his wife, he ought to have left her when she was younger. The children, once the children have gone.

And do you think children stop needing their parents once they're grown up?

Well some do and some don't.

Anyway ... I think we're going down a blind alley.

I think, I think ... I mean, I still think that I have a priggish side to my nature, which I don't try and enrich, or stand, don't you think?

Anyway, since we last made a tape for the Sound Archive, which was the end of August, your life has been hit by some quite drastic events, hasn't it.

Yes.

I think we ought to say something about those.

At what stage do you put that in?

Well, when we last talked, you were about due to go off to France, so what's happened since then?

What sort of ... [SCRAPPY RECORDING HERE]

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 273

One of the pleasures of retirement from professional practice as an architect, is that you're spared the endless meetings and arguments with builders and putting on gum-boots and wading round sites in November, in the damp Midlands, which was never very interesting to me, because I was really a drawing board man, rather than a site inspection man. It is the switch to being able to, to work at home, and, and to draw and do watercolours of buildings you like, which are probably not your own. And then you get commissions for doing portraits of houses and, and scenes of whatever it may be, for various people, and the last five years, I've had a commission from a wine shipper, an English wine shipper, who wanted to present each of his vineyard domaines from which he got his wines, portraits of one portion or other of the domaine - could be buildings, could be scenery, could be anything. And we started up in sort of Luxembourg area, and then we went to the Rhine each year, and then we went to sort of south west France, the Auvergne and the lot … and this year, this August, which is August 1990, we were sent down to the Rhone, the bottom end, near the Camargue, and the client, who is an amateur watercolour painter, decided to come with us this time. And we travelled, because we're so old, we tend to travel with the children, they do the chauffeurs and the couriers, and paying the hotels, and dealing with all the chores of travel, so it's a pretty painless and enjoyable exercise. Anyway, when, when I was at ... we were all sitting at Heathrow, waiting to push off, I didn't feel very well, and found I had a temperature. However, I got to, got to the, to Toulouse, and then to Montpelier, where we were staying, and I felt terrible. However, there was only three days' work. Each day was a separate domaine I went out every day, and my legs felt extremely painful and I couldn't walk, really, without help. And I had a slight temperature all the time.

That must have been very frightening, wasn't it?

And I thought it was just 'flu, actually, because that's the sort of thing ... and I've been very lucky all my life. I've never, in my life, been to hospital, and never been seriously ill, never had anything taken out, or put in, nothing broken, no scars, which is a mark of physical cowardice, I think, because few people go through life without getting a few scars. In fact, a friend of mine who went to prison for conscientious objection during the war, and when he was seen by the doctor, when he went to the prison, he said, "where are your scars"? He said he hadn't got any. "No scars?" He said, "you've been looking after yourself," with the greatest scorn. I've always sort of thought of that! However, as it got worse, on the third day, I thought I could just about do a drawing, and I finished it at lunchtime, and then told the children we'd Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 274 have to go home because I couldn't bear it any more. So we flew home, and found that I'd developed a, a disease called polymyalgia which is a, I think it's a, really an inflammation of the blood which, of the arteries, which gives you very painful limbs, and they take away the pain immediately, with taking steroids. And steroids have side-effects, which affect your diet, and, and your ability to think and everything, and also, your eyes, and that was the thing I was naturally rather frightened of. And so this was in last September, and it's now December, and I've really been, well, I went to hospital for about a week, and then I've been sort of bumbling round the house in slippers, complaining, ever since!

How have you coped with it all?

Well, I, I feel terribly lucky that it hasn't happened, nothing's happened to me before, really, so I can't grumble. And if you're 80, as I am, obviously at 80, anyway, things begin to fall off you, or aren't seen any more, or you can't hear, or you can't lift weights, or you can't walk up a hill, and that sort of thing. So, actually, it's been quite peaceful, because I just go from my bed into my studio, and draw all day. I sleep in the afternoon, and spared all committees. And yesterday, I gave a lecture, which is the first one for five months.

Did you find yourself getting very depressed at certain points, because you fought it incredibly well. But a lot of people would have got sunk by it.

I thought I'd be sunken with misery, twist my hair round my finger - what's left of my hair! And look out of the window, and wondering what was going to happen next. But actually, I'm a fairly buoyant character. I think it's a, like all optimists, optimists are really people who won't face facts, aren't they, as a rule. And I wasn't facing the fact that this would be a ... for the rest of my life, a physical, a collection of physical handicaps. And most of them, I mean, the quick movement, and, and the inability to run after a bus, and all that sort of thing. I didn't mind about that, because that would come with age anyway. But I was worried about the eyes, because if they, if they go, then, then the whole interests of my life go too. Reading and drawing are about the only ... and writing ... the enjoyments I have. So, at the moment, at the moment, I'm going to see an eye specialist.

And there was a further complication because of diabetes, wasn't there?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 275

Yes. That ... steroids, of course, stir ... I'd had latent diabetes, not serious. I never took any notice with diet or anything, it faded away when I was about 30.

So did you have it from being a young ...

And the steroids, it suddenly comes back, and stirs it up, and turns it out of bed, and says, "come on, get busy." And then you get all those complications of, of diet and, and feeling faint ... before meals, and all those boring things. But those you can deal with. I think the eyes is the only one that is a worry.

And when we were talking before, you said that you partly wanted to do the job at the Royal Academy, because you feared inactivity, and you've had to face inactivity recently. Have you found it better than you thought it wou1d be?

Being active again?

No, being inactive.

It's been quite enjoyable, it's been quite enjoyable in winter, because you don't, tremendously, want to trail off to Sheffield and give a lecture on Ruskin, or something. 'Cos the whole, you've done it before, and nice as everybody is when you get there, the fag of going up to Sheffield, or wherever, giving the lecture, staying the night, and coming back in the train the next day, I've really had all that, I think. And I think I was driven by vanity, to go on doing it longer than I should.

End of F1160 Side A

F1160 Side B

... talk about your watercolours. What stage did you, I mean, you were always drawing, but (a) you were drawing in black and white, and (b) you made it sound as though they were really much more sketches, done on the wing, either for building work, or just as a sort of an almost visual diary. At what point did you (a) start using colour, and (b) start working on them as pictures? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 276

Well, when I came down from Architecture School in, I suppose, about, when I finished, round about 1934, and I went into an office to work as an architect, I continued drawing, and I, I just began, cautiously, to what I call "colour in", my drawings, like children do. You know, you draw a building, then you colour the brickwork red, and a blue sky, and it was infantile stuff, really, because I was frightened of it. And then, and then the war broke out in 1939, and I became a camouflage officer, and this meant that I had to work in colour for about four years, because you had to give instructions for various standard camouflage colours, for various buildings and things. And so then, that was the first time I really started using colour with some confidence. They were very stiff drawings really, watercolours are very stiff, because, being an architect, you, you tend to draw stiffly rather than loosely, I think, and, and they were rather tight, and rather overworked. Because everybody starting with watercolour finds it a very difficult medium, because it's, it's very elusive, and you have to, to do it well, which I've never really managed to do, you have to work very fast, and very wet, and we'd learnt watercolour at Architecture School in a totally different way. And I was taught, when we were putting on great washes over our architectural drawings, I mean, the papers were the size of a hearth rug, and you had to put on a wash over the whole thing, colour of some kind or other, because that was the fashion in those days, it was really an 18th, 19th Century fashion, still taught at the Beaux-arts. The teaching then, was, that you never touched the paper with the brush, you touched the paper with the water, on the end of your brush, so that it, the brush never makes a mark, and it's quite tricky, actually, because everything's got to be frightfully wet, and as everything dries so quickly, in a centrally-heated studio, you have to work like dotty at speed, and with big brushes. And that was a totally different technique. The speed was something I lost, because, once I got rid of the Beaux-arts system, I was doing small watercolours, I mean, sort of a foot by nine inches, maximum. And you didn't have to worry so much. But, even so, the lesson about having that bubble of water between the brush and the paper, I never lost, because it was a very instructive one.

But at this stage, you're still talking about, really, doing paintings to do with architecture?

Yes, they were all, all really, all buildings. I once, I started doing landscapes. I was terrified of trees, and architects have a sort of technique for drawing people, which, what you might call "standard people", which they put in their drawings to show how high the building is. And in the old days, big drapers like Selfridges, would draw hundreds of people in Oxford Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 277

Street, but they were all about the height of dachshunds, so that it made Selfridges look enormous, and nobody really, could hardly look over the skirting! But architects are a little bit more honest than that, not much, but a little bit! And so one practised at drawing little standard people, now you can buy standard people from, from art shops, and you just stick them in your drawings, which is what most architects do. But I never really did life drawing, which I greatly miss, the, the experience of doing that. Because drawing, drawing life is really wonderfully, wonderfully, fierce discipline. And I wish I'd done it. So I've had to sort of be self-taught. It's hopeless. And I'm really lazy about drawing people sitting in a chair, reading, or something - one's wife, or children, or something. So I still stick, really, to buildings, or buildings in landscape, and, I mean, very corny subjects like flat, flat horizons, flat features and nothing for miles.

And when did you start actually doing them as pictures, rather than to do with working drawings?

Well, after the war, I went first into the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, working on new towns - Stevenage, and prefabs, and that sort of thing - for only about 18 months, two years. And there were no opportunities, because this was sort of straightforward architectural, mechanical drawing. And there was no, no pretty pictures of anything. And there wasn't much time to, to do them in your spare time. So then, when I went back to practice, I, my partners decided that I was a draughtsman who could do attractive pictures of buildings we were designing, attractive enough to persuade the client that they wanted to go ahead with it. So I did a lot of work in the office. I wasn't too hot on, on the technical and mechanical side of architecture, so they drove me away from that, to avoid the expensive mistakes that I would have, I would have made. And I spent a lot of time doing what, what I suppose you'd call, roughly call "presentation", watercolours of new buildings, which was slightly mechanical and had to be ... you couldn't cheat, you can if you're drawing a cottage in the country, make the chimneys higher than they are, or whatever it may be. But if it was for a new building that somebody was paying for, they didn't like it to be too idealised and cheated, in fact. So I began to do a lot of that, and that led to doing drawing on holidays and drawing, if you went abroad, because I always had a sketch book, always, with me. Just practising. As you were saying, a sort of visual diary, of what happened. I've got hundreds of these books.

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When did you first have an exhibition?

I think my first exhibition, I was just trying to remember. Yes, it was in Cheltenham, actually, before the war ended. And I was just winding up the camouflage section in my region, of which Cheltenham was the centre, and the, and I'd done quite a lot of watercolours of crashed Wellingtons, because it was largely an area for training pilots, and they were always running off the end of the runway, and that sort of thing. And the local art gallery said, to whom I showed one or two of these things, said, could they have an exhibition? So I, I got permission from the Air Ministry, and had "Censored" written all over them, in huge letters, as being okay. And that was the first one, which must have been after the end of the European War, and the Japanese War was still going on.

But you never considered just being an artist and dropping architecture?

Never, no. I never, I never thought I'd be really good enough, and ...

And was it always very successful? I mean, if you have an exhibition now, it tends to be sold out before it's even open, quite often. Were they always very popular?

They were fairly popular because, I think they had a sort of fatal charm about them, which one wasn't very proud of. But I found I couldn't avoid, somehow, the way watercolour went on, or the subjects I chose. The conventional subjects, you know, rotting fishing boats, or follies in deep woods, and that sort of thing.

Did anything you ever saw in anyone else's work ever change yours?

I was trying to think who influenced me very much. Actually, in the days of the ... just after the war, people didn't get around much, and you never, I mean, going from one place to another was still quite difficult. And everybody was busy, and the buildings were all falling down, and it was rather a miserable period, and I managed to free my style a bit during the Festival of Britain, which started in 1948, the works there, and I had to do a lot of quick impressionistic idea sketches, of the sort of thing that might happen here, might happen here, often on a blackboard, or on a pin up board, for a committee. So that made you inventive. But, I mean, there were certain people whom I admired beyond worship really, in my field. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 279

There was a man called William Walcot, who was an architectural perspectivist, professionally. He was Russian, and he was ambidextrous, and he could draw simultaneously with both hands, on a drawing, and he used glue and fish paste, spit, blood, anything, and his drawings are not much seen nowadays, but they were absolutely fantastically exciting to me. They were mostly reconstructions of the baths of Caracalla, full of Romans, very small, and huge great columns disappearing into gold dust, or hair oil, or whatever he had on the desk at the moment. I wanted to have that freedom to, to pick up any sort of object - a piece of sealing wax, or a stump of boot black or something.

Was he your contemporary?

No, he was much older than me.

But you knew him?

No, sadly, I didn't. I saw him about. I used to go and stand in front of his fabulous ... his drawings were enormous, they were the size of hearth rugs, and he just went at it. And he didn't cover the whole paper with stuff, it was just a sort of smudge, quite often. And he was the man I admired most, as an architectural draughtsman, in the immediate post-war years. And then there were a lot of people - Paul Hogarth, and another architectural draughtsman - who was interesting because, in those days, he was a rather keen Communist, and he spent most of his time drawing in Russia and China, rather careful drawings of heroic workers on the front of a dam, or something, in pencil. He didn't use colour in those days, at all. And then there was Felix Topolski whom I did know, who was a war artist, and he did this very loose drawing. He could almost draw in his own pocket, you know, without taking his hand out of his pocket. And I was a great admirer of his portraiture skill.

Would you ever talk to him about the way he worked, and the way you worked, or would you never have that sort of conversation?

Felix?

Mmmm. Or anybody.

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Just trying to think. It's so difficult to remember, it's so long ago. I was rather frightened of Felix because his skill and fluency were really quite breathtaking. And he could get wonderful likenesses, I mean, he was always drawing. Of course, in those days, he was drawing generals and, and admirals and seamen on bucking destroyers, and heroic figures, because he was a war artist. He was wonderful at horses. And he came to England because he thought the horses and the uniforms in London were so extraordinary. By uniforms, I mean, the St. James' Street lunch crowd, with bowler hats, and velvet-collared black overcoats, and umbrellas and tiepins, he found these absolutely fascinating, lying horizontal in Club chairs.

Did he like those people, or did he just like the way they looked?

I don't know that he knew very many of them. He regarded them as extraordinarily baroque figures, and he expected London to be very stiff and dull, everybody in flat caps.

And he found this, in London, the West End, and scenes like Ascot, or Henley, or the Royal Tournament, he found really, really like that great horse race in Italy, you know?

What, the Palio?

The Palio, he found just as extraordinary. And went on thinking so, till he died.

But, I mean, would someone like Bawden, would you have discussed?

Oh, I love Bawden's work and Ravilious, but that was the period of, of which they were sort of main leaders, of very decorative and very English sort of drawing. A lot of cross-hatching and beautiful watercolours. But they, I never watched them drawing. I knew them both. Bawden very well, and Eric Ravilious, although I've got a lot of his decorative work. And they were page decorators. And in the war, they changed completely and became wonderfully perceptive interpreters of battles in Abyssinia, and Bawden, particularly, he was mostly in the Far East, and Egypt, and Abyssinia and Turkey and Iran. And he, he drew, he was a wonderful, wonderful draughtsman, wonderful.

Did you like the sort of Shell posters, and things like that? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1160-B Page 281

Yes, well, of course, they did a lot of these, and these were due, largely, to a man called Jack Beddington, who was the chief adviser to Shell in their advertising, and he, he commissioned Bawden and Ravilious, and slightly what you might call, I don't know quite how you'd call them, they were slightly comic rather than funny. They were magical draughtsmen. Magical.

What were they like as people?

Both very shy. Bawden was wonderfully caustic, and I remember he and I worked on a ship once, and he used to do a lot of work for restaurants and hotels and advertising and posters, and I remember, Humphrey Spender had designed a carpet, it was for a ship, it was for a ship line, it's gone now, the Orient Line, they were great, wonderful patrons of the arts, and they covered their ships with murals, and special carpets, and special curtains, and they used all the current modish people. And Humphrey had done a carpet and Edward had done a huge screen for the dining room, and Edward had been down to see it, and Humphrey, and we were there at lunch at the College, and Humphrey said, because he was always very anxious about his work, he said to Edward, "were people enjoying my carpet? Did they like my carpet?" And Edward said, "it's a very difficult answer", he said, "well, they were walking about on it, if that's what you mean." And continued without saying any more. It didn't mean he didn't like it, but he had that sort of sharp-edged comment on, on, on the arts. He hated, he hated art critical writing. And I was very fond of him, and he had a very sweet wife, and talented child, children he had two. He's only died very recently.

But did you tend to talk to him about life in general, rather than about painting, would you?

Yes, I was rather nervous about talking about other people's techniques and ...

And when did you start to know Ruskin Spear?

At the college.

And what was he like?

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When I joined the college, round about '52, and was there for about 20 years. And he was a no-nonsense, wonderful man, very, very lame, he walked with a stick. He was a very heavy man, bearded, and he was a very popular teacher, because he was a ... well, he was brave, and forthright, and went straight at it, and took interesting subjects. Rather like Sickert in a way, he would take newspaper cuttings, and make huge oil paintings of them. I remember, he had two wonderful figures coming out of the sea at Brighton, and it was called "The Quarrel over the Bedroom", and he was a commentator, really, as well as a very fine artist. But Robin Darwin, who was Head of the Royal College at the time, he recruited a lot of people from his student days, from the Slade or, or Camberwell, or, it wasn't the Royal College, the Royal College had almost died during the war.

And Moynihan, when did he come into your life?

He was there at the same time.

And what was he like?

Frightened of him! He was rather severe, monosyllabic. And not my period. I mean, he was older than I was, I think, and a wonderful painter. And again, you see, he was the great period of all that period of, of Spear, of Ruskin Spear, and Moynihan, and the starters of the Euston Road School, all rather serious painters, in fact. Spear was a funny one, but the other ones were serious.

But were you still frightened of Moynihan by the time you were President of the Royal Academy, and giving him an exhibition?

I was a bit, because he seemed very closely contained man. I think because I'm not a frequenter of pubs, I don't enjoy pubs, and that period, everybody lived in pubs, either at the back of Tottenham Court Road, or that sort of period of, of the, the drinkers in the, in the, what was that pub called where everybody ...? The Fitzroy. And I, I didn't like pub life, and Ruskin and Moynihan, and that period of painter, I think, rather did, and so I didn't sort of roister, because I was nervous, I was nervous of them. They seemed very grand, and they weren't grand people, but they seemed very grand.

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So they were sort of work colleagues, rather than particularly close friends?

I, yes, I only saw them at lunch time in the common room.

So, at the time, for instance, you were at the Royal College, who were your closest friends? Who would you see after work and weekends, and things?

Difficult to remember. I think mostly the graphic designers, rather than the painters. Painters kept themselves very much to themselves. They had their own table in the common room, and didn't like other people sitting there. I saw a lot of Robin, the, the Head Boy, so to speak, Robin Darwin, because I'd known him during the war, in camouflage, and they were, he was a close personal friend.

But were you really seeing people from outside that world much more, or what?

No, I had lunch very nearly every day in the common room.

No, but outside work hours, and in the evenings or weekends, who would you be likely to see?

Not tremendously ... mostly, I think, quite a lot of architects. I think we stuck to our own, our own professions, rather, in a sort of stuffy way.

And you quite like going to parties and things, don't you? Or not?

Mmmmm ... painters' parties tend to be pretty exclusive, I think. In those days, they seemed to stick together very much. Very agreeable to meet and talk to, but I don't think I spent smoky evenings in peoples' studios discussing Matisse or anything.

End of F1160 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 284

F1161 Side A

When did you first do any designs for the theatre?

My actual first commission was from my Uncle Lewis Casson, the actor, who, with my aunt, Sybil Thorndike, was going to do a series of Grand Guignol short plays at the Coliseum. And he wrote to me when I was at school, I suppose I was about 15, 16, and said would I design the set for one of these little playlets. As far as I remember, it was about a sculptor who murdered his wife, and then cast her inside some plaster of Paris, and the last curtain was when he was chipping away, and this awful dead face appeared from the, from the heart of the plaster of Paris. And it was a very conventional set. It had a studio window, and a stove with a crooked black pipe, and, and ... Anyway, he took the design, which I thought was extremely noble of him, and it was used more or less as I designed it. So that was my first ...

Were you surprised to be asked?

Very. I mean, they were, they were a close uncle and aunt, in that, in that I saw them quite often. They came down to see me at school sometimes, when my parents were away, so they were not, as it were, strangers. But she was at the peak of her fame, she was just about to start doing St Joan, Bernard Shaw's St Joan, after long periods of touring in America with Shakespeare. And I was very devoted to them both, and, indeed, I lived with them at the end of the last War, in London. I was a lodger, and the last bits of the V-ls, and V-2s, when she was working then at the Old Vic. And I didn't really touch the theatre again, until years and years later, in fact, I suppose, the fifties, early fifties. And my first sort of what you might call professional approach, came from Glyndebourne. I had never been to Glyndebourne, and I was not taken much by my family to the opera, and so the whole world of the opera was, was rather terrifying to me. But I knew the theatre was renowned for the tremendous support given to people who were doing things for the first time, because they were quite experimental in their, or were becoming so, in the people they asked to do design or production.

Do you know why they'd approached you?

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Well, I was quite well-known because of the Festival of Britain, South Bank Exhibition, and, you know, when something like that happens, you get quite well-known for about a year, and then you're forgotten, usually. And, anyway, the letter came saying would I go down and look at the theatre, which I did, which was, as most people know, is an extremely beautiful little theatre, cosy. And it has all the, what's nice about it is, all the workshops and the wardrobes, and the people who make hats and props, and everything is done, as it were, in the stables or the house, and it's all extremely friendly, and, and unusual. And I didn't know any singers, and I didn't know how singers behaved, or, or who was in charge of opera. I mean, is it the conductor, is it the producer? Or whatever it was. Anyway, the opera I was asked to do was called "Alceste, by ... oh dear! ... One of those Greek classical dramas and everybody wears long, pleated robes, and the priests were always processing around with staffs, and being rather bossy. And the, the production, the producer wanted a very grave, solemn, impressive thing. It mostly took place in a temple, and I remember my first sketch was to have a huge statue of Apollo in the middle of the stage, in which it was so huge that his knees actually brushed the top of the proscenium, so you thought, "heavens, the size of this building is terrific!" We had to reduce it, in the end, to about half the size. And it was all, all done in very very slow, shallow steps. It was rather like the, I suppose you could say, the Italian and early experimental work of the ... Appia, the man called Appia, whose work I absolutely adored.

Where had you seen his work?

Only in ... never seen a production ... only seen catalogues of exhibitions and things.

And had you been quite interested in theatre design, or did this come out of the blue?

Well, it wasn't all that different from architecture, you see, because ... it had the advantage over architecture. You didn't have to keep the rain out, to start with, which, half the time in buildings, is keeping the rain out. If you're doing something inside a shed or a theatre, that's dealt with. The other thing is, you can control where your shadows are, because you just put up a light, so the sun comes in where you want it. And the third thing is that the practicalities of, of stage design, to me, perhaps because I was an architect, were not all that different, because, for instance, I mean, the singers who have got a lot to think about - movement, and music, and words - and they're wearing long tunic dresses. They don't want steps that are Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 286 likely to trip them up. The producer, of course, rather likes steps because he can bring people in at high level, and they come down and make a good appearance. So all of what you might call the practicalities, were very architectural, and familiar. But I was, of course, not a very imaginative designer, because I was working in a new field, and I was terrified.

Did you go to anybody for advice?

No. Except the advice I got, of course, at Glyndebourne, from the ... from Moran Caplat, who was the sort of managing director of the place in those days.

And what sort of advice did he give you, can you remember?

As far as I remember, Moran's advice was, "don't get rattled", which is good advice at any time. Because you're nervous, I was frightened of musicians, and, of course, most of them are speaking foreign languages all the time.

Did you have any hesitation about taking it on?

Not at all, no. 'Fraid not! I think architects get used to being asked to do a, I don't know, a jam factory one day, and a stately home the next. I mean, you just, or a child psychologist's research plant. I mean, you have to pick it up in 20 minutes. And so you're used to that sort of thing. But it was a new thing, and, of course, the confusion of authority was difficult. You see, again, the musical director and the lighting man, and the producer, and the people who are paying for the scenery and all that sort of thing. There's, it is quite a confusion unless you've got a very powerful chap in control. Anyway, that was my first at Glyndebourne.

And, so how did it go?

I enjoyed it tremendously. It was, it was quite successful. As far as I remember, it got a round of applause when the curtain went up, which the designer likes, the musicians hate. But it was very slow and grave, and people were always marching about very slowly, and, as it were, holding on to lapels.

Did you actually like the opera? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 287

Yes, I loved the music. I loved it.

And are you quite musical? You are, aren't you?

Not really, well, I learnt the piano until I was 17, so to speak. But since I've married, I've been much more into the musical world, because my wife is genuinely musical. Anyway, it was really my first toe into, into the opera world, and it was interesting.

How was it different in terms of working with a team of architects, from working with a team of theatre people? Technicians, really ... and I mean, did you find it was more or less the same in human terms, or not?

Pretty well. I think there's a lot of wooing goes on in the theatre. You don't say, "please move that light". You say, "we're having a bit of trouble with the lighting, Ted. Do come over and say what you think we ought to do here". You see, and that's partly artificial. It's nice in a way, but it's partly artificial, because Ted has already spotted that you're having trouble. He was already moving the light before you say it, so, so there's a lot of that, I think, in the theatre world. I can only call it "wooing", and I don't quite know how else to describe it. It's asking people to do things, rather than telling them. And I'm sure there are lots of directors and producers who are much fiercer, and just shout very quickly. I did another set, scheme, for "Merry Wives of Windsor", which didn't, in the end, come off.

As a play?

No, no, an opera.

At Glyndebourne?

Yes. And the last ....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

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But the next one I did, after Gluck's "Alceste”, was a really wonderful opera by Monteverdi called, "L'Incoronazione de Poppea", and it's the story of Nero falling in love with this tart, and sending his wife into exile. And again, it was classical. The background was, it was a permanent set with slight alterations in the way the windows appeared in certain acts. And it was a classical set. It was really a totally architectural set - steps, columns, openings, dirty yellow sort of stone, and people walking about again, in long robes. But the music was absolutely magical, and it finishes with a love duet between Poppea and Nero, which is one of the top musical experiences I've ever had. It's very very very moving. And the final one I was lucky enough to do at Glyndebourne was Haydn's "Fedelta Premiata". And that was much more light-hearted. It was, it was rural peasants and straw hats, and sort of distant stately home, and parks, and gazebos, and, of course, it got a bit fanciful at the end, where the monster comes out of the lake in the moonlight. And the monster had to open its jaws, and disclose a goddess. We had a little sort of trigger in the monster's teeth, which clicked it open, and there she was, shining away. And so that, that was quite a technical challenge that one. I rather enjoyed it. But I loved the opera, and I saw, I think it was, it was, as far as I remember, it was re-done three or four times at Glyndebourne. And, of course, everywhere else has ... not with my sets, but I love, I really loved doing that.

Do you think you designed them architecturally because that was your background, or was that naturally how you saw them? Or was it that you had some other thing that you'd liked to have done but didn't know how to do it?

Well, in the two classical ones, I did try various Italian, I suppose you could call them, roughly speaking, you could have huge fragments. The great thing about Italy is the scale, and the people look tiny beside columns, and so somehow, you've got to get into a small stage, which is possibly only 15 foot opening height, the feeling that the columns are going on absolutely forever. And so I think the, the, the, what you might call the attitude I took to both those classical ones, was, was quite a defensible one, even if it wasn't one which I felt happiest in as an architect. The Haydn was different because that was, that was really landscape architecture, with some eccentricities with the monster coming out of the lake at the end. So that was the, really, the end of my Glyndebourne experiences, and every one of them was enormously enjoyed, because the, the experience of working down there was tremendous. I need hardly say that I'm not a dress designer, or a tailor, or costume expert, which does require people who know about it, and so, in each case of those operas, I did Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 289 work with a costume designer. And that was very instructive, and gave me some of the strength to my next major one, which was Covent Garden this time, which was Willie Walton's, "Troilus and Cressida". And again, there we are with a temple on top of an acropolis, and, and priests and huge 18 foot high doors opening, and processions of soldiers coming up from below, and, and very measured rhythm. And I was rather frightened of Sir William , because he had a reputation of being rather difficult, but I found him extremely helpful. It was very distinguished. We had, Malcolm Sargent was the conductor, and Willie Walton was the composer, and George Devine, who had just made a tremendous reputation at the Royal Court Theatre, was the producer. And his assistant was Jocelyn Herbert, who later went on to make a tremendous reputation as a stage designer. But again, the language I worked in was steps, because architects love steps. Flights of steps are always wonderful, if they're kept shallow enough. And people look wonderful going up them, or coming down them. And great columns. And we had another set, which was the penthouse, on a block of flats in the middle of Rome, so to speak, with Venetian blinds, and, and Cressida getting out of bed, with Nero and walking to the Venetian shutters, and flinging them open, looking over the prospect of Rome, which is rather romantic. And that was a terrific experience. It wasn't, unfortunately, a terrific box office success, I think. I don't know whether Walton's music was regarded as difficult in those days. But the music is, I thought, extremely interesting, and the cast were good, and George's production, I thought, was masterly. And we had the last, the last scene was the scene of the ... invading camp outside Rome, and it was rather like a, designed rather like a concentration camp, with one of those look-out towers, with a soldier up at the top, silhouetted against the sky.

And what was he like to work with, George Devine?

Very decisive, which was lovely. I mean, he would say, "now, at this point, I want four soldiers to be walking abreast down this ... a change of level. I can't trust them to come down steps if, if they're always having to look at their feet. So we'll have to have a ramp, and it mustn't be higher than such and such, and it mustn't be lower than such and such, and it mustn't stick out more than such and such." And so he was very, which I think all architects and designers like, a decisive client. It didn't mean you couldn't argue and say, "wouldn't it be prettier, or nicer, or more grand, if you did it this way"? Which, you know, he would accept if it didn't make things difficult for the singers.

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And what was the balance of power between him and Sargent and Walton?

As far as I was concerned, George was my client really, and he, he, he was the man, I think, who took all the decisions with which I was concerned. What went on between him and Sargent and Walton, I didn't really attend the musical arguments, because I wouldn't have been able to understand them.

Did you form an impression of what the three men were actually like, as individuals?

Well, George, I hadn't known before, and I took an immediate liking to him, because he had a sort of flaming integrity which, which was very nice to, to be in touch with. Malcolm Sargent, everybody knew, Malcolm Sargent was, was a slight boulevardier, you know, with a buttonhole, and, and flashing of fingers, and full of zip, and encouraging always. And Willie Walton was wonderful. He was very slow, caustic. He had a wonderfully caustic tongue, which he used amiably, but I was, I was ... got very fond of him. Still slightly nervous of him. And I was a sort of tot, you see, and working with these very famous grandees, was really quite alarming. Well, then I did ...

Hold on, what was Jocelyn Herbert like at that stage?

Well, Jocelyn was really, being the producer's assistant, she would have to bring in, go and fetch coffee for him, and sharpen his pencil, and find out why somebody was late for rehearsal. I mean, she hardly ever sat down for a minute, she had a notebook she was scribbling in all the time. But she is wonderfully warm-hearted, and sweet-tempered. And again, a very very decisive girl on her own. She later became, when she was in charge herself, she was very very decisive, and a wonderful person to work with. And the whole, working with George and Jocelyn, was really very cosy. We got to know each other all very very well. But then I did two extraordinary musicals. One was at The Royal Court, which was called "The Golden Boat", and it was, it was a sort of Aldeburgh story. The famous foreign violinist comes to Aldeburgh to play in the Festival, and he can only find, the only accompanist is the doctor's wife who comes and plays the piano for him in the local British Legion Hall, and they fall in love, and, and the husband gets jealous, and there's a slight melodrama in middle, where a boat is burned. and, and in the harbour with masts, it's always Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 291 nice. And then he goes back to London, and she goes back to her doctor. Slightly sort of Celia Johnson/Noel Cowardish sort of ...

Doesn't sound like a Royal Court play!

It doesn't, does it! But the, the music was written by a young man called David something, who, in fact, I'd met before, as a, as a, the manager of a hotel in North Wales, attached to Portmeirion, and there was nobody very famous in the cast. I think Michael Gough was one of them, and it, it had quite a success, but was never revived.

And presumably it was totally different designing that from designing at Covent Garden or Glyndebourne?

But not for an architect. I mean, the sets were really, the inside of a British Legion Hall, well, every architect knows what that looks like! Flags hanging from ghastly roof trusses and notices pinned up everywhere. Then there was a Green Room scene, where they poured their hearts out to each other, which was really the sort of, where the Committee of the British Legion would have met, you know. And then there was a nice little harbour scene, with a sea wall, and boats coming up behind, where the boats went on fire, and so it was, it was not too difficult. Great fun, actually.

And did you work very quickly when you were plotting designs?

Yes, I did really. And there wasn't much rehearsal time.

And how does having an opening night compare to having your building being put into use for the first time?

Well, the difference is, when your building's open, nobody ever looks at it. I mean, nobody takes any notice of a new building, unless you're one of those huge glamour stars, you know, where the whole buildings a bit of "look, no hands", and everybody goes and gapes. But ordinarily, when a building opens, there's very little ceremony, the Chairman, says, "very nice", you know. "Pity we didn't have some carpet here", you know, sort of thing. But the first night of a theatre is always very tense. Everybody's tensed up and they've come there to Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 292 look at it, as well as to listen to it. I know designers only think this and actors don't think the sets matter at all, probably. And then I did one more musical which was at the Piccadilly Theatre, which was called "The Golden Touch", and that was quite an interesting story too. It was a Makarios, a corrupt Greek archbishop, living on an island, who was selling out the island and the monastery to some huge developer for a, a sort of Sheraton, Sheraton Monastery Hotel, and he had a, the tycoon had a, a teenage rebellious daughter, who was determined to, to beat the archbishop into mud for being such a traitor to his religion, and his island, and everything. So that was a sort of melodrama, and that was, technically, one of the hardest because it opened on a steam yacht, which had to be transformed without lowering the curtain, by flaps and drops, and things, into the archbishop's chapel, and it was all done in Byzantine, the Greek stuff. It wasn't classical.

Did you draw on your thesis?

Yes, I did, actually. And, but it was, they had a French leading girl, who was not very good, and it, it ran a very short time.

When you were doing these, did you feel a part of the company, and carry on feeling you were involved after the opening night?

I didn't, I didn't actually meet the cast terribly much in any of them, really. In the operas I did, because they were around more, but in these ... so many of the rehearsals were being held in British Legion drill halls somewhere in London, which you didn't attend.

But I remember Jocelyn saying that she always thinks the designer is thought of as part of the company until it opens, and then you're sort of forgotten about. You didn't feel that, because you weren't so involved, presumably.

Well, I always felt, I must say, and partly because I was, I suppose, a recruit to the whole business, I always felt very very junior. I mean, if somebody had asked me to go and hammer up some curtains at the back, I wouldn't have hesitated to do it. I think now they get much more professional recognition, probably they get rather grand. But those are the major ones. And my final one was round about the same time, I suppose, the late fifties, early sixties, which was a, a musical by John Osborne. And on the, and the story was really the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-A Page 293 story of the, the pestilential gossip columnist who rustles through your dustbins to find out things about you, and he was called Paul Slickey, and the first set was the inside of a huge Victorian, at least, it needn't have been, but I made it, Victorian, enormous mansion with a huge staircase running up the back, which, mostly painted, but half way up you turned right, so to speak, on to some real steps. And it was rather saucy because the, there was a sex change in it, and there was a rakish priest who, who danced, swinging his, what do they call it? The census, rather like a stripper. And there was a procession with a coffin with a body in it, jazzed up to jazz music. And we opened in Bournemouth. And that was interesting, because all the old birds at the matinee, I remember, all sat there with their handbags on their knees, didn't bat an eyelid. Just asked for another cup of tea in the interval! And when, when we got to London ... we went to Brighton then, and it was, it had a mixed reception there. John was just beginning to be celebrated as a, as a, how can I put it? A rebel, really.

But it was after "Look Back in Anger", wasn't it?

Yes, oh yes. And he was quite, he was a famous man then, but, but I don't think he was tremendously popular, because it was those days, it was still the Gallery Club, you know, who used to, you know, first nights, would assemble up in the gallery, and be really beastly if they wanted to be. We had, anyway, we fetched up at The Palace, ...

End of F1161 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 294

F1161 Side B

I did it all in, it was all about newspapers, and so all the sets were in black and white, and it was all done by drawing, white background and black drawing on the, and the costumes made by a girl called Jocelyn Rickards, an Australian designer. And anyway, we got to, to the Palace Theatre, and the first night was a total nightmare, because the audience got restless around, in the first interval, and at the end was a sort of ...

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

... when the curtain came down at the end, the, the noise in the theatre was ear-splitting, it was like some frightful street demonstration in Baghdad. I mean, catcalls and screeches and "get off's", and I mean, for the poor cast, taking their curtains, it must have been a nightmare. John, in fact, didn't take a call, and he was, naturally, very upset, and he and Jocelyn skittled out of the stage door, and vanished to Italy.

That was when they ran off together?

To lick their wounds, yes.

You were with him when he ran off another time, too, weren't you?

Another time, yes, different girl.

Did you know he was going to run off at either time?

No, no. I mean, he was very ... he was extremely, again, he was extremely professional and nice to deal with, as indeed was Jocelyn. So, from my point of view, it was a great pleasure to work on, and I thought there were great merits in the musical, but I mean, it came off in about four days as far as I remember.

But how clearly did John Osborne know what he wanted it to look like? How much had he thought about it?

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I don't quite know. I mean, I just put up the idea that as it was all about newspapers, and newsprint, black and white seemed to be a, I don't know, an attitude to the, to the background. And it was, and as I naturally draw, rather than paint, I was happier drawing, scribbling on white flats.

So there was no real indication in his script about what direction you might have taken?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I think he, he waited for what I thought, and then, I'm sure he'd have knocked it down if he hadn't liked it.

And did Walton have any idea how he wanted his opera to look?

Not, I don't think it was a powerful directive of any kind. I think he was more worried about the music and the cast, really, than my sort of back-up stuff. I don't think the designers, in those days, were very significant people, because they were all, except a very few famous ones, like Cecil Beaton, where the sets were, in fact, the whole scene, you know, nothing much happened, you just looked at the set and clapped, and you went on. So that, that was really the, the end of my theatre work. And the only sort of fringe theatre work I did when, I did all the subtitles for a film, which was really doing very loose watercolours, which were magnified up on to the screen, which made it, made you feel like Michelangelo. I mean, you do a sketch three inches square, and there it is 30 feet high! And you really feel, "gosh, I'm really a master painter"!

What sort of thing was it?

It was an Agatha Christie, about murders and things going on in Majorca. I mean, we accepted it as being Majorca, and as I knew Majorca very well, unfortunately, there was no need for me to be taken there to do drawings, because I'd been there every year for years, as holidays.

What, as a child?

No, as, as, since the war. We stayed, I built a house for some friends in Majorca, and we went out every year for ages, and stayed there. I love the island, actually. And, of course, in Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 296 those days, it was much less crowded. And even the North, now, is still very empty. So that was my last touch of the theatre/film world.

Why did you get asked to do the film, do you know?

Well, it was made by the firm that made, the producing firm that made the famous Freddie Ashton film of Beatrix Potter, the ballet, and they were a very visually minded firm, and they made "Little Dorrit", and they made, they used to make money out of the Agatha Christies, they did a lot of Agatha Christies, in which the money went back into doing things like "Little Dorrit", or ballet films or this, the one I was on was, of course, an Agatha Christie. But they were very very interested in, in the visual side.

And did you have to work differently for that?

Yes. It was straight. I mean, you just did what you hoped looked beautiful drawings. Each credit producer, director of production, or whatever, had a picture. I mean, it might have been a director's chair sitting on an empty beach, in a storm, or something. They were symbolic watercolours, pretty rather than moving, because the whole story was a ridiculous story. But that, that did quite well as a film. But, you see, these were all, in a way, sidelines, because all, at the same time, I was, I was busy being an architect.

Do you think you've suffered because you were able to do so many different things, that the English don't really like that a lot of the time, do they, they like you to stick to one thing and be distinguished.

No.

Slap your wrists for moving out of ...

That's right. Well, I think you're regarded, really, as an amateur if you, if you're versatile. Versatile is almost an adjective of dispraise, isn't it? You can't be good at everything, obviously, and it means you haven't concentrated on one thing. But I had the fortune, I think, of what I always call myself as an "Etcetera", in that I was happy doing architecture, and I was happy doing the theatre, and I was happy doing watercolours, and consultancies. I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 297 enjoyed everything I did, and, in fact, the one which is the most, had the most boring intervals in it was architecture, because a building takes about five years from the moment a man comes in and says, "I want a new office block", till the moment he goes upstairs to sit at his desk, is usually about five years. By that time, you've been through a very very long tiresome period of dealing with, with organisation, and money, and changes, and difficulties of supply, and all the technical side, which I found very difficult to be really interested in. The site meetings, and arguing with sub-contractors about why was the delivery of roof timbers three weeks late, and ... but you didn't get much of that. Everything else I did was much quicker.

But, I mean, did you get fed up with people who were cross with you because you could do more than one thing? Or did you just accept it, or ...

No, I accept it as a weakness, I must admit.

So you thought their criticism was right?

Well, I think I felt guilty about, I don't know quite what the phrase is, being, being ... if you're doing a lot of things simultaneously, even on one day, you're obviously not thinking very deeply about any of them, because you put down the file dealing with a horrible delivery problem on a site in Birmingham, say, in the morning. And in the afternoon you go off to a rehearsal of “Troilus and Cressida”. And then in the evening you, you write a couple of articles for an architects' journal. None of that can really be terribly serious. You hope it's serious, but it's unlikely that it could be, because your mind's jumping all the time.

But they might feed one another.

Well, I think that's possibly true.

And am I right in thinking that you designed some china as well?

Well, I did, yes, I did some, I did some crockery for a very nice Staffordshire firm. The trouble with that was, that all he asked for was little drawings, and he wanted it to be of, vaguely of Mediterranean scenes, you know, cafes, and boats tied up, and old fishermen Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 298 mending nets, I mean, the really corny stuff. But the difficulty was that you had no control over the size of the image, which he would place on a teapot, say, and then on to a toast rack, and so, and then, of course, they were all hand-coloured in the factory, they weren't your colours. He took your colours, and the girls in the factories slapped it on, and, but the interesting thing was, they were enormously successful. And I was deeply ashamed of them. The children used to tease me about it, and they used to go down to the Portobello Road and they saw these, they'd buy them, and bring them home. And, of course, eventually, they got frightfully expensive and I believe they're still pretty expensive.

Are they still being sold?

You can see them in the Portobello Road, yes.

What are they called?

They are, they are really dreadful. It's a horrid thing to say because Mr Midwinter, the client, was such a support and a nice man. And he loved them, but they were, I think, I mean, some of them were in the V & A as a sort of example of the terrible fifties! I'm sure they're not on display, but they were bought and cut into the, into the storage. There was, I think they were really not, not a success. But mostly I was doing, we were working then on quite big university jobs in Cambridge and Birmingham, and Belfast. And, and I was also doing consultancies, which is another thing I got a slight reputation for doing, I suppose, because I didn't get cross easily and what these cities like Bath and ...

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

As I was teaching environmental design or interior design at the Royal College of Art, I did get quite a number of commissions for interior treatment of existing buildings and hotels, and that sort of thing, because interior design, serious architecture is regarded as a form of pastry- cook work. I mean, it's fiddling around with things which you're going to tear out in five years again. And that, in a way, had the same sort of attraction to me that theatre design had, that, at the end of the thing, it was torn down and you never saw it again, and then it vanished. And with interior design, I mean, if you're doing the inside of a railway train, or a ship, you know the life of that thing is going to be 15 years at the most, and then it's gone. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 299

And the ships I was involved in, which was the Royal Yacht Britannia and the P&O liner, Canberra, when you went to see her sail off to Australia, there went your work, and you'd probably never see it again, and it was a relief, in a way, to see it, all your mistakes gone. And buildings continue to ooze your own blood until you drop, or they fall down. And so I liked the, I liked the, slightly flippant, I suppose, the temporary side of interior design. And I was lucky enough to do a British Rail, two British Rail carriages, a buffet car and a first-lass coach, the insides only. And then, this wonderful opportunity to do this flagship with the P&O Line, and it was particularly interesting, because the P&O are noted as a, or were noted, in those days, as a very conservative Scottish management, and I remember when I went to see the, the Chairman of P&O about this, he said, "I have no advice for you, except to remind you that on P&O ships, drinks are brought to you at the table. You do not sit at the bar. People who sit at the bar become nuisances. That's all." And I thought that was a very surprising key theme, but it went right through the Scottish management, it went right through the Line. And their ships have been very pretty, they're designed by a man called Temple, and they were painted white, and had one single yellow funnel, and they went out to India and Australia and China, and they'd recruited into the drawing office, the design side of the firm, a young man of about 25 from Belfast, or from Northern Ireland, anyway. And he said, "you're dotty". He said, "all your ships give the best space in them to the engines. You have a funnel and an engine room, which takes up the whole of the middle of the ship, and the passengers squashed into the front and the back. Why don't you put the engines at the back, and give all the middle space for your swimming-pools and dining-rooms and first- class lounges?" And he was very sparky, and he persuaded them that this was, in fact, the right thing to do. As you know, big tankers always have the engines at the back, and the tanks are unobstructed space, till you get to the front end. Now, the problem, of course is, if you put the engines at the back, they're very heavy, so she's inclined to sink at the back, and the bow to rise in the front. So you then have to counter that by putting something like storage of water in the front, which brought the bow down again. So this balance, he was, he was concerned very closely with these technical issues. But we did, in fact, do this. All the passenger accommodation was in the centre of the ship. The engines and the smoke and the smuts are all at the back, and the crew were squashed up with the water in the front end. And she was built at Belfast, and I was amazed at the very few ...

[BREAK IN RECORDING HERE WHILE SERVICE VEHICLE GOES BY]

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She was built at Belfast, and I think, fairly up to time and cost, as far as I remember, and I did this, I was the co-ordinating designer of the ship, but I couldn't have done it all, because we were a small firm. So what I did was really what we did on the South Bank Exhibition, and at the Time Life Building, we gathered together a core of designers and architects and painters and sculptors and, with whom we'd worked, and enjoyed the experience of working with, and everybody had a section. I mean, you'd give, Humphrey Spender, the painter, and he was an architect too, was given, as far as I remember, the card room, which had to be transformed into a chapel at certain stages of the voyage, which he was very ingenious about. And Julian Trevelyan did some wonderful stainless steel inlay, all the things on the main stairs.

What was he like?

Julian? Oh, fine artist. Very amusing man. Dark green face, looked as if he'd been assembled rather than born. Loose-jointed, and anyway, he was excellent. But it was great fun. And then we had to ... I didn't do any of the cabins, they, P&O always had the same girl to do the cabins, the sweat of choosing 500 or 600 cabin interiors, she had that particular worry! But together, we bought all the pictures. We bought a lot of pictures for the ship.

What sort of pictures?

Well, we, we went around, of course, buying quite a lot of historical pictures of early ships going to Hong Kong harbour in 1877, or something, and, of course, bought quite a lot of new ones. And our most adventurous coup, I think, was the, they had a thing called the "Teenagers Room", because if they went on the Australian trip, it was before cruising really, she just went to and fro, and there were always a lot of students and teenagers, and this was fitted (up with the usual sort of pin-tables and music machines. But we lined it with, with varnished wooden boarding, and this was by Colin John Wright, who did this room, and we asked David Hockney, who was still a student at the College, to draw all over the walls with a red hot poker, do you remember there used to be mottos, "Home Sweet Home", which were written in hot poker, into wood, and made a sort of black lettering. And he drew, and being David, of course, he wrote a lot on his drawings in those days, and he drew from top to bottom, side to side, all the way round the room, and it looked simply wonderful. It was the largest Hockney in the world. And everybody was frightfully pleased. But, after about three Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 301 voyages, David, in a way, rather asked for it, hoped that people would add to it - forgetting they don't draw like David. And so a lot of the graffiti which were added by the teenagers as she went to and fro to Sydney, were not attractive. They were done with felt pens, and they weren't very funny, and, and eventually the, the P&O decided that we'd have to board it in. So it was boarded in, and then it was turned into a photographers' shop and developing place, because ships are always changing the uses of these rooms, because she, by then, she was going into cruising, and the teenagers vanished, teenagers don't go on cruises because they're not rich enough, but people take photographs of themselves. So that happened. Now, the dining room was on two levels. The, the bar was right up at the front end with a great window overlooking the front end of the ship, and she, she was very successful up to the Falklands Campaign, when she was commandeered as a ... she was just about at the end of her life, which is normally about 30 years for a ship, and they took her as a trooper to the Falklands. And when she came back, she became a sort of heroine ship, and they couldn't take her off, because everybody wanted to go on her, and she's still working. She must be, I should think, 40 years old now, jolly nearly.

Did you ever go on her?

We went on a little trial voyage, which was from Southampton up to Scotland, and you did steaming trials and turning circles off the North Irish coast, with a sort of guest, guest list. And it's the second time I'd done this. I'd done it as a journalist before, on a ... on an Orient ship, and it was great fun. Great fun. Nobody ever went to bed. And, of course, it was more than fun for the owners, because they were listening for grinding noises of the wrong kind, and ... and "why is she vibrating in this particular room, and not in that?" So they were having a horrible time. And we, we couldn't do much about our pictures falling off the walls, so we just had fun. So that was lovely, that was really lovely, and I was so glad she's still alive, because I'd love to do another ship. Those were the sort of interior works, but normally one was just banging on with bricks and mortar.

Can we just talk about your parents again for a bit. I mean, we've talked about your relationship with them up until the point, really, of going to Cambridge, and you used to go home for the holidays, as a student, when Moggie went to South Africa. But how did your relationship with them change? Did you, were you always very close to them, or did it become more remote, or what happened? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1161-B Page 302

Well, as you remember, I saw very little of my parents until I was about 12, we hardly met really, as was the custom in the old days of the Empire. And it wasn't till, I suppose, about 1925, that they really settled down in a house which one could call home. And there was my sister and I, and my father and my mother. And I think we were, we were a very amiable and good-tempered family, really. My father and mother were both very keen on camping which they'd done all their lives in Burma, and ... so we used to be taken off to Wales, living in tents.

But after you got married, for instance, what was your relationship?

Well, before that, when I was, when you first become independent, when you go to university, isn't it, really, and nowadays, independence starts when you're about 16. In those days it didn't start until you were about 18, and we were all very unsophisticated, and I think I can say that virtually everybody I knew at university, went home for holidays, and the idea of taking a cattle ship to Valparaiso, or becoming a barman in Santiago, was inconceivable. I mean, you didn't do that sort of thing, You went home. And you wore the same clothes as your father, in a smaller issue. And we were very young, and, and very very unsophisticated. I mean, all the people I knew were, anyway. I'm sure there was a very grand, sophisticated bright young things, people which I never met. But if you were living in Southampton as we were, which is a town I've always loved, because it's full of ships. We did a lot of sailing, and endless picnics, and ... and as to girlfriends, you see, which normally cause friction. We didn't really have girlfriends.

You mentioned taking Moggie home to them, I mean, were they welcoming to her?

Yes, they were, because she was very quiet and shy, and, which they rather welcomed.

But when you actually got married, I mean, presumably they were pleased, were they?

Very.

And how often did you see them then?

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Not very much, because we were married just before the, when war broke out, in 1938, Munich time, and within a year war had broken out, and then we were posted away in various places, and so then travel was very difficult, nobody moved about much. And they stayed in Southampton, and we stayed wherever we were. It wasn't until after the war, we sort of picked up the reins. By then we'd, we'd started renting a little cottage down in the New Forest on the, on the Solent, and so every time we went down for our summer holidays with the children, three of whom, two of whom had arrived by then, we called in, because it was on the way, and they would come over and see us. We were only about 20 miles away, and we'd come back. So we saw a bit of them in the summer hols, but not much. They didn't come to London much. Neither my father nor my mother liked London very much.

And were they involved with the Festival? Did they come and see that?

They did, yes. They, but they had to be put in irons and dragged to London really.

And were they very proud of you by then?

I suspect they were. They thought that I'd done very well. But they were that generation which didn't make a fuss about things, you know, "don't make a fuss about that", sort of thing.

So you weren't terribly close to them, really, in later life. in a way but you were fond of each other?

No, we were fond of each other, but we didn't see each other very much really.

And didn't one or other of them come to live with you in the end?

Well, when my mother died, my father said he'd like to stay in Southampton, because that's where all his friends were. So he took a flat near Portsmouth, on the sea. But it was, it ... he was obviously lonely there, I mean, by himself, and cooking for himself, and, and he was a very self-contained man, because, you see, he was a very high quality mathematician, so he could spend all day calculating.

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End of F1161 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 305

F1878 Side A

Right, you were talking about your father ... being self-contained.

We felt he was lonely down there, because, in fact, most of his friends, he'd been teaching navigation at the local Navigation School, for about three years, which he enjoyed, and did a lot of sailing with the cadets. But, on the whole, he was lonely, so we'd, by then, had got into a rather big house in South Ken, which had a flat in it, a bedsitter and bathroom and pantry, so to speak. And we asked him would he like to come? And he, he said he would. He was reconciled to London. And, in fact, when he got there, he rather enjoyed it, because we were very near South Ken, so ... he was a very keen walker, so he tramped round the Round Pond every day, and he lived with us until he was ... till he died, when he was about 93. Quite healthy, and walked about, and he ate with us in the evenings, and he had his own breakfast, and I don't ... he had a few friends, but most of them, by then, if you're that sort of age, most of your friends have, in fact, died off.

And did it alter the balance of family life, having him around?

Not at all. The house was big enough so that if he wanted to be by himself, with his calculations, he could be by himself, and not even meet you on the stairs, and if he wanted to be ...

And how did he get on with your children?

Oh, very well.

Did he know them quite well? Were they young at this stage?

They were about, I suppose sort of, elevenish, and they always quite liked running round the Round Pond, and they hadn't ... they were just ... Carola, the eldest, was just beginning to discover boys, and, and the excitement of going off by themselves. But he was a very good lodger, and absolutely no trouble. And we had a housekeeper who, who coped with the house, because my wife was working full-time, and I was working full-time, and she looked Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 306 after him when we weren't there. So it worked very well, and I think, I really do think that he was quite happy.

And can we actually talk about that house? Can you describe it? Because that was the main family house, wasn't it.

Yes. Yes. Well, this house ... we weren't actually house-hunting at the time. We were living in a small terraced house up in, at the top of Campden Hill, in which we squeezed in, because our housekeeper had two children. She was a war widow, we asked her to come and live with us, and help us in the house, and have her children with her, and everything. But we were a bit of a squash with three children. And Moggie was always keeping an eye open, we saw this extraordinary house in Victoria Road, which was a house, mostly stucco, sort of late Regency/early Victorian character slate roofs, and sash windows, and there was this extremely extraordinary huge brick, 1890ish brick house. Huge rooms, beautifully planned. Stairs that went up round and round and round, and the room at the back faced down another street, so you could see right down. And we decided that it was absolutely irresistible. Far too big for us, but we thought we could have hundreds of lodgers. And we found it belonged to a rather eccentric old lady, who'd gone bankrupt, and all the stair carpets, and fittings belonged to the Water Board, or the Electricity Board, or the ... the poor old girl, she'd been forced to leave. So after the service companies had stripped the house, we moved in. It was white panelled with ... it was very much of the period, with shallow cornices in which you used to put blue and white plates all round the ceiling, you know the sort of thing. And fireplaces in every room. And huge rooms. And in the basement we had the dining room, which doubled as my office, and the kitchen, and then our housekeeper had the front, ground floor room, and we had the back ground floor room, and then we had one, two, three, six bedrooms, above that. Three children, and our bedroom. And it was a ravishing house. And it was designed by a man called Ferrers, who eventually became an earl, suddenly he inherited this, and never built another building as far as I know. And it was a, it was really an arts and crafts building. It's now been turned into an Embassy, by the Vietnamese. And we sold it to them on the, they had to sign, saying they wouldn't touch anything, because it's a listed building, so they can't ... being very correct people, all they did was put in a huge radio mast and iron shutters, and as far as I ... I never see a sign of life there. I mean, the windows are painted, and it looks in good trim. So that became our house. And, but the children, it was next door to a very posh little ladies' school for children, and our children began to get Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 307 restless at the sound of these Sloane Ranger voices in the mornings at 9 o'clock, you know, all coming up in their station wagons, and saying, "well, good bye Amanda, shall I see you at the Walters' tomorrow"? You know the sort of thing, braying over the top of the roof of cars. And the children eventually said, "we can't bear this, we're moving north of the park". And they pushed off to Notting Hill Gate.

What, all together?

Well, more or less. Not quite simultaneously, but one went first, and then the other one, and then ...

Were you very upset when they left home?

Well, it was sad to lose them, but, of course, by then, they were beginning to get, wanting to be on their own, in flats. I mean, one of them had a flat in a mews at the back of Cromwell Road, for a bit, and she shared with a friend. But eventually they all fiddled off, and they all live, now, very close to each other. Not by design really, so much as the way it happened.

Did you feel jealous when they started to have boyfriends and to get married and things like that?

I don't ... well they hadn't, on the whole they were ... two of them went off, straight off to America, pretty well, before doing anything, for two years. Carola was a typographer, she'd done the London School of Printing training, and she went to work for Columbia University Press, and did extremely well, designing text books and dictionaries. And Nicky said she didn't want to train again, she wanted to train as a secretary and get a job. And she got a job working for a photographer. And they both shared a flat in New York.

Who's "they both"?

That's Carola and Nicola, the two eldest ones. And they both met Englishmen, in New York, whom they married. And then they came home, having sought their fortune, and set up here.

Do you think, given that you're very close to them, it's quite hard to be a Casson son-in-law? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 308

I don't think it's that bad if you're not competing in the same world. Adam was Carola's husband, and he had been running a little sort of studio/cinema, downtown in New York somewhere near Washington Square, I think it was.

And Ian was a, in fact, a photographer, a professional photographer.

That's Nicky's husband is it?

That's Nicky's husband. So he came back and got a job at, teaching photography at the Central School of Art. Adam had found that he was jobless for a time, and had a, quite a difficult time, and then decided to be a sort of freelance small time builder, doing alterations and things, building people's kitchens and things, which he still does. And, but sadly, that particular marriage foundered.

Was it a shock to you if your children's marriages collapsed, given that you hadn't had any real experience of that directly, either your parents or your aunts, or yourself?

Well, I think we'd had enough experience with the girls friends, because so many of their friends had begun to lever off their first husbands, and it had become more, more commonplace. We were very sad, because there was considerable distress. Carola had had one son with Adam, and Nicky and Ian were going through the process of adopting children, because they couldn't have them, but they stayed together, and are still happily married. And then Dinah came along later, and she married a young playwright, called Nick Wood, who was roughly, at that time, doing a producers course at the BBC, and writing what I would call "pub plays", and occasional broadcast plays, doing reasonably well, but it's a pretty hair- raising life. And so Dinah went to Hornsey Art School and then Bromley, and she did the furniture course, and became a furniture designer. So they were all, and Nicky was working here, in London, as a secretary, to another photographer, in Notting Hill Gate. So they were all busy girls, and they all lived near each other, and they all got on well, which they hadn't always when they were babies, so to speak.

Because they were competitive?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 309

Yes. But it's an extremely close family, I'm glad to say.

And was there a time, say, in their adolescence, when you were less close to them, or were you close to them the whole time really?

I don't know whether all parents feel this, but I think we always felt that we were very fortunate in that their only restlessness was in the normal teenage, they'd rather not have a holiday with us sometimes. And now, of course, they've come back to it, they do like having a holiday with us.

And when they were babies, did you actually do things like change nappies and give them bottles, or whatever?

Oh yes. But that was always a pleasure. And they all liked being sung to.

Apart from the housekeeper, did you have other help in the house, and other staff?

In the big house, the Ferrers house, we had a housekeeper, and we had a daily help who came in twice a week or whatever it was. She was crazy about polishing brass door handles, so that's what she'd spend most of her time doing. Very nice woman. And then when we moved, ourselves, when the girls said, "come on up, it's fine when you're in". So we moved up to Notting Hill Gate, and got another big terraced house, but that was, the girls had gone by then, so we had lodgers there.

You didn't have lodgers in the other house?

Yes we did. We had quite a lot of long-staying lodgers, mostly teachers from art schools, or students.

And you didn't mind having other people in the house?

No, nice. It was nice. We like having the house full of people. And we had one lodger who had a daughter there, who became our lodger in due course, as they say!

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 310

And the house in Notting Hill Gate was different?

It was a stucco house, about 1850. It was the house, in fact, which Nehru lived in when he was a student, law student, here in London. And it was very very tall, again, Victorian, mid-Victorian, huge cornices, huge fireplaces, and it had a garden at the back, which opened into a communal garden, as it all does round the Ladbroke Grove area. So you could let the children or the cat out of the back gate, into a safe enclosure, from which there was no exit. And that was a great advantage.

And where did your children go to school?

They went to baby school in, on the top of Campden Hill, in Sheffield Terrace, and then they went to another, slightly less baby school, off the Gloucester Road, Miss Puttick's. And then we made the great decision to send them to boarding school.

Why?

It's difficult to remember why. I think we thought, our housekeeper was a very powerful character, and saw a great deal of them, and I think they slightly fretted under her discipline, which was more fierce than ours, in a way like nannies are, you know - elbows off the table and that sort of thing - which you're tired of hearing when you're 15. And we thought they ought to get away, so ... in sequence …

You didn't think of getting rid of the housekeeper?

Well, that was difficult, because she had nowhere to go, it would mean a Widows Pension and she had her boys that she wanted to stay with her as long as they were non-earning, and they vanished into the world eventually. And she'd become a sort of family friend as well as a retainer. So I don't know whether we thought it was a good idea, but I think we were rather persuaded by a girl we knew very well indeed, who taught at the school.

Which school is this?

This is a school in Dorset. And she ... Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 311

Called?

She was called Cynthia Pettiwood.

No, the school.

And the school was called Cranbourne Chase, which was a lovely old ... splendid great stately mansion and park, with a lake. And the owners, the Martins, had decided they couldn't run it during the war, they'd vanished into the local vicarage or somewhere, and the school was temporarily converted, not ... really only by putting beds in it, as far as I remember, they'd left all the grand ceilings and chandeliers, and the glass panelling and everything. And I think all schools are pretty awful at times, but I think they made a lot of friends who they still have, and I don't think it was as awful as some of our schools were earlier. Although John Betjeman always says "all schools are awful, never believe them".

Did they actually want to leave their schools?

I think they were quite ready to leave.

But if they had been really unhappy, you would presumably have taken them out?

Oh yes. But the, ...

And, I mean, their schooling was relatively straightforward? There weren't any terrible problems?

Pretty straightforward. And the music, they were particularly good for music there, and English. Not very good at art, because the art master was idle.

Were they terribly interested, always, in what you were doing, yourselves, you and Moggie, or not? Were they very involved.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 312

Not besottedly, I don't think. It's awfully difficult to tell. I must ... we ought to question them about it now, they can remember it back. But half way through, the two elder girls had just left school, moved to about 15 miles to a Wardour Castle, which is a huge great extraordinary mansion with battlements and towers, and great stately staircases. And the headmistress left. The first school was twinned with Bryanston School, so they saw a lot of boys, which was nice for them, because things like amateur dramatics, and singing, and athletics, and all those things, and labs were shared, they were only 15 miles apart, you see, so they could. And that was very helpful, in fact, two of them married Bryanston boys in the end. But the, Wardour Castle was a bit further away, and the boys dropped off, so to speak, in the term time. And the headmistress, whom we greatly admired, she was very good, she left, she retired, and there was a succession of not such very successful ones, and the school closed this year, because of financial difficulties and ...

So Dinah actually became a designer, didn't she?

She became a furniture designer, yes.

Was she very influenced with you? Did she talk to you both a lot about it at the time? Or did she go off and do it independently?

More with my wife than with me, because my wife did more designing of objects than I did, and she designed glass and china, and furniture, and textiles and things. And that was more close to what Dinah was doing, and I think ... my wife was much more of a technician. I don't know whether all women are, I think, tend to be technicians. They're always regarded as silly little feather-heads, who can't mend a puncture, or a water tap washer. But they're much better than men really. They've, they've got dextrous fingers, and they're serious and finish it. And I think Dinah got much better advice from my wife than from, than she did from me.

And did they come to both of you equally about emotional problems, or didn't they talk to either of you, or ...

More to my wife than me, I think.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 313

Did you mind that?

Not at all. I really think not at all. Because we were, we were really very, I think, a warmly connected family. So I don't think there was any ...

And you're very close to your grandchildren, aren't you?

Well, we were to begin with. But then, of course, they began to ... they're now in the stage when they're beginning to have boyfriends, and, and a row on the river, and that sort of thing now, so they're all getting ... and taking driving lessons, so they've passed on to the next stage, you know, when grandparents are people you occasionally see.

They were very good when I was ill recently, they constantly came in and see how you were and things, but they're now living their own lives. But they're so near, I mean, you could walk to all of them in five, ten minutes.

3 May 1991

In the last couple of days, you've been involved in anniversary celebrations, for 40 years of the Festival of Britain. Can you tell me what's been happening?

Well, there were two anniversaries, in fact. One was a personal one, May is the month of my birthday, and May was also the month of the opening of the South Bank Exhibition and the Festival of Britain. And some friends who worked on the Festival, the survivors, so to speak, decided, which is very kind of them, to have a sort of mixed celebration of, of the opening of the Exhibition and my birthday. And they wrote all the way round, to about 300 people whose addresses could be traced, which, of course, was primarily architects, designers, painters and sculptors, but also the administration of the Festival, quite a number of them survived still, but sadly, and it was impossible, of course, to fix this ... none of the people in the engine room, as opposed to below decks, the sort of lorry drivers, and typists, and ... we could never manage to trace them, they were impossible to get hold of. However, 250 people turned up, last night, at the Festival Hall. And the Festival Hall, of course, was the only permanent building built at ... in 1951, on the South Bank Exhibition site, and this was built by the GLC architects. The GLC, of course, has since been disbanded ... and doesn't exist Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 314 any more. But the architects of the building turned up last night, and everybody was ... agreed that it really looked totally splendid. It was polished and shining and clean, and full of people.

By "it", you're meaning the Festival Hall?

The Festival Hall. And so we had our dinner and party there, and we had the sort of principal guest, Prince Philip was the principal guest, because one of the people who supported, and, indeed, thought up the idea of the Festival of Britain, was the Royal Society of Arts of which he is President. And also, all the designers and architects, agreed that he was the man who, at high level, so to speak, had done more for British design than anybody else. He gives a great deal of time to it, and he was one of the founders of the Council for Industrial Design, and the Crafts Council, and he really takes a strong personal interest. And it had an added enjoyment for me, because, not only because I worked with him closely on the interiors of the Royal Yacht Britannia, and I've also done his study at Buckingham Palace, and the one at Windsor Castle as well, and his library, and so I'd had him as a client, and this was years and years ago, about '54 I suppose, and so he was the Principal Guest, and I was called the Guest of Honour, because it was my birthday celebrations. And they had the Chairman of the South Bank Board, who is in charge of what happens to the South Bank, and the rest were people who had had associations, or worked in the Festival, and it was quite moving really, because many of them hadn't met for 30 or 40 years. A lot of them were on sticks, or coming up to you, saying, "weren't you Hugh Casson?" Remarks like that. And the speeches were very short, and we had the Danish custom of a speech between each course, lasting five minutes. And they were, the Principal Speaker there was Sir Denis Foreman, who was in charge of the film side of the Festival, and he's now Chairman of Granada. Simon Jenkins, who is the Editor of The Times now. Max Nicholson, who was the Principal Private Secretary and general helpmeet to Herbert Morrison, who was the Minister in charge of the Festival, and that's, I think and then Prince Philip was the final one, and then I did my little bit at the end, which was largely Memory Lane, and anecdotes. Everybody had masses of anecdotes, of course!

What were yours?

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Well, it was rather difficult, because the night before, I'd had a birthday party given me by the Royal Institute of British Architects, and I'd used most of, most of my jokes, and I couldn't use those again, because so many of the people were the same people who came twice. I don't think they were really of any significance. I don't think they're really worth retelling, except in after dinner speeches.

Was there anything in the other people's speeches, surprising to you?

No. What I was very glad about, was that I'd decided that I was going to use this speech, not so much for Memory Lane, but for making a fuss about the present condition of the South Bank, which looks like a lost property office now. I mean, I don't think there's any civilised city in the world, that has a national theatre, and a national concert hall, stuck in the middle of absolute dirty dereliction. And it's been like that for between 30 and 40 years. And it's a sort of monument to indecision. And the whole background to this, of course, is very political, because the ... at the time of the Festival, the Tories were very much against it. They thought it was a Socialist plot by the Labour Government, who were then in power, and Herbert Morrison, who was the Home Secretary, and who was pushing the Festival very hard, and so they strongly disapproved of it. The press was universally hostile. The hard Left was against it, because they thought it was Hampstead wets teaching the working classes how to have fun. And that is, of course, perfectly true. I mean, we were all Hampstead wets. And also it was, in a way, a Socialist, not so much plot, as, as attempt to get the South Bank, which has always been neglected, and nobody goes there without worrying whether there are thieves and robbers, and dereliction generally. And the secret of restoring these sort of places, is to put in some form of hot water bottle on to the dereliction. Build something which attracts people. It may be a supermarket. It may be a, an ordinary open air market, maybe an open space, or a tiny park, or anything which makes people feel here's something rather nice to go and look at and see. And when you warm the place up, then gradually people come in and say, "this is a rather a nice place to live, or to work", and the thing develops. And Herbert Morrison's idea was to put in this hot water bottle, which would last three or four months, and everybody would go there, and know about it, and get used to crossing the Thames, and not get hysterical about it. And, but unfortunately, the, the Government changed, when the Festival closed, the Government changed back to the Tories. And the Tories, I don't know whether it was deliberate, but they simply did nothing about it at all, they just left it as a building site. We left it, all the buildings, all the exhibition buildings went, of course, but we Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-A Page 316 left, underneath, an enormous network of sewage and electric services, and water and gas, and compressed air and everything, under the ground, so you could have done anything there, if you'd wanted to. And we left a whole mass of trees, which, of course, were left. In England they don't cut down trees so much, and if they'd been cut down, there'd have been a real fuss. But gradually people got used to this sort of, as I say, a mixture between a used car lot and a lost property office. And gradually the cars began to creep in and use it, and I should think two-thirds of the whole site is used for casual car parking, right on the river front. Added to this dereliction, is the County Hall, opposite the Houses of Parliament, which has been derelict and empty for about two years now ...

End of F1878 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 317

F1878 Side B

... and I thought, or have thought for many years, and so did everybody else there, I think, that this is an extraordinary scandal, really, that in the old days of the GLC or the LCC, whatever you like, they were the strategic planners for London, and they dealt with all the Boroughs on that sort of scale. Now, nowadays, this has all been given back to the Boroughs, so poor old Lambeth, who are an ordinary London Borough, with an understaffed and overworked Planning Department, and haven't the quality of staff, in fact, that can really think strategically, and in a visionary way, because they're so absolutely covered with local problems of housing and whatever it may be. And so there's nobody really, at high level, think tanking level, thinking about what's going to happen. And so I thought this was an opportunity to make a fuss about it, as politely as one could. Because I knew that the, the Chairman of what's called the South Bank Board, which is dealing with the future of the Festival Hall and the Hayward Gallery and all those sort of things, was going to be there, and I thought, just to remind him. And I was terribly pleased, because it wasn't arranged in any way, that everybody spoke very sharply about this, and, particularly Simon Jenkins, and I hope as Editor of The Times he'll pursue it a bit. He's got a bit about it in The Times today, but ... because he was, he was very sharp, but I found myself sitting next to the Chairman at dinner, and ... who was a very amiable industrialist, I think he's President of the CBI this year, and a very nice man, and obviously a good administrator, but you see, he's not the sort of person who's going to think up some dramatic and beautiful use for this area. And as far as one can gather, what's happening is what always seems to happen in England, that nothing happens, because the Government is so idle, or overworked, that it doesn't think it matters. We've actually had, I think, four Ministers of the Environment in one year, and they can only sort of put their feet under the desk, and look at the first few files, and then they're changed to the Ministry of Agriculture, or something. And it's particularly irritating, because the present Minister, Michael Heseltine, is a man of an adventurous nature, and he's a bit of a pirate in many ways, and he's the sort of Minister, and Morrison was, that if you could excite him, he'd drive it through. But he's been non-stop on the Poll Tax, or Community Charge, or whatever it is, and he hasn't opened any other files since. So anyway, everybody spoke about this, and I spoke about this, and I had to re-write my speech during dinner, really, that the bit, being rude to the President, the Chairman, because he was sitting next to me. And I thought that would be, you know, a bit offensive, and also, it was supposed to be a celebration, not a long, moaning cry of despair. But it was interesting that the feeling of the whole assembly, all of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 318 whom admittedly, were parti pris in the sense that they, they'd worked together for three years, to make the South Bank Exhibition a place worth going to, and then we all remembered how the thousands and thousands of people, well, eight million, in fact, went there in the three months. It was always packed to the teeth. And there was no vandalism, which was interesting, there. Because people, in a funny way, I don't know whether it was partly because it was on the South Bank, felt it was theirs, and it didn't belong to the Government, because all the Government, and the City, and the notes, all live on the North Bank, that's where power is, that's where the limousines glide, isn't it? And once you get across the river, you're in, in normal life. And I think so many thousands of people, particularly the ones who came down from the provinces, felt it was homely, friendly area, and they weren't alarmed by strong expressions of power. And so there was this feeling that the place belonged to them. And this is why, I think, partly because there was, nobody picked any flowers, nobody broke anything, nobody scribbled on the walls, and whether that was part of the spirit of the times, or whether, in fact people didn't do that in 1950, people didn't scribble over pillar boxes, or walls. I mean, you'd get occasional political slogans about fascism, or the Blackshirts, in the, in the immediate post-war period, but none ... none of the sort of general mess which you see now. And we, of course, designers, being frightfully pleased with ourselves, we thought this was because we'd designed in a way that made people feel that it did belong to them, that it wasn't imposed on them by some bossy lot of architects. But maybe this is all romantic in back thinking, but it certainly was true. There was no vandalism at all. And very little policing, and no drunkenness. It was an extraordinary thing. And possibly, it was due to the, the discipline of five years of war and, and dreadful rationing. Because during the Festival, in fact, the rationing was much worse than it was in the worst time of the war - petrol, clothes, food, building materials in particular - they were all desperately seriously rationed. Everybody looked exhausted and grey and dusty, and the buildings all looked shabby and unpainted, and half broken down. And then it came into this huge sort of glittering toyshop, full of colours, and did give people a lift, I think. And the fact that it was a hot water bottle, intended as a hot water bottle by Herbert Morrison, and failed to become one, because the Tories did nothing about it, and have done nothing about it for the last, how long have they been in power? Ten years, or more? So that's sad. And anyway, we all grumbled away and said, "disgrace", and thumped the tables and said ...

Including Prince Philip?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 319

Well, he would, no, he's really, he was rather careful about entering into this political thing. He made a, he made sort of remarks like he hoped that whatever happened would, would be as good as the Festival was, or something. But he didn't say how disgraceful it hadn't happened, because I don't think they're allowed to, to mess into it that much. Anyway, no, he was, he was rather embarrassingly personal about it, actually, because he sort of reminisced about us working together, on one of the jobs.

What did he say?

Sandringham, and Windsor and ...

What did he say?

Well, how much he'd enjoyed it, and always been a hilarious experience, and everything went all right and ...

But nothing more precise than that?

No. He was rather rushed at the end because he was trying to catch a train to go to the North of England, and he had to hare off at half past ten. And then we had some, we had some films, old Festival films, shown on, on tellies, and we had a choral group singing some special Festival anthem, which I'd forgotten I'd done the record sleeve for, years ago. I mean, a hundred years ago! And, but most of the time was going up to say, going up to people and saying, "Good Heavens! How are you?"

You actually owned the County Hall for a little while, didn't you?

That's very difficult to discover, you see, in this Festival times ... the whole of that area was owned by the GLC, the LCC, from Westminster to Waterloo Bridge, in fact, a little bit longer, I think. It was theirs. Well, then, when the LCC was dismantled by the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, she appointed a thing called the London Residuary Board, to sell up everything the LCC owned, all their schools, their further education colleges, their clinics, swimming baths, anything that the LCC owned in London was flogged off. Very often to Boroughs, if they wanted them, and the money coming from that was then divided Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 320 among the Boroughs, to comfort them for losing a swimming bath or a playing field or something. But what happened to that particular area, I find it very difficult to discover what happened. The LCC, the County Hall was put on the market to the highest bidder, and it was specifically said that it should go to the highest bidder, irrespective of use. So far as the Tory Government was concerned, they didn't ... the building was Listed, so it couldn't be pulled down, but they didn't mind it being filled up with a couple of Sheraton hotels, or anything, it was anything that paid the cash, it didn't matter who you are. And part of the public area, which is now a car park, was also alleged to be in that thing, plot for sale. And that particular public area was for, for the use of the public for leisure, and they use it as a great green lawn. And downstream, you have the Festival Hall which was owned by the Festival, by the LCC, I'm sorry, and the London Residuary Board didn't sell it off to any buyer, because they wanted to keep the Hall in their sort of slightly public connection, and so they formed the South Bank Board, who was to look after the Festival Hall, and the Hayward Gallery, and the two concert halls. And they were built, all built and designed by the LCC, and have now passed into the ownership of the South Bank Board. And the South Bank Board seem to have a, a sort of ruling hand over the car park area, and the neglected bits. And, as I say, they, when they're challenged about what the hell's happening, they say, "well, you'll hear soon enough, and then we'll disclose our plans". And I believe the next date is supposed to be now, it's been postponed many times, but in about July, when they're going to unveil what they think should be there. And then if anybody has any ideas about whether that's nice or not, they'll say it's too late now, we've been working on this for two years.

Didn't you say that you and Baroness Seear tried to buy it?

Yes, we actually decided, Baroness Seear set up a little, she's a Liberal peeress, she set up a little committee, well, this is for County Hall, she said that, "this is such a disgrace, we'll somehow borrow the money", like, I mean, none of the people who buy these places have any money, they all borrow it. The hotel group which tried to buy it, went bankrupt, because they couldn't repay the debt. But she said, "but we'll borrow the money, and then we'll hand it back to the Boroughs to use for such things as ..." well, originally the LCC controlled education, and transport, say, so they could all be in one ... and so Boroughs didn't have totally different attitudes to education. And, "we will also ...."

In other words, they'd be used as, County Hall would be used as offices? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 321

Yes. Well, it is a wonderful office building, you see. They've got panelled rooms on the grand floors, you can stuff Ministers in there, or leaders of that and the other, and the rest of it's very good office space. And they've got a huge auditorium for four or five hundred people, in the middle. I mean, it's ideal for any group of Ministries. I mean, the Government could just come across the bridge, and the dotty thing is, the Government is still building government offices, still building accommodation for MPs, building them! And there's that place, 100 yards away, which they could move in tomorrow. And one wonders what, what the thinking is behind this. They think, I know, that they could make a fortune out of County Hall, by selling it to a hotel chain, and then build rotten offices, which they've been doing down at Southwark for the last 20 years.

Do you think that Mrs Thatcher was the emotional element? I mean, Ken Livingston and the unemployment figures brandished all over it.

Well, one has to say, in fairness, that she was, obviously, daily irritated by banners exposed on the Labour controlled County Hall day after day, "2,000 more unemployed today, Mrs T", you know, in letters 15 feet high. And she couldn't avoid seeing them, because they were on her way between Downing Street and, and ... so I think they taunted her. But she is, as far as one can remember, tremendously opposed to local government, in some way. She doesn't, she doesn't seem to warm to them. And the Tory Party, I think, never has. And one of the ploys that Max Nicholson used at the beginning of the Festival was that the main block against the Festival was Winston Churchill, because he thought he was a Socialist, a ridiculous Socialist ploy, and Max, with great brilliance, secured Churchill's best friend, Lord Ismay, to be Chairman of it, and that shut it up, shut him up, you see. The moment Ismay was there, they both had tremendous loyalty to each other, and Ismay was fantastically loyal to us, the Festival, and Churchill never opened his mouth.

So who would you pick to have that role now?

I wonder!

And what would you ideally do with the South Bank if it was …

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Well, the original planning, and always have been since the County of London Plan, and the plans got out during the war by the Royal Academy and other freelance consultancy bodies, was that it should be a culture-belt, so to speak, there's only one word for it, which might mean it was for public, public culture, education, and leisure. I mean, it could have been just a big park, very nice, or it could have been an assembly of galleries and libraries, or museums. I know there was a plan to have the National Portrait Gallery moved down there, where they'd have room. The drawback to so many cultural buildings is that they don't need any windows, because most of them are blind, like concert halls, theatres, museums, they don't like windows, so if you don't look out, you get a lot of shoeboxes, and the whole site looks like Freeman, Hardy and Willis! So you have to watch this, that you get restaurants and, and circulation things on the river front. But I don't know what, in fact, old South Bank Board, the man, President next to me, wouldn't say anything about it.

You presumably were prevented, for some reason, from buying County Hall?

Prevented from what?

Buying County Hall. It didn't actually happen.

The House of Lords.

Prevented you?

No, what happened there was, that we were, we weren't interested in buying it except for making it available for local government. We put in it that it had to be used for local government. Ridley was Planning Minister at the time, said that was illegal, that you could only say it could be for offices, the offices could be bookmakers, or makers of Bibles, it wasn't up to Government to say who should go into them. So we lost. And then we appealed, and funnily enough, for some reason, we won at the High Court. And then we were overruled at a higher level, and lost on the grounds that Government, you couldn't say ... we didn't want to buy it and just sell it again to ... what's the point? We're not in that business. So that was a disappointment, but it frightened them a bit, I think. And we've also, since then, made some enquiries as to who would be interested in going in to it, institutionally. Not, I mean, I'm terribly against a Sheraton Hotel there, or whatever, you Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 323 know, with a Dick Whittington bar, and you can imagine, you can see the whole thing, can't you, a lot of brass and potted plants, and we scouted around over the last few weeks, only, to see who was interested in it. And we found the London School of Economics would love to go there, they're absolutely bulging. So that would be, as it were, a university. The Church wants it, because the Church is, I think, leaving Church House as no longer right for their uses. The law wants it, because the Temple and Lincoln’s Inn and all those, eight people, barristers to a room, sort of thing, and you know, there are typists in linen cupboards, and I mean, it's a nightmare of space. And, of course, Central Government needs more accommodation as well. So there's no need, need to have a commercial outfit there. And you shouldn't have, opposite the Houses of Parliament. I mean, this is the sort of nucleus, nub, of the whole of Central London. However, nobody knows what's going to happen till July, and all we were trying to do last night, all the speaker were trying to do, really, was to get it into the hands and minds of the South Bank Board, who were there ... to be more open about what they're doing, because they've been absolutely dead quiet. What they do is, they consult little groups of local residents, what I believe they call the "anorak brigade", as you can imagine. And the anorak brigade are very vocal and enthusiast, and small in numbers, but you know, energetic, and splendid like the one in Covent Garden, and, but you see, it's not right that the local residents of Lambeth should be the only people who decide a site of this importance. They should certainly have a very strong view, but they shouldn't be the, I don't think, the arbiters, really. It sounds bossy to say so, but I think it ... that site of it is a piece of, it's a national site.

Who Picked the members of the South Bank Board?

I've no idea. I imagine they're all Government appointments.

And didn't any of them seem to you to have the right qualifications?

I don't know. I don't know, I looked down the list, and I think the only man I knew was Max Rayne, who was the Chairman of the National Theatre, but then he's a resident on the site, so he's okay. And he's an imaginative and, and serious man. But I didn't know any of the others.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 324

So last night, there was a sort of a gathering, and then a dinner, and then looking at films, and that was really it?

That was it. And then they, tonight, there's been a three day thing, like yesterday was the architects having a party, tears down their cheeks.

No, that was the day before.

The day before. Then yesterday was the, the old gang, sobbing over into each other's shoulders, and tonight is the South Bank Board, they're having a party to celebrate their existence, and I don't think they're going to reveal anything, I think it's just a rave up.

Which you have got to go to as well?

Mmmm. I'm not going, I think, because I've got to go to the country. They were kind enough to ask us, but ...

Is there an exhibition to go with all this, or not?

I don't think so. I think they, they, they're holding their plans back until, I think, there's some ...

No. Is there an exhibition to do with the Festival going on?

Now, you mean, in the Festival Hall?

Mmm.

No, I don't think so. I think that's all. I think it was a three night, two night do.

And tell me again what the RIBA evening was?

Well, that was just, the RIBA decided that the South Bank Exhibition was really renowned for its architecture. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 325

The Festival?

Yes. Was ... and the architects should wave a little flag, saying, "sometimes we pull it off, not always", but in those days, it seemed that we had been a success, and for a time, architects walked tall as the phrase goes, but it proved a disastrous gait, of course! Because walking tall is very conspicuous, and when you aren't successful, as most of us are from time to time, then you're in the front line for, for heaving rocks.

And what happened at the RIBA?

Well, it was just an exhibition, and the films, two films, and the, some very energetic students had redrawn a lot of the buildings, and they're going to publish a book. And this exhibition is still up at the RIBA, and then it'll be made into a book. And the students are very interesting, because they say, because all the students are absolutely crazy about the South Bank style, you see, and I remember John Betjeman saying to me, "you've just got to survive, and you come round again". Because, for about three years after the Festival, the Festival began to run downhill, as a fashionable style and attitude, and was followed by a very solid, ammunition booted sort of architecture called "Brutalism", the new Brutalism, and everybody built things like the Hayward. And that lasted for a time. And then that gave way to what's called "post-modernism", in which architects thought that brutalism was a bit brutal, how about making it a bit livelier? And then it became post-modernism, which is really hovering over all the buildings in the world, and spitting them out on the front of your building, so you've got pediments, and cupolas and ... but it was, it was like arranging fruit on a sideboard, really. I've always thought it was extremely tiresome, and ... tiresome really, because it was a private joke of all the designers and architects, nudge, nudge, "isn't it awful? How awful can we be?" It's like, it went into graphics too, and in advertising, a sort of private, private fractiousness. And they always liked to be called witty, but, in fact it was facetious, I thought. And half way through dinner, I began, I was correcting this speech, and I suddenly thought, "I'm getting really very very testy". And it's a sort of normal sign of old age. And I don't think old men are quite as obsessed and selfish as children are. I think they're the arch group, human group, which thinks the world revolves round them, kind of thing. Children, and then I would think, probably artists, also think the world revolves around them. They're not interested in anything else. Indeed, it's their strength. Permits them to be artists. Then Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1878-B Page 326 old men are supposed to be very selfish, which I think they probably are. But I think children are the worst.

End of F1878 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 327

F1879 Side A

I wanted to ask you about the Royal Fine Art Commission. There was a particular episode where you and John Piper were asked to be judges ...

That's right.

... in a rather bizarre sort of trial. And I wonder if you could tell me more about that?

Right. There's been in existence, for, I suppose, 50, 60 years, a semi-Government authority, called the Royal Fine Art Commission, and ... and they consist of about 20 members, half technical, in the sense that they may be sculptors, or architects, or painters, and half, I suppose, connoisseurs, they would call themselves, or ... who have judgement about aesthetic matters, and any important building or development which is going to be near a sacred place, if it's adjoining Westminster Abbey, or a cathedral, or in a very tender part of a small village, or something.

So when you say "sacred", you're not using it literally?

No, no, no. No. The Fine Art Commission can either hear about this, and call it in, and say, "we'd like to see this before you go too far". And/or it's sent to them by the client or the architect, for their views, and they meet once a month, and they have about, I suppose, 12 projects in front of them, which are stuck up, and they're explained by one member, and then the architect, or the developer, or the local authority, comes in and says what they want to do, and why they're doing it there. And then when they leave, the Commission discusses it, and comments on it, and sometimes recommends against it, and sometimes recommends for it. And in order to make it a little easier for the applicants, they're allowed to come for informal meetings, for a sub-committee, who can't commit the full Committee. But the sub-committee can say, "well, if I were you, I wouldn't bother with this, it's so awful, it wouldn't get to first base. So you're better to go away and think again. But if you want to come to the full Committee, of course, you can." And the whole exercise is rather mysterious, because the Commission has no teeth, they can't say, "you must do it". All they can say is, "we think it should be done in another way, or in another place". But the prestige of the Commission is very high, and no developer will really go ahead with anything when the Commission has Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 328 pronounced against it, because the local authority which gives the planning permission, it sounds rather complicated, it's the local authority which gives the planning permission. If they're told that the Commission says it's dreadful, they are very reluctant to give it permission.

Didn't you say that one of these awful fountains had just got the go ahead, despite what the Royal Fine Art Society said?

I'm not saying that they make good judgements all the time.

No, but I thought they said no. And it had still gone ahead?

This was a fountain which, which is a rather specific ceremonial fountain, for marking the Queen's 40th year on the throne, or something, and once you get into the royal issues, people tread very carefully. And if it's got ... rather a tender side to things. The Commission is the only people in the country, in fact, who can say, "I know it's a very good cause, but it is a terrible thing". But usually ... I was on it for 25 years, I enjoyed it enormously. Partly because all the people on it were, I thought, highly intelligent, historians, or architects, or painters, and you listened to people like, like the painter John Piper, or Nikolaus Pevsner the architectural historian, apart from the good architects who are on it. And the Chairman is a Government appointee. We've had, I've sat under a Vice-Chancellor, a Secretary to the Cabinet, the present one is an ex MP, now a peer, called St John Stevas, and they all have a very interesting input into the arguments. And, of course, what's interesting is that the laymen are very anxious not to let the architects bully them. And they are inclined, when the architects say, "oh, my goodness! This is really dreadful!" The laymen defend it, just to ... or tend to defend it, just to show the architects they aren't bosses of everything. So the whole thing is an interesting battle, and we had John Betjeman on it for a time, and we had Osbert Lancaster on it for a time. And you usually serve about five years. But if you clearly enjoy it, or if, in the opinion of the Government, you're helpful, they leave you on it for ... I think the maximum is you're turned off at 60.

Are you paid?

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No pay. But everybody loves interfering you see, so there's no shortage of people wanting to do it, because, interfering with other people's things, and being rather bossy, is irresistible!

Were there sort of certain major things during the time that you were on it, that we ought to talk about?

I knew them all very very well, because when you get to a certain age, or position, or whatever it may be, you tend to know the people who are in the same sort of, they're on juries for competitions, and they're advisers on this, that, and consultants to cities, and the Commission has to be very careful not to be too conventional in its make-up. But they tend to be, I think the youngest person when I was on it, was about 32.

But were there any particularly interesting projects while you were there?

Always.

Either that went ahead, or failed, that are worth talking about now?

I don't think I can remember them now, because I was there for 25 years, and we had 20 buildings a month. But it would also deal with landscape, or railway bridges, or should you destroy a wood for open-cast mining, or have a barrage on the Thames, or, you know, whatever ... I mean, there were …

Was there anything that you all said yes to, that you now regret?

Yes. I ... there were a lot of things which I didn't terribly like, but one felt was being too bossy to fuss about, because buildings only last 20 years as a rule now, the ordinary commercial buildings, and you don't have to worry forever, and architects tend to be a mixture of merciless criticism, or, "well, poor old thing, he can't do it any better, and it's no good telling him to make it better, because if he could make it better, he would have done." And so you, it's a funny sort of ... but we enjoyed it.

Did you actually all vote? Or was it just a vague agreement?

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No. You vote. You vote. And the Chairman, really, has to assess whether the vote is fair, because he has the really ticklish business of dealing with it.

So what was this incident where you and John Piper had to rush off and hear a ...

Well, early on in the Commission days, a problem was referred to us in Salisbury Cathedral, that a Canon, called Canon Dawson, who had an absolutely paranoiac hatred of any Victorian art, particularly stained glass, but lectures or pews, or statues, if it was the 19th Century, he and his friend - he made friends with the Clerk of Works - would take it out, smash it, and bury it in the Close, and he'd removed virtually all the Victorian windows that he could get at, from the Cathedral, glazed them with clear glass, and then he, his last villainy was that he ... there was a huge elaborate, rather rich and beautiful Victorian iron screen across the chancel, he couldn't bear it, apparently, and he had that taken out, and smashed it, and buried it, you see. This, they had a complacent, what is it? Compliant is the word, isn't it, Dean, who wasn't too crazy about Victorian art, and said, "well, you're in charge of the furnishings in this Cathedral, and you must just do what you feel right", but gradually it got to the ears of some high ecclesiastical authority, who said, "what's this fellow, Dawson, up to"? you see. And the Dean defended him by saying, "Well, he has very strong views, but he's an admirable man". However, the high ecclesiastical authority, I can't remember what it was, said, "We must send the Fine Art Commission down to investigate, and question, in front of the whole Chapter, Dean and Bishop, what he's been up to". So this came to the Commission, and the Chairman appointed John Piper, the painter and stained glass designer, and myself, as an architect, to go down and sit in judgement on poor Canon Dawson. It was the most extraordinary experience. We arrived and we were shown into the Chapter House, it was winter, it was freezing. And the Chapter House was full of all the clergy of the Close, Canons and people, all absolutely muffled to the noses with ... and all their breath coming out in white plumes, and the Bishop right at the back. And John Piper and I were given two chairs, like coronation chairs, with pointed backs, and arms, and we sat there, not knowing quite what to do, or ... we sat there anyway. And the Canon ... and the Dean was in charge, and the Dean, by now, had got rather nervous that he'd been undiligent in looking after this thing. And the Dean sort of cross-questioned Dawson, and he said, "and I understand that you've removed ... what are your, what are your reasons for removing them?" "Well, they're so terribly ugly", says poor old Dawson, you see. "I mean, they're hideous, how can you stand these things"? And the Dean would say something like, "well, people have other views Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 331 about this", you know, "and you've had no authority, as I understand it, from the Dean and Chapter to do all this". Anyway, it was a very embarrassing morning. John and I really didn't speak, except on the question of fact, and "when was this done"? And "whose opinion did you take"? And that sort of thing. But it was clear that the poor old boy simply couldn't understand a word that we were talking about, that it was inconceivable that anybody could admire these things, you see. And at one stage, the Bishop, who was sitting at the back, raised his hand and said, "Mr Dean, I wonder whether I could make an observation"? "No, you may not, Bishop. Sit down", said the Dean. Because, as you know, the Dean has power over the Cathedral, and over the Bishop, the Bishop has no powers, so good as the Dean. So the whole thing was an extremely interesting day, it was sort of mediaeval, I thought they were all going to be taken out and burned, about lunchtime! But ...

What was the outcome?

The outcome was that Dawson publicly apologised for what he'd done, he said it had been done, and the stuff had been smashed. There could be no possibility of getting it back, but he wouldn't do any more of it. And shortly after, he retired. And I don't know whether he was pushed. But since then, an outfit called The Cathedrals Advisory Committee, now sits on cathedrals, and they're called in whenever any major alteration is made.

Because of Canon Dawson?

The Dawson case was, has become a sort of legal benchmark, you know. But he was, that was the only time we, we sat like that. But I remember going to Birmingham, over the development of the new, the centre of the city road development, which the Commission thought was absolutely terrible.

Do you mean the Bullring?

Yes. And the Chairman and two of us, with him, we went up to Birmingham, to meet the Leader of the Council, and the City Surveyor, City Engineer, City Architect, and when we went into the room, the Chairman then was a man called Sir Colin Anderson, a man of ... terrific connoisseur, and a huge collection of wonderful paintings, and chairman of a shipping line. And a man I knew, he was Provost to the Royal College of Art. A man ... he spent his Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 332 whole life in the world of aesthetics and criticism. And we walked into the room, the three of us, you see, in our normal rather pompous way, and the Leader of the Council said, "good morning, gentlemen. If you've come to see what we've done, we've done it. And if you've come to see what we're going to do, we're going to do it whatever you say. Very nice to have met you. Good morning." And that was the only time we had a moment of ... a moment of indecision as to whether we walked out pompously, or whether we said, "oh, come now". Or ...

And you said "oh, come now"?

And I think we said, "oh, look here, surely we can discuss some of these issues", or something like that. But you can, you can have some quite awkward ...

Do you think you had any effect on the Birmingham development?

We were too late. It was a terrible scheme, but the man who'd designed it was there, in the room, which is always a bit awkward. You can't say, "this is an absolute nightmare", with him there, because he's a servant of the ... so, I mean, I don't say every meeting of the Commission was a ... as forthright. It was like Joan of Arc in Salisbury, it really was! But normally, it was going to places like Hull, or Sheffield, or wherever you were going, or even to some tiny little village, as to whether they were going to destroy some village pond, for instance, which the locals thought ... Anybody can write to the Commission, and say, "have you heard ...", "I suppose you've heard about this dreadful thing that's going on at the end of our road"? And then the Secretary decides whether this is really something which six people should spend the day on, or whether he says, "do write in and we'll discuss it".

But have there been moments when the fact that the Commission didn't actually have any legal power to stop something happening, has mattered? Or has it usually been able to influence very directly?

It has no legal power because that would be bossy, and it would override the local planning authority. It might be, say, Southwark or Gloucester, or something.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 333

But, I mean, what you said before, that it has, in practice, has the power, because it has such influence.

Mmm. Well, the Government, the Government, you see, if the Commission has come out against a Government building, like a new block of offices, for the Ministry of Agriculture, we'll say, and that's called in by the Commission, and the Commission says, "it's absolutely disastrous". No Government would admit to going on with it, without some alteration, as a rule, because they don't like somebody getting up in the House, and saying, "are you aware, Minister, that this has been turned down by the Royal Fine Art Commission? Is your Government persisting in this monstrous sacrilege?" You know, so the Government, on the whole, listens to the Fine Art Commission, I think it really does. Most local authorities do, unlike Birmingham did, because they don't like being asked in the local council.

So really, the fact you haven't got any legal power has never been a problem?

No, because we have a, we have a certain prestige of a funny sort.

What was John Piper like?

What, John? He's very forthright in criticism, always. I mean, he ... he's very clear about what he thinks is worthy of the situation, or unworthy, and as he's been in, I think, every parish church in the country, he knows every parish church personally, by having walked round it, and edited guides on it. So he was a wonderful, a wonderful member indeed, because he had these three qualities - he was a stained glass designer, he was a painter of architecture, loved architecture, and he was a good painter, and he was a sensitive and modest man. I mean, he didn't throw his weight about.

Did he work well with a team of people?

Yes, very good.

And how did he compare to Pevsner, who must have had the same kind of knowledge?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 334

Pevsner, being German, and being a professional academic, would be inclined to give a lecture on a thing, which would be, actually, quite interesting, because he, he would pick up a billiard cue, and point to various things on a new building, you see, "you'll notice that this particular motif has been copied from that wonderful palace in Madura, or somewhere, "but it's been mutilated in the translation to the design, and so has lost what vigour and originality it had, and I don't want to make a thing about it, but it doesn't seem to me, a very helpful addition to this building, and would be better left off". So he would, he would be useful because he was the historian, and also, he would know, if a building came up to which an addition was being made, he would know whether, "well, that addition was put on in 1927, by ... a not very competent architect, in my view. I don't think it would really matter if it was pulled down." I must say I enjoyed every meeting. I never missed it if I could help it.

How often does it meet?

Once a month.

And did Piper ...

All day.

All day? And where does it meet? In its own ...

It meets in St James' Square. In the morning, you see the applicants, one by one, this is what we want to do. The architect explains why he's doing it that way. And then you have lunch. And then after lunch, you go into a, a jury box, say guilty or not guilty.

And did Piper and Pevsner know one another? Did they overlap?

Oh yes. I mean, everybody knew each other.

But how did they get on?

Alright. They both respected each other's disciplines.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 335

And would they tend to agree on outcomes, or not?

I should think, on the whole. I mean, I think there was really pretty general agreement, in fact, nearly always.

And was that because people had been picked because they were a certain type of ...

Well, they were picked because they were a certain type of discipline. They represented sculpture or painting, or, or creative, or patronising, patronage haunting laymen. And it was really rather like a dinner party, in fact, I'm ashamed to say. But it was very English, in fact.

And did anyone ever mount any protest about the decisions you made?

Oh yes. We had a very fierce member who was on for about five years, until he gave up, and he was an architect who lived in East Anglia, who did beautifully, scholarly reinterpretations of Georgian houses and schools and ... and he did the restoration at Downing Street. And he was a man of tremendous integrity, and skill in reinterpreting the ... he believed that there had never been anything nicer in architecture than sort of 1750-1820. And he always worked in that particular language. And he never spoke all through meetings, until the end. And he, he was lame, and he walked on a stick, and he used to sit with his hands on the top of the stick, and when we'd all made our rather good mannerly, "I think, perhaps slight readjustment to the West Wing, and a lowering of the chimneys would improve this thing". He would say, "the whole thing is a total disaster, there's no point in talking about it any more". And that would be the end of his contribution. And sometimes he was right. He didn't mind being very very powerful, but the fact that he always worked in that particular language, was slightly, slightly against him. Because one would have liked to have seen a really modern building, but he was such a sensitive …

Was there anybody on it, who was very in tune ...

Like that now?

No in that time, was there anyone to counterbalance him? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 336

Well, everybody loved him, and everybody respected the fact that he worked in a language of the past, but I don't think he won all that often. His virtue was that he was very fierce, and we were sort of tip-toeing round.

So there was nobody on the other side who was as fierce as he was, who would balance him?

I don't ... there were one or two who came and went. And usually in the English system, anyone who was frightfully tiresome, was eased off fairly quickly. The best, the best member, and she's still a member, after ... she's done longer than I have, she's done 26 years, 27, called Elizabeth Chesterton, and she's a woman of enormous sense, has straight common sense. And she often resolved rather tricky things, by just saying, "it's not worth worrying about, this particular ... it's really not worth it". Or, "this something's tiny, but it's really worth worrying about". She was wonderful. And is wonderful. So that, I really enjoyed that.

And how did it compare with the work you did for GLAA?

Well, GLAA, which is the Greater London Arts Association, which is a subsidiary of the Arts Council, and the Arts Council, which gave grants for various creative exercises in the visual arts, which might have been helping some tiny little theatre to survive, or supporting a piece of sculpture in a park, or an exhibition, or whatever it might be, and they worked by, by delegating most of the decisions to the local authorities, so the Arts Council coped with the nation, and the Greater London Arts Association dealt with Greater London, and Hampshire Arts dealt with Hampshire, and Southern Arts dealt with Kent and Sussex, and it's become, in fact, more devolved now, to the local areas, with the top council dealing with the flagships like the National Theatre, or the new Birmingham City Hall, concert hall, and the locals really taking local decisions as to whether they have a sculpture exhibition in the grounds of some nice beautiful house, or whether they spend it all on helping some poor man to frame his pictures for an exhibition. This is done by the local ... and I was Chairman for a time, of the Greater London Arts Association, which dealt with Inner London, but not Central London, really. And you'd, you'd have, you know, 30 or 40 applicants wanting to buy new electrical switchboard for some little theatre, or whatever it might be, or to finance a production of such a thing, or a concert, or whatever it may be, and you, really, you had a Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-A Page 337 limited budget, you just had to try and sort it through. And usually, you had very good officers, officers who were dramatic, in drama, or in literature and poetry, or in painting, the visual arts, or dancing, and these were very ... nearly all girls, and they would be extremely efficient, and they would say, "well, I wouldn't recommend this particular thing, because I don't think it's got a very reliable administrative background, and I don't think they're really capable of looking after money".

And when somebody said something like that, would there be any attempt to verify it?

Mmmm. It wouldn't be enough just to say, "oh well, they're no good. Cross them off."

So would someone actually say, "let's look at the way it's being run"?

Yes. I mean, actually other people would say, "well, I know they're having a hard time, and the man's a drunk, but they are doing good work", or something, and then you'd try and ... It was, it was interesting. From the Chairman's point of view, it tended ... unless you were frightfully ... what's the word? Really conscientious about the thing, and you couldn't go to every production in some little room over a pub, you had to trust the people who went round. I didn't enjoy it very much really, because one was always refusing money, and that's no fun.

I mean, a lot of those decisions were much more controversial, weren't they?

Well, they were, because, at the time when I was there, the, there was a tremendous, there were two battles, one between the ethnic battles, of course, "we want more ethnic dancing in Spitalfields", say, and the other one was, I suppose you would call it, roughly speaking, street theatre, or the people who would resent having a room to do what they wanted to do, and the quality of what they did seemed to be rather self-indulgent, if you were rather beastly. You know, there was a lot of self-indulgence about ... putting on bare feet, stamping up and down some terrible little alleyway in Hackney. On the other hand, it was an expression of interest in doing something creative and active. I, I found it very very difficult, I wasn't very good at it, because I was too. I was too soft-hearted really.

End of F1879 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 338

F1879 Side B

Interview with Hugh Casson, 3 June 1991, at his London Flat

... about the house you had in Victoria Road and the one you had in Elgin Crescent, and, since we're in it, I wondered if you could talk a bit about the flat you live in now.

Well, after the war, we, we started in a small house, and then to a bigger one, and then to a bigger one still, and we had three living at home children, and we therefore had lots of walls, because our last house was five storeys high. And they were high big rooms, it was a sort of 1860 house, and so there was ... there was no problem about finding enough space to hang pictures. Then, more recently, as we've got much older, and the children left home, we decided we'd have to get on to, into smaller space. So we found what, in London, is called a mansion flat, which is a flat usually about 1850-1910, in period, very solidly built, huge windows, high ceilings, about 8, 10 feet high, cornices, panelled doors, and fairly heavy Edwardian sort of architecture, which suited us very well, because we like the solidity of it, and the heavy doors, and the brass handles, and, and in London, which is very rare, in a flat, we had fireplaces in every room. Now, in England you're not allowed to burn, in London, I mean, you're not allowed to burn coal in coal fires, in London, because of the pollution, so we have gas fires in the fireplaces. But it's a great pleasure to have the fireplaces, and the mantelpieces and the overmantels, all of the sort of 1880/1890 period. And we were lucky enough to get two flats, one on top of the other. Each had three bedrooms and three sitting rooms, they're pretty capacious. And we moved in with all our books and pictures, and actually, we hung them pretty quickly. And sometimes one leans pictures against the walls for months and months, trying to make up my mind where to go, but we did this very very quickly. My wife and I both taught at the Royal College of Art, and therefore we, we were exposed, every year, to an exhibition of students' works, students' paintings or drawings, or pottery, or whatever it might be, and also, as I was working at the Royal Academy we had the annual Students' Exhibition there as well. And this meant that we were able to buy, what we thought, extremely good or promising work by, by students, which hadn't yet reached West End prices. And so a high proportion of the pictures that we have hanging around us, are by students, either from the Royal Academy School, or from the Royal College. And one or two by staff, but they, of course, were more expensive. The other source we had, because we didn't like buying pictures from galleries much, particularly the West End galleries, who Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 339 priced the work far beyond anything we could do, use. But our other source was that my wife and I were both, worked for the Arthur Koestler Foundation for Creative Work in Prisons and Institutions. And I was Chairman for about 15 years, or 20 years, I think. And this is a scheme by which annual prizes are awarded for any creative work done in any institution, men or women, or adolescents, could be painting, could be photography, could be pottery, could be writing plays, it could be writing poetry or novels, composing music, or performing music, and all these submissions from all over the country, were centrally collected, weeded out by the local teachers in the subjects, so that you had, in the end, around about 150 works to judge. And we did the final judging. And they were awarded with prizes, and they also were rewarded with having an exhibition in London, every summer, usually in the Royal Festival Hall, where they could sell their work if they wished. I mean, quite a lot of them don't want to sell it, they want to keep it, or keep it for their families. And what was very moving about the whole of this exercise was that, and the tragedy of it really, was that none of this talent which emerged, of a startling calibre, in many cases. None of this had been discovered at school. They'd all left school, really well stamped as failures, because they weren't apparently bookish or scientific. And then they drifted into unemployment and into crime, and they'd all spent fairly long sentences, because if you have a short sentence, you have no time to discover that you have a talent, or to ... and no time certainly, to let it expand into practice. And so we found that in the prisons which dealt with long-term prisoners, like murderers, who have a sentence normally of about 12 years, they could really learn to etch, or to compose, or whatever it may be, and the work they turned out, because it was innocent, and totally unaffected by reading art criticism, or going to West End galleries, I mean, none of them had ever entered a West End gallery, it was original and, and, and we found sometimes, very moving and exciting. So we have a lot of those works. I mean, some of them are bought out of mercy, to make yourself feel good, help the fellow along, sort of business, but most of them were bought because we'd have bought them anywhere, if we could have afforded them. So our, what you can laughingly call our collection of pictures, is very varied and it isn't a collection, in fact, it's just a lot.

Can we talk about some of the ones that are most precious to you? I don't mean in value, I mean ...

Well, nothing we own is very valuable. We've got left a large drawing by Ruskin, by an uncle of my wife's, which I suppose is valuable. And I bought some Edward Lear travel pictures, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 340 he's always my favourite painter, watercolour painter. And in those days, just after the war, they were selling them off for 25 bob each, and they were ... dealers used to buy up his old sketch books and tear the pages out, and, and just sell them off. So we have, or used to have, about a half a dozen of those, very small. We then had one or two friends whose work we loved, a man called Philip Sutton, who is a Royal Academician now, but in those days, was banging away, trying to make a living, down in South London. And he painted a portrait of our youngest daughter, and we bought a big painting he'd done in Hawaii, and a lot of nude studies he'd done as a student, and those we're very fond of. Otherwise, I think, well, we had two or three portraits, in watercolours, of the children, done by friends. My wife and I both had busts done, uncommissioned, and given us by ... both of which are quite good portraits, although I don't like having them about, one's own portrait, very much, in the room. But I should think virtually all, nearly all the paintings we have are watercolours or drawings. There's very few oil paintings. And in these two flats, we usually keep the, what you might call the slightly technical ones, like architectural drawings which one's done oneself, or had from friends, we keep in the other flat which is above us, which is where the office is, and my wife's darkroom is. And so, when you come into the place, there's a, there is a feeling that you're, in a way, floor-to-ceiling owner of too many pictures for the house. But I like that. And I rather like, although we haven't done huge pictures that actually go from floor to ceiling, but it's a very dangerous thing to do, because Hoovers get pushed into them, and cats scratch them, and so we haven't got any very large pictures. Our largest picture, I suppose, is the portrait of my daughter, which is about five feet square well out of the way of the cat!

And what about the paintings that you've done, that you've decided to keep?

Well, scores of these ... every now and again I paint very small pictures. I mean, my usual size is about 4 x 8 inches, tiny. And I have about three exhibitions a year. Luckily most of them get sold, but sometimes I keep back, not for sale. And some of them we've hung on to for about ten years, really more out of idleness than because we think they're of any interest. I mean, sometime they're places we've been to. They're all topography. I don't draw people much. And they're all, I've been very lucky, and travelled all over the world and so there are masses of pictures of Greece and China, and India, and America. Sort of memory lane, it's rather like a snapshot album. And they hang about in little groups. But as they're watercolours they have to be kept clear of the light, because they fade so quickly. And I Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 341 suppose we've got about half a dozen pictures by living painters who are established and successful.

Like whom?

Well, they wouldn't be widely known, I suppose, except in this country. They're ... Prunella Clough was the first picture I ever bought, who I think is a lovely painter. She must be about 60 now.

Where did you buy that from?

Well, I bought it in a furniture shop. It was the first picture I bought in my life. And I remember going in to see it, it was Heals in Tottenham Court Road, which used to have an art gallery, and I thought this was absolutely wonderful. And I'd never bought a picture in my life. And I paid about three visits to look at it, and eventually, nerved myself to buy it, and it's still very much beloved, partly because we were so brave, the idea of buying a picture was ...

When was this?

When was it? I suppose about 1937.

And what is that particular picture like?

It was a corrugated iron roof, seen from above, in a sort of blue/grey steel coloured roof, in a rather yellowy-green landscape.

And why do you think that was the first picture you ever bought?

I don't know, I thought it was wonderful. Plus I'm crazy about perspective, and all the lines of corrugations, they were very carefully drawn by Prunella, and I think that's what ... and those two colours, I mean, that grey/blue and sort of dirty yellow/green, I think, are a wonderful combination. Well then we bought one or two sort of oddments, off the pavement, you know, funny old portraits of Edwardian ladies in high lace collars, pitch black with dirt, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 342 or architectural ones which we also have a lot of. And, but we haven't, we haven't done any buying, I'm ashamed to say, for about three or four years now. We thought we've really, the walls have got enough to stomach at the moment. We've got a Duncan Grant, which we bought somewhere, which is rather nice. And the sitting room has got mostly my pictures, I'm ashamed to say. But my wife is now a photographer, and so ... but she does ... not straight photography, sort of black and white complicated images, which are done, she does her own printing and enlarging. And it's a very complicated process, and they're rather mysterious, you can't quite tell whether it's an etching or a photograph, which, of course, gives great trouble to picture galleries, if she wants to have a show. She's had shows in Tokyo and New York, which did quite well. So that's what she, she's an architect, but she doesn't draw any more. She does it with her camera and her developing mechanisms.

And you've got one or two mugs by Ravilious, haven't you?

I'm sorry?

[BREAK IN RECORDING HERE]

... yes, I'd forgotten to mention that we did, always, in the exhibition, annual exhibitions of these students, buy pottery, and sometimes tiny bits of sculpture, and quite a lot of jewellery, which was art students' jewelry in the sense that it didn't use platinum and diamonds much, because they can't afford the material. But it was always interesting, and, and it sometimes was very witty. I mean, I remember we organised an exhibition in Bath, of students' work, and they had a huge dinner party in which all the food and the plates, and everything, was made out of china. Wonderful china herrings, I remember, with lemons in their mouths, beautiful things. And a lot of it survived actually. But the cheaper ones tended to be slightly student jokes, you know, a cup on two legs, and kneeling, kneeling down, and you know, they were high spirits rather than great art, if I can put it that way. And, of course, quite a lot of book jacket designs and that sort of thing. But it was lovely working in that atmosphere, because you were in the nursery, so to speak, catching people before they, before they launched themselves, and I remember when the prize pupil of the College was David Hockney, and, but he was picked up, I think, in his second year, by the galleries, and by the time he was in his third year, when Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 343 normally we would be buying things, he'd got far beyond my pocket. I did get an etching of his, one or two prints and things.

And what's the etching like?

The etching is called "My Heroes", which is three portraits - there's Gandhi, and Walt Whitman, and I think himself was the third, as far as I remember! And we were very devoted to him, because he was totally, absolutely unspoiled, and this, I'm talking now about 40 years ago, and he hasn't changed at all. He still has the same friends, he still has the same flat round the corner here, and although, of course, he must be a millionaire now, and he lives in a very modest house in California, travels a lot, but totally and absolutely totally exactly the same. And if you ask him to lunch, he's quite likely to bring his mother or his aunt to, to join him, or his sister or ... they're a very close North country family. And there are one or two very very successful young painters, some of whom got spoiled by the dealer scene, which can be very unattractive, really. And …

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Our furniture, I suppose, like many people in our walk of life, is second hand, or fifth hand, for that matter! We have one very distinguished piece of furniture by Ernest Gimson, who is one of the chief furniture designers of the William Morris period. And I inherited that from my wife's uncle, who had it made for him, and, in fact, participated in the design. It's an enormous great teak bed, which is absolutely beautiful. The other piece is a chair, about the same period, in fact it's a 1900, by Liberty's, which looks very very curiously spare and elegant, and thin-ankled, made, I think, out of some fruit wood, pearwood, or applewood, and extremely elegant. In fact, it's so elegant, you rather hesitate to sit down on it, because it looks as if it would be too thin-ankled to take your weight. Otherwise the furniture's really straight out of the salerooms, off the pavements of flea markets, some of it's survived most of our married life, but it's ... and there's one or two things ... my daughter who is a furniture designer, my youngest daughter, one or two things she's designed, a table and things, which ... but you couldn't say there was any masterpiece of marquetry by some European French designer, or any of that stuff. I don't like French furniture.

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Are the pictures that you have in your bedroom ones that you care about particularly, or do they just happen to be in your bedroom?

No, they were chosen because they were among my favourites. They're ... I have the Hockney there, and I have a great watercolour of a battleship, done by a student at the Royal College, because I love battleships. And I've got one or two drawings given me by, one is by a Danish architect, and one or two etchings and things. The room is fairly small, so all the pictures are hardly bigger than sort of 18 x 9 inches, you know.

You've got an Edward Lear in there, haven't you?

Yes.

Some sheep, aren't they?

But they, I haven't changed the ones in the bedroom because they seem to fit there very well. A lot of them are ships, because I …

You've got some sheep there, haven't you?

Sheep? I've got a watercolour of sheep, and my other ... sheep and ships are ... I must say, very attractive to me.

And what about your interest in Ruskin, because that's somebody you lecture about, isn't it.

Well, Ruskin came to me very late in life, because when I was a student at university, in 1930, he was at the bottom of his reputation. In fact, I remember second hand booksellers would refuse to accept one, if you took in two or three Ruskin volumes, they'd just throw them straight in the bin, because they couldn't get rid of them. It was like The Waverley Novels, you know, I mean, you, you can't get rid of them. And he was very unpopular, and my tutor said, well, I wouldn't ... if you're an architect, although he wrote about architecture, he had so many blind spots, one of which was, he never wrote about architecture being the art of enclosing space, he only wrote about architectural surfaces. What he loved was surfaces, cornices and carvings, and mosaics, and that sort of ... that's the sort of thing he was crazy Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 345 about. And the other weakness he had, in the eyes of my teachers, was that he hated classical architecture. He thought, for instance, that a church in Venice, like Santa Maria de la Salute, he thought was unspeakably awful. And this was the sort of social decision, because his belief was that if you were designing in Gothic, the workmen could contribute. If you were designing in the classical style, eg like St Paul's Cathedral, the workmen couldn't be allowed, because there were certainly rules about classical architecture. And you can't allow people to muck about with cornices, because it's all laid down in the famous books about classical proportions and things. The proportions of cornice, and each part of the cornice to the whole, and the capitals and the ... what you did with the bases, it was all in the books. And so the, the mason was really just a mechanic assembling a sort of Ford car, really, with bits and pieces, which ... over which he had no control. He just had to put them together. And this, he found, was degrading to the workman, and so all his life he fought for Gothic, because Gothic is free-range really. And if you had a good carver, mason, you just said you want a pinnacle five feet high, and he made his own little curlicues, unless they had to be repeated, and then they had to be pretty similar, but they were all, in a sense, they had a certain freedom of movement, with gargoyles and that sort of thing. And, of course, we were brought up on the classical orders, Corinthian, and Doric and Ionic, much more than on Gothic. And so, Ruskin was not, in fact, a favoured person. And the last thing they disapproved of, of course, was that he was so inconsistent. On one page he'd say he loved this, and the second page, he was saying, on the whole he didn't like it, the third page he'd say, "I don't apologise for inconsistencies. Truth is always balanced between two untruths". And so I didn't really ever meet Ruskin, in fact, on the page, until I was about 50. And then somebody, oh, I know what it was, it was Kenneth Clark, brought out a book on the, called something like, "The Best of Ruskin", which were chapters or paragraphs, or apothems from some of his 20 or 30 volumes of stuff. And I found them so moving and true, and inspiring sometimes, that I then got his autobiography, called, Praeterita, which was the most readable of his books, in the sense that he was, it was the story of his life. His awful childhood and his awful mother, and his poor wife, and his gradual mental instability. But he spent most of his life trying to save Venice from being destroyed by the Italians. He was a sort of one man "Venice in peril", and he did a terrific lot of work, because he was rather rich, and so he could afford for pamphlets to be distributed, and meetings organised, and protests established. And he really deserves a huge monument in Venice, although they've got quite enough of them. And his other, his other great work, was his Christian Social attitude, which is, funnily enough, sort of mixed up with a sense of hierarchy, that he was going to remain in a position Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1879-B Page 346 of authority, it wasn't going to be, "let the people decide", or any of that stuff, because you had to have educated people like himself in charge. But the idea was that there should be more, well, I suppose, what we'd loosely call democracy now, and, and he invented things like the Green Belt, and smokeless zones, and he believed in the public ownership of land. And he was, he was a very far-sighted man. Of course, he was gradually going out of his mind, and by the time he died, when he was about 80, at the end of the century, he really was pretty dotty. And I, I have to confess I haven't read all of his stuff, because it's so very very wordy. I mean, he couldn't stop his pen going. He says, "once ... I'm like a ball going down a slope. I cannot stop. No friction of any kind. I don't ... searching for an adjective. I go roaring off." And this, coupled with his desperate unhappy relationship with his wife and his, the girls he loved, who wouldn't have anything to do with him, and his dreadful mother. So he had a pretty interesting life, and I suppose quite a lot of people have probably written psychological studies of him, which I've never read.

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F1880 Side A

Why did you start lecturing about Ruskin? When did that happen?

Well, I got, I got to Ruskin through Venice, really, because, having been lucky enough to go to Venice quite a large number of times, I got very devoted to it, and also got rather annoyed that the guide books never mention what happened really, between 1850 and the First World War, when there was a lot of building, and a lot of schemes. I mean, there was a scheme to build a main road down the Grand Canal. There was a scheme to pull down St. Mark's, which a lot of people thought was a hideous building. And there were all sorts of terrible, ghastly things going on, mutilation of buildings, by ignorant architects. And Ruskin really plunged about stopping things. And so I got to think what a marvellous job he'd done there. He was totally devoted to it. Until he got very very old, and then the whole thing suddenly became dead, he found it a sort of corpse. But the interesting thing, I think, when he wrote about Venice, he said, "it's such a warning to England, because the Venetians, in the sort of 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries, were the very very rich, very very powerful, and very very stable, exactly like England at the height of our Empire". And gradually, and they were admired and hated all over the Mediterranean, because they ran the place. And then they got lazy, and corrupt, and uncharitable, and lost any interest in the poor, and he said, he was writing this about 1880, I think, "mark my words, this is what's going to happen to England". That people will lose compassion for the less successful, and the less privileged. They'll become corrupt and selfish, and spend most of their time on trivial pursuits, and ... he was very far-sighted, I mean, his, his sort of prescription of what England was going to be like in 1980 was pretty accurate.

And what do you feel about England now?

What do I feel about him?

No, England, now.

England now? Well, what do I think about England? I think one is very twisted by living in London, because London is a very untypical bit of England. Not because it's very Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 348 cosmopolitan, entirely, although that, of course, contributes. But because city values are very different from country values, and you notice, immediately, when you go into the country, that the ... once you get away from the, what I can loosely call the Home Counties, where all the villages are full of retired colonels and senior civil servants, and nobody has ever been known to cut a hedge, or reap a field, or anything, but if you get away from that, I do think you find that the, the basic country values are still there. Obviously the, the mobility, which has been brought by the motor car, and the general television world, which has brought all sorts of things, which in the country you'd never have heard about before, has, has made a difference. One gets the impression that, it's a long time since I've been anywhere near a village school. That village schools still, the staff still know the children, and why Johnny never has his shoelaces done up, and things like that, which you'll never find in the city. Nobody has any time to do that. And I wouldn't have thought that the, those values have changed tremendously. Everybody wants to be a bit richer, I suppose, but I don't think people are beastlier, probably than they were. When you think, you think of the 18th Century, and the mantraps, and the poor house, and the awful things that happened to ... and really being starved to death in the villages. There's not much of that in the country now, but you do find it in the cities still.

So you think there's some reason to be optimistic?

I don't know whether that's because I'm English myself. I've never lived or worked abroad, so I don't really know how the differences are. And how, for instance, if I lived in a Roman Catholic country, or a Moslem country, whether I'd find their values and attitudes strange and difficult. I heard a man talking on the radio yesterday morning, saying, "the word of God is the root of all evil". And he was, roughly what he was saying is that is all the troubles we have now, are people who think they know better than somebody else, and don't argue about it, they just hit them now. And, it will go on for years and years and years, and I think that's probably true, and I think there's more bigotry outside England, and I would guess than most places in the world.

And do you think there's much thinking going on in England?

Thinking? Serious thinking, or academic thinking?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 349

Serious thinking.

Serious thinking. I wonder. I think people are much more aware of, really much more aware of what it's like under the carpet, than they were.

What do you mean?

Well, when I was young, before radio and telly, really did ... one knew very little about what was ... picking up the carpet to see what terrible things were going on. I lived in a period when my mother would, still, believe it or not, in about 1920 she'd still be taking pillow cases or Christmas pudding to the local villagers, like a sort of Edwardian novel, you know, and that was one's faintest contact with poverty. Because we lived in a town at the time, which was in Southampton, which was reasonably prosperous. And the dockers had the Dockers Charter, which meant that they were never out of work really. And sailors always had a job. There were lots of ships about. So I was never faced with scarecrows sitting on doorsteps, as I would have been, I think, if I'd lived in London, because you couldn't avoid it really. Turn left off Regents Street, and you still find it pretty, pretty much, don't you. But I don't think very much myself, I'm ashamed to say. I mean, I'm very sentimental and cry at the slightest sort of ... not so much at a brass band passing, but as ...seeing somebody in distress, who won't accept help because they are probably mentally unstable, and don't recognise it when it's offered, and all the sleepless, and the bag ladies, which one's familiar with in London now, but it was much worse before the war, it really was. I mean, all those terrible doss houses.

And do you think we're more complacent now than we were then?

I think we're probably much more selfish. I don't know whether ... I think, I wonder if we're more complacent? I think we're, we are more selfish. Because the richer everybody gets, the more ... it's such a cliché this, the more important objects become. And if objects are almost within reach, within 10 pounds of your income, so to speak, so you can buy a video or a ... whatever, you must have a little talisman to show you what class, what layer of class you're in, and that's why in Africa, you'd find in a village, somebody who'd had a broken transistor. The fact that it didn't work, didn't matter so much, that he'd been in a civilisation where transistors could be bought, and looked at. While we, we buy broken pottery from African villages, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 350 they buy broken transistors. And they're talismans. They're symbols of your place in society, aren't they, and they're very important now, and, and I mean, it becomes to such ridiculous things, like people paying thousands of pounds for a number plate with their own initials on it now! That shows great insecurity, doesn't it? Inexcusable in a civilised society.

Do you think we're more divided by class now than we used to be?

No, I don't think we're worse. I think, I really don't think we are worse, because the edges are getting so blurred. I was thinking the other day that, in the olden days, when I was young, there were certain events, for instance, like Ascot, or the opening of the Covent Garden season, or Henley, which were social events which you had to be seen at. And now it's very difficult to name a single event, nowadays, which, if you wish to be regarded as somebody with a capital S, you have to be seen at. I'm sure Ascot isn't it any longer, certainly Henley isn't, and in New York, it used to be the opera, you had to be seen in a box at the opera, even if you were sound asleep, but you had to be there. Now, the smart thing to do, apparently, is to go to the auction houses, and that's where wealth gathers, and that's where the diamonds glitter. And so you don't go to any entertainment, except to an auction. But everybody who is there, is, is in Society, and is in the social columns and everything. But I think most of the sillier side of Society with a capital S has vanished, because it has been infiltrated by a much more energetic and more vulgar, if you like, world of ... of the media, pop singers, and television personalities, and people who are sort of constructed, by the media, into certain sorts of figures. And they're seen, as it were, in Claridges, ... where they wouldn't have been seen 25 years ago. And so it's very difficult to be very grand, and his Grace, the Duke of Tiddleywinks, when all the attention is being given at Claridges, to a pop singer, perhaps because his tips are better, or because he's better known, or whatever it is. I think that has been, it is a change. I think the death of, the death of Society, of that sort of Society, is very healthy, I'm glad it's gone, really. And I think it still exists in remoter places in the country, where big landowners and ... can still be regarded as rather exceptional, even if they're half- witted, they can be regarded as exceptional.

If we looked at you, taking you decade by decade, from 1910, to 1990, how do you think you've changed? If you start at 1920, say, when you were 10.

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Certain characteristics have remained with me, I think, all my life. One ... and none of them are very agreeable. One of them is physical timidity, in that I'm not physically very courageous. Not just in going out and climbing mountains or anything, but when I was at school, I used to try and keep out of trouble. I hated fights or quarrels, and that was ... I called it timidity, but it's only a nice word for cowardice. The second thing is that, owing to my earlier life, being separated from my parents, and living always either at boarding school, from the age of seven, either living with strange little boys, or with cousins, or in, not quite holiday schools, but almost, if you went about in groups of people, and that meant that every time I went into a new group, a new school, or a new class, you had to quickly establish who you were. Are you a swot? Are you a bully? Are you an entertainer? And I, I think, I probably consciously decided that I wasn't a swot, because I wasn't clever enough, and I certainly wasn't a bully, because I was too frightened, but I was quite good at talking, and making myself agreeable to a new group of people. Every few months it had to be, you know, and you suddenly had ... you know like when you go to school, you have to quickly assume a role of some kind.

But how do you think Hugh Casson in 1980 differed from Hugh Casson in 1940?

Not much really. In 1940, no, not much. I mean, equally timid, equally voluble, and, I was trying to think of a word which means that you wish to be agreeable, which it's never very ... I think all the words that mean it, are rather derogatory. But I've always found that if you're good at getting on with people quickly, life becomes a great deal easier. The opposite side of that is, I suppose, is that you become phoney, and you don't mean what you say, and if you're a friend with everybody, you're really a friend of nobody.

But that's not true of you.

No. But there were ... risks of it at the school, I think there were, I mean, I used to tell stories in the dormitory at night, because I'd make them up, you know, I mean, I didn't pretend they were true or anything. They were just, "my time in India", you know, from 9.20 to 9.40 when lights out, and that sort of thing. And so I got quite articulate, I think, is probably the word, and could hold people's attention, little boys of 9, 10, 11 or something. And then when I got older at school, about 15 or 16, when nobody was anybody unless they were in the First rugby football team, and I hated all games, through cowardice. One always got hurt in Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 352 games, hard balls and kicks, and misery. So my natural, or calculated, or trained ability to make conversation, is perhaps the only word for it, I've never found that difficult. And I've just come back from France where we had four days, and every day we had lunch with a party of 12 or so, or more, total strangers, French. My French is far from liquid. I mean, we can stagger on. But I wasn't alarmed or frightened or anything.

Well, perhaps you ought to explain a bit more about it, because it sounds rather odd if you don't put it in context for what you were doing in France, having lunch with lots of different people all the time!

Well, I think, I think the language thing doesn't really make much difference.

No, no. I don't mean that. But the purpose of your journey. It sounds rather strange unless you say what you were doing, why you were there.

Well, this particular trip, which is the fourth we've done, we do for about between three and five days, every summer, four of us. My wife and myself and two, one other married couple, go with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, somewhere in Europe, for a quick look at architecture, and pictures, and churches, which she's very interested in, and an indefatigable sightseer. And we go off, and she takes her own car, and her own chauffeur, her detective, and her maid, two ladies in waiting. That's her entourage, and then there are four of us, the guests. And last year we went to Brittany, and this year we went to Haute Savoie near Geneva, and the year before that was down in Sicily, and as she's 91, and our main French host was older, and her ladies in waiting are 80+ and I'm 81, we didn't actually run anywhere, or climb any mountains. And we left, it was a very sort of leisurely timetable. You left at half past ten in the morning, and got back at six, and went to bed by 11.

What was the ceremony in the cemetery?

Well, we were in an area which was one of the main Maquis areas during the war, and just at the back of Geneva, in the Haute Savoie, there are a lot of mountains, very high mountains, which are still snow-capped, last week, which is in June, plateaux, sort of flat-topped, rather like Table Mountain, and all the parachuted agents and arms and supplies were dropped on these plateaux, which are very difficult to get at, except, unless you are mountaineers like Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 353 these villagers were. And there were about 500 in this particular group, and they ... and these 500 men, was very very successful. And eventually, the Germans sent up a huge unit of 4000 soldiers, and murdered the lot. They murdered prisoners and shot the whole lot. ... And, of course, some of the bodies were recovered, and reinterred in a little cemetery right up in the hills, and we went to a ceremony there, where all the veterans of the Maquis, the survivors, who hadn't been there that day, old men with white moustaches, and carrying flags and badges, and medals, had tears rolling down their faces, because, it's very interesting in France, the World War Two seems very very close still, and they talk about it, and think about it, and have ceremonies about it, partly, I think, because there's the terrible terrible problem of the Vichy supporters in the same village. You see, if you lived in a village, maybe half the village were supporting Vichy and the Germans, and the other half were the Maquis, and that village never came together again. Anyway, we went to this ceremony which was very moving. And what was interesting was, there were a lot of women there, who are normally spectators in these sort of exercises, but these women had been little 16 year old girls as messengers on bicycles, taking messages from place to place, or explosives, or whatever it may be. And they were all there, sort of motherly old ladies, with very thick ankles, also very, very moving.

Was the ceremony happening because the Queen Mother was there?

Yes.

No, no. ...

Or was the Queen Mother there because there was being a ceremony?

No, they had it specially for her, because no member of the, of the Royal Family had ever been to this particular remote place, and they were extremely touched and proud that this had happened. And they had a little tiny, simple museum, in a wooden hut, you know, with photographs of all the dead ... well, children, I would have said, because they were about 18, 19, 20. It was a very moving performance, in fact. And one forgets how awful this Vichy village division must have been. I mean, really awful. And that was our only solemn day. The rest of the day was looking at churches and houses, and gardens. The trouble with, for women in France is, all the gardens are covered with loose gravel, and huge cobblestones, which is agony for women who are not Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 354 wearing suitable shoes, or wearing shoes suitable for having lunch in a chateau in. And so I think our party were hobbling around a bit by the end of the day! The cobbles are so huge, they really tip you sideways.

And something else I wanted to ask you about, going backwards. What about your work for the Royal Mint?

The Royal Mint?

Mmm.

Well, the Royal Mint is a, used to be, of course, a royal industry. I mean, the King ran it, and it was a sort of private press for ... I'm talking about mediaeval times, for making money. And it used to live in the Tower of London, for many many years, and then, in this century, of course, it became an industry, because it had to have huge printing plant for, for notes, and, of course, great presses for coinage. And it actually operates now, under the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He's the sort of Chief Master of the Mint. And he runs the place. He's a civil servant, and the factory is down in Wales, and the Chancellor decides how much has got to be made, and then somebody has to decide what it's going to look like. And so some years ago, they set up an Advisory Committee, under the chairmanship of Prince Philip. And they consist of historians, because, if you're commemorating some battle or event, you've got to have somebody who knows the dates when it happened. You have a numismatist, who knows about coinage, and you mustn't interfere with any other nation's coinage, historically or in present day use. I mean, if you make a sixpence here, which fits a shilling slot in Paris, so to speak, there's trouble, so they have to be very well informed on international coins, sizes and weights, and things. And everything, you see, every time you change a coin, sometimes it means all the Tube station slot machines, and all the chocolate machines have to be changed to take this, because it is quite technically and industrially, it's quite a difficult thing. So anyway, we have our historian who keeps us right on history, we have our numismatist who keeps us right on the history of coins. We have a naturalist, because sooner or later, some animal appears, a bird or a kangaroo, or a whatever it may be, and the design has to be correct. It has to have the right number of toes, otherwise there's trouble. And then we have a sculptor. And then we have two people who are sort of allegedly visually trustworthy, and, but not necessarily anything to do with coinage. And we meet about twice a year, because we Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-A Page 355 deal with medals. I mean, there's ... we've just been dealing with the Gulf War medal, and we deal with coinage of the realm, and the Mint, of course, itself, deals with, as a contractor, makes coinage for other countries. I mean, if some country comes to us to have their coinage dealt with, then our Committee doesn't operate so much with them, because it's really their, it's their worry, what the things look like. And it's an extremely difficult thing to judge, because it's such a technically nightmarish problem. You usually have to get a lot of lettering on it, you have to get dates, you have to get the weight, the weight right, and the size right, it's actually in millimetres, I mean, it's very very accurate. And for a sculptor, they, they work on a, on a size, I suppose about 9 inches across, they work on a clay model, which is cast in plaster first, and we first see it as …

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F1880 Side B

And I've been on this, I suppose, for about 15 years now, and I enjoy it very much, because the aesthetic decisions are very complicated. I mean, the ... because the limitations of the whole exercise are such a nightmare. There are very very few sculptors who will, in fact, face up to them, and ...

Is it part of your job to recommend people?

Yes. You can recommend people. We're having a competition actually, at the Royal College of Art, and I'm going down tomorrow. We're trying to get some students interested in it, and, of course, the discipline of it is, is very very tight, and students are not, or very rarely, I think, interested in such discipline, because they like to "do your own thing". You know, why don't you have a coin that is bent in half, or, you know what students are, "let's have some new ideas", and some of them are, it's very difficult to find any who will really grip the practicalities of it. But we've got one or two new ones recently. We've had some failures, I think, and one or two successes. Also we're doing one now, on some European community coin, of a kind, or a medal, and so, as I say, we meet once or twice a year, and it's held in Buckingham Palace, overlooking the courtyard, at 11 o'clock, just when they're Changing the Guard, and the noise from the band underneath the windows is earsplitting! It rattles the windows, and so the debate is not a sort of measured quiet voiced historians, it's yelling at the top of your voice!

I mean, do you tend to be mainly in agreement?

I think what I'd call the aesthetic people are usually, pretty well always in agreement. The numismatists and the heraldic experts from the College of Arms, they have very strict disciplines of their own, you know, that you can't put this in this position because it means something else. And they, they argue really, on rules, like the naturalists, you know, the water lily has only six strands on its left hand root, or something, you know. So they argue on facts, and, of course, they have facts on their side, so there's, there's ... and sometimes they're not too hot on, we think, the aesthetes, we think they're not too good on art, on the Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 357 visual side. We've always had at least one woman, sometimes two, on it, and I find it very, a very amusing exercise.

For instance, with the Gulf medals, what are the points of discussion?

Very difficult the Gulf medal was, because the Chiefs of Staff had sent in their ideas, roughly drawn out, to remind us that it was fought by three branches of the services - the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army. Well, normally you have different medals for these things, but this had to be one medal which could be given to a sailor, or a soldier, or an airman. And each wanted some sort of symbol of what they were in, and so it had to, it had to have something expressing the air, the sea and the land. And the conventional one was quite good. It was very formal, and they had an anchor, to symbol, which is a strong symbolic form on a coin, which fits very well, because it's got curves up here, an anchor, and they had, most of them had in some sort of cloud, to express the air, and then they got stuck on what you had for the land. Some of the designs, we usually have about 10 or 12 designs sent in to choose from. Some of them chose tanks, some chose a very flat area, to show it was the earth, and the desert, and that sort of thing. And none of the designs were terribly good, because the rules were so impossible really.

Did some people not want to do designs for something like the Gulf War, because they don't feel they were pro the Gulf War, does that come into it or not?

Well, they wouldn't submit if they didn't feel conscientiously interested or…

But presumably they're invited to submit?

Well, some of them were open competition, they just say there's a competition.

Who knows about the competition?

Well, they send it out to all the schools, and to known sculptors, yes. And the, we usually get about 12, but they're nearly always from the same old lot, you know, who have learnt, learnt how to fight their way through the Royal Mint rules, and that sort of thing. The winners get paid a small fee or a Prize. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 358

Do you get paid?

No, the Committee isn't paid, they just have fun. So that's rather enjoyable. There were two of those exercises which I enjoyed very much. And the other one was the National Portrait Gallery. I was a Trustee for some time. And there you have to decide on three things: is the person, man or woman, distinguished enough? One, to go in the National Portrait Gallery. Two, is the picture, drawing, painting, watercolour, good enough? And thirdly, can we afford it? Because if you have some wonderful picture of some 18th Century admiral, which costs 2 or 3 million pounds, there's your whole year's money gone, you see. So if you can't afford it, you can't afford it. So we had two or three historians on this, who decide who, how distinguished the man was, because I mean, there were certain people you'd never heard of. And then there would be somebody, a painter, or two painters, who would advise us on the quality of the painting. And the third one was, can we afford it, it was just the director who would say, "well, we, we can't manage that". And the arguments were very interesting. We had a very splendid Socialist lady on it who, quite rightly, was fighting for more Trades Union figures. She said it was all full of the upper classes, the National Portrait Gallery, and not enough of, well, obviously a man like Aneurin Bevan would be in, but there might have been some splendid ... the man who ran Toynbee Hall, for instance, in the East End for years and years and years, who certainly ought to have got in, and so she would battle away, quite rightly, for those, and she usually won, providing the picture was good enough. But there were so many of the people that actually one hadn't heard of. And I remember an admiral, I'd never heard of. And I said, "did he ever win a battle"? And they said, "no, he never won a battle, but he invented some new form of steering for ships, which revolutionised naval tactics, in about 1782", or something. "And although he's totally unknown, he really made us win all these battles, which we did around that time." So he got in alright. Although we were all looking down our noses, we'd never heard of him. So that was great fun. And I was very sad when that, when I had to retire from that after my period of office. And I had one other Trusteeship, which was the Natural History Museum, but that I didn't enjoy much, because they were all scientists, and they talked in initials, and in Latin names, for things like, it was botany and fish, and birds and ... and mostly it was, it was scientific research they were talking about, to which I could contribute nothing. I mean, all I could contribute, was, do we repaint the doors black or yellow, or whatever it might be. That was the sort of thing I was asked about, which I didn't feel was very useful. Or whether some dotty old member of staff Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 359 should be kept on out of mercy, because he hadn't done a stroke for about 12 years, you know, looking out of the window. And my view on that, I suppose, is no worse than anybody else's really.

And what about your connection with the National Trust?

Well, that went on for a lovely long time. I was on the Executive of that for about 15 years, I suppose. And when I started, it was, it was still pretty aristocratic landowners, and scholars, architectural scholars and historians. And the Chairman was a man called Lord Esher, who, who was a great amateur architectural critic, and very cultivated man, who could write ... a very amusing man. And he was succeeded by Lord Antrim, who's just as good, equally funny. And again, we had historians, landscape architects, and animal experts. And the agenda was so extraordinary. I mean, item one might have been foot rot in West Wales, or something, among the deer. The next one might be nude bathing on National Trust property in Cornwall. The next one would be the condition of the van Dykes in some country house. And the next one would be, what do you charge for tea in some famous house, or something. They, all these, you jumped, absolutely over high fences, into another field, and it was a, it was a ... we had our experts, of course, but the, the Committee was one of generalists, really. Old-fashioned generalists. And being landowners, they knew a bit about deer, and they knew a bit about van Dyke, and they knew a bit about what to do with a herbaceous border. And they were very good on, particularly, because the National Trust is really, best known, perhaps, for keeping old houses and buildings and things, but, of course, most of it is coastal walks, and meadows and ponds, and bridges, bird sanctuaries, coppices, peat fields, all of which require quite a lot of scientific knowledge to make any sensible comment upon. So you kept quiet half the time. And spoke probably too much when you thought you were on a field you knew. But it was very very interesting. Every meeting was interesting, although certain people didn't like each other, and quarrelled, and there was always, always, somebody who was crazy about closing footpaths, and somebody who was crazy about badgers, and somebody really crazy about shooting, and those are the, the ill-tempered problems which came up in the Annual General Meeting, when people really thumped the floor. And I enjoyed that very much. And, of course, the National Trust is now, its main problem is success, you see, they've now got a million or whatever it is, members, and all their properties are pretty well overcrowded, and the gardens get battered into mud, and the carpets get battered into fluff, and then people come into a room, and finger the curtains, and they're Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 360 worn away in about a year, I mean, it's just ... nothing there. And so they then, now have to decide, do they restrict membership? Do you say, well, you can go on a waiting list? But, of course, they long for the subscriptions, so they hesitate from doing this, but it is, success is a great danger in these exercises. And they're just beginning, what the Americans do, when you go to a famous house, for instance, or a famous garden, you're not allowed to walk straight in, you buy a ticket for 4 o'clock, or 4.30, or 5.00, when you get there, and that means that your party is not trampled underfoot by other parties. And it works quite well. I mean, it's very annoying if you've driven a long way, and you want to get home again and you can't get in until half past four. But it's a great success story. And I found, lecturing on the National Trust in Europe, people are very surprised about it. They can't understand how the land and houses are given away by people. And if you go into the Lebanon, for instance, I remember lecturing there once, in Beirut, and all the beaches there are covered with barbed wire from the hotels, and they run the barbed wire right into the sea, so that if you're in that hotel, you're allowed to bathe in it, but if you're a citizen, absolutely not a hope. No, no business about beaches for everybody, or anything like this. They do find it extraordinary.

And your work for the National Trust was unpaid, or not?

We've done work for them, yes.

No, but when you were involved with it, it was mainly as a Trustee, I mean, was that paid?

Yes. I didn't, I didn't do ... we've done, I think, three, three actual buildings for them, which is nice to do, and, but they normally, it's organised in regions, and they normally have regional architects. If you're up in Yorkshire, for instance, you have Yorkshire architects, and in Kent, you'd have Kentish architects, and they have a sort of stable of people who can be trusted to handle a crippled old Tudor cottage, or a collapsing castle, which is a very specialised job. And they build a few new little buildings like visitors' centres, and, and cafes, and ...

So which were your buildings?

I did a Memorial Arch at Polsden Lacey, to a Mrs Greville, who was, it was the house, in fact, where Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother spent her honeymoon. It's near Dorking. A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 361 very pretty Regency house, a bit more modernised. And she left a lot of money to build a memorial arch, and the National Trust was very cross about this, because when they took the house, they wanted the money for repairing the roof, or rewiring it, or, you know, or doing something useful. But they couldn't get out of the legal ... so a little competition, which I won, for the memorial arch, which had to be high enough to get a Green Line bus through, and I did something that looked rather like Leningrad, it was in sort of dirty yellow stucco, with white trim, and a slate roof. And it looks very well, I think. And another one, we did a visitors' centre down near, in Surrey somewhere. And that was done by one of my partners. And I found working with the National Trust was lovely.

And the other work you did, sort of advisory work, that was unpaid was it?

Yes.

So what do you feel about public service, in general?

Well, I was brought up in a generation when people didn't question it much. I mean, a lot of public service is paid. I mean, I think if you're a local councillor you get a, used to be you get your expenses, but I think you get a wage now, don't you, if you're a town councillor in Leicester or somewhere, you get a salary of some kind. And, no, I think there's a terrific lot of public service done in this country still, an enormous amount. And I think people enjoy it, for all sorts of reasons, some respectable, and some perhaps not respectable. I mean, some people like it because it gives them a sense of importance and power, which, if they don't get in their ordinary employment, they find is enjoyable. But most people, I think, really give it because of interest in ... I mean, you can't ever say it's not interesting work, because of the variety. I mean, if you, I mean, you may be wanted for your opinion on irises in Cumberland, you know, or something like that. And you maybe happen to be the chap on the regional ... who knows about them, and so he has his fun for his moment. And the next item is, how do we repair the chimneys on, on Drogo Castle, which have leaked ever since they were built. And then you have somebody else who's ... of course, you have your technical people as well.

Has power been something you've wanted?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 362

I don't think so, actually. I don't think I've ever searched for it, because I've been lucky enough to be in a profession which is inevitably powerful. I mean, if you're an architect, you are in charge of things, and you are in charge of people's future lives, really, if you think about it. And if you're designing a, a factory or a church, or a house, or an office block, people are going to use the thing. And the decisions you make are going to make quite a difference to their life, probably, which I think, most architects worry about, because you have three levels of client, you see. You have the client who's paying for it, you have the people who are going to live in it, or work in it, and then you have the client which is London, or the street, or England, if you like. There you are, sticking up a great thing in the street that wasn't there before, and that's a responsibility, and you could say it gives you a sense of power, but it also gives you a sense of nerves as well, and I think, if you're a first-rate artist, which not many of us are in our profession, you're rather more merciless, because you're putting up a, in your view, you tend to be, I think, pretty dominating, and say to yourself, I've never been like this, but ... I sense you to say to yourself, "look, this is going to be a masterpiece. The moment I listen to what the Houndsditch Residents Association says, I'm chipping a bit off the masterpiece, making concessions, and so, alright, I'll make it four feet less high, and paint it red instead of blue, or whatever he says." You never, in the end, you never get a building which has had the control that you can get from a single vision. That's why a lot of architects, and not a lot of them, I mean, a few architects, who are in the top rank, are, are tremendously obstinate, as they should be really, if they're artists. On the other hand, you have to, this awful business, you have to feel that you're a citizen as well, but other people are going to use this thing, and if you condemn them to live in a room without any windows, because it looks, the building looks better, in a way, you've cheated half the programme. And I think, I've been, I've never been a first-rate architect, because I concede too quickly, not to be agreeable, particularly, but to, because one's sense of, of, I don't know what you call it, responsibility towards other people.

And did you ever want money?

Did I ever want money? Well, I was brought up in a very thrifty family. And none of my family were rich, my parents on either side. My father's father was an organ builder who went bankrupt in the end. My mother's father was a barrister, who went to Burma to make a living, which he did, quite a good living, which was easy to do, the competition was minimal. We were strict middle-class, sort of civil servants, army officers, clergymen, all that sort of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1880-B Page 363 grade of people. And my parents, as I say, were thrifty, and they, they always travelled second class on the P&O to India, never first class, saving money for my education, that sort of thing. But we were never, we were never hungry. And we had a small family car, and we used to have a servant, for quite a long time, living in, till about the, till I was about 15, I suppose. But we were, we were, as I say, brought up in very middle-class sort of setting, which is very agreeable. And we found, and we, we never went to the opera, or ... we'd go to the local Rep and that sort of thing, but we lived modest lives, and architecture, I knew, was a ... a way to wealth if you were smart at that sort of thing, but it wasn't a way to wealth if you weren't smart at that sort of thing, and I've never been very good at financial enterprise, partly because I don't understand figures very well, can't read a balance sheet, even at 81, still can't! Really can't! And so I was never going to make money. But I could have made a better living, no doubt about it, if I'd gone in to public service, if I'd gone into the Westminster City Council as an architect, or assistant, I think I could probably have risen, or into the Ministry of Works, I could have risen to a pretty well paid position, without any responsibility, in the sense that the Ministry took responsibility if the telephone exchange fell down, not me. But I didn't want to do that, I wanted to go on my own. And so, I've found the first list of jobs we had, and one of the first 12 we had, I think, was a coal scuttle, and I remember that was a job in the office, for about a week, designing a coal scuttle. And quite difficult it was, too.

But did you want enough money for certain things for your family, for instance? I mean, did you have some ... was there some degree to which money mattered to you?

Well, I think, in, in our period, in our social layer, we did, we did save up for education, non-State education, for the three children. But the grandchildren, looking back, I think we ought to have been more generous than we were, in that they all went to State schools, partly because the children wanted it that way, for our grandchildren, and then the father of one of the, one of my sons-in-law, had an education bursary for his two children, so to speak. But the others stayed in State schools, which, I don't think, was a great success really, for the grandchildren. I think they came out under-educated really. I mean, they weren't unhappy or anything, but it ... it was, our own children went to boarding school, all three of them, and I think they were no more miserable than anybody else.

End of F1880 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 364

F1881 Side A

... that you've got the plans from the South Bank Board, that you were saying were being kept rather secret before. What are they?

Well, the South Bank Board, which is in charge of the South Bank site today which is June 1st ...

Its actually June 3rd!

Well, the South Bank Board which is in charge of the future of the old South Bank Exhibition site, and today, June 3rd 1991, published preliminary proposals for the development of the site, which has remained deserted and derelict for nearly 40 years.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Since we last discussed the problem of the South Bank, opposite the Houses of Parliament, the future of the old exhibition site, has been in the hands of the South Bank Board, and today, which is June 3rd, 1991, they published preliminary proposals, in very outline form, for what they are intending. The site at the moment has three big cultural monuments on it - the National Theatre, the Festival Concert Hall, the Hayward Gallery, and the two subsidiary concert halls within its belly. Those are the three main things. But the rest of the site is really derelict, awaiting future plans. Now, the South Bank Board, who are charged with the responsibility for doing something about this, decided, apparently, not to have a press conference today, but just to send a Roneo'd copy of their ideas to the main newspapers for information. I don't know whether this is because they don't, at this stage, want questions, or why, but anyway, they've, they've sent the ideas. And roughly speaking, they are keeping the promenade along the river, quite rightly, because that's going to continue right down the river to Tower Bridge, eventually. They are keeping the Jubilee Gardens, which is the big green lawn near County Hall. They're putting all the cars which, at the moment, litter the whole site, underground. They are pulling down, or proposing to pull down the Hayward Gallery, art gallery, with its two concert halls, which will involve them being replaced somewhere else, because they are in continuous use. They're leaving the Festival Hall and the National Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 365

Theatre untouched. And they're putting in a certain number of shops, and cafes and things. But this is only the first stage, and none of the designs have been published for these buildings, merely the positions of where they are supposed to go. They will improve access for scenery and stuff to the Festival Hall, and also to the National Theatre, which is very bad at the minute. And it's impossible to tell, in fact, what any of it will look like, because there are no designs, it's a statement, a diagram of intent, really.

So it's not, in some ways, quite as bad as you feared?

No. I ... well, I think the disappointing thing is, really, that the idea of the whole of that site was that it was to be dedicated to public pleasure and leisure. And in order to pay for some of these things, they are going to put up offices, inland from the river. The site of the Hayward Gallery, for instance, is going to be an office block now. And what I would have liked would have been for an international competition for the whole site, so you'd have had a really visionary, I hope, proposal for that. And the Government should, in fact, be the developer, and undertake it, as they would in Paris or Amsterdam, or any civilised city. And what the Government has done, of course, is to say they won't do anything about it at all, it's up to the South Bank Board, who have to find entrepreneurs who are prepared to put money into it, hope to get their money back, and obviously have to keep a very sharp eye on, on costs, and drama, if I can put it that way. So I think, when I think this is the finest site in London now, empty, and to leave it to the ingenuity and enterprise of two or three private people, on a site facing the Houses of Parliament, on the Thames, seems to me rather an old-fashioned way of doing it.

Do you think any of the pressure that you and various other people put on, about that site, both through what Baroness Seear was doing over County Hall, and the speeches, for example, in the Festival Hall, on the anniversary of the Festival. Do you think that had any impact at all?

Well, I don't know. I rather doubt it. The County Hall is now empty, and derelict, and on the market.

So that's not included in this plan?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 366

No.

That's outside it.

They can't ... they can't, actually it's not their job. The South Bank Board stops at County Hall. County Hall belongs to the undertakers, the funeral directors of the GLC. When that died, there was a thing called the London Residuary Board, which took over everything, the GLC, all the schools, and sold them all off, and they are in charge of selling County Hall. So God knows what's going to happen to that. Now, I think the, there are two dangers I think, is one leaving it to, to private, private enterprise, which they did, of course, with Canary Wharf as well, which means that you, you get involved in this sort of minuet of entrepreneurs, who I'm not saying are unenlightened or anything, they have to watch their budgets and their returns, and their shareholders and things. And I don't think that's the right thing for that particular important site. I mean, you wouldn't do it in Trafalgar Square or anywhere else, so I'm disappointed with that. And the other thing I'm disappointed about is that the, they say that they're going to hand the buildings out to different architects to do, so the ... and the other risk of that is, that the experience of the last 10, 10 or 15 years, is that there is a sort of treasure list of, of architects who get always put on the same list. Not because they're anything but good, I mean, they're good architects, and, and serious architects, but they come up over and over and over again, and you get whole areas of London being done by the same firms, and the younger architect never gets a break, you see. The advantage of a competition is that some, somebody suddenly swoops through from the bottom with a really splendid idea, and there's a building. And if you go, you see, what happened in the thirties and the First War, was that there were two or three firms in London, which built acres of London, really acres, because they were competent, quick, kept to their budget and their time, knew all the planning officers, knew the side way through the corridors of planning permissions and things, extremely efficient. Very dull buildings, very boring a lot of them, and they have masses of them. And I think the danger is that you form a little cosy group like this, and you don't really let opportunity come up from the bottom. So that's my, that's my sadness about it.

Interview 18 June 1991

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 367

A long time ago, on another tape, we talked about the Homes by the Million book that you did. But there was an early book you did with Betjeman, wasn't there, about paint and colour, I seem to think?

Yes.

Can you tell me about that?

Well, in, in between the wars and the last half of the thirties I was a young architect working as the single assistant to Christopher Nicholson, and I used to bump up my income with odd jobs, like measuring up mews garages, for estate agents, so they could convert them into houses. I never had the job of conversion, I only did the measuring up, which was very boring, but not badly paid. And I also did quite a lot of, of very trivial journalism for women's magazines, and architectural papers. None of them serious, critical work, but just very day-to-day architectural journalism, talking about new buildings, really news items and a bit of gossip column stuff. And I also wrote for women's magazines, what to do with that cupboard under the stairs, or how to convert the loft into a children's playroom, or watch out for dry rot, and that sort of thing. And, at the same time, I was assistant editor to John Betjeman, who was the editor of a magazine called Interiors, which had been founded by Robert Harding. John was the editor, I was the assistant editor, doing a weekly description of a ... some what I considered to be good interior, public or private. And Robert Harding, in fact, nearly wrote the whole of it. John was the editor, but didn't write very often. But from that, came an invitation from a paint firm called Duresco, to write a little history of the use of paint in interiors, which John and I collaborated in, and this was a, it was really a little sort of Penguin-sized book, which I think they sent to clients. It was vaguely historical. John did the historical bits, and I did the contemporary bits. And that was really, it was the first time I'd ever collaborated with John, and we spent most of the time giggling, because he was a hilarious companion always. And ...

In what way was he hilarious?

Well, he had a, he had a very good playful way with words, and with attitudes, unexpected criticisms, and I think he was a slightly professional, not quite a wit, I suppose you could call Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 368 him a slightly professional wit, that he regarded himself as an entertainer. But he had periods of great melancholy, when he did find it difficult to work on trivia.

When you were working with him, was he consistent, or would it, I mean, over that book, would he have been roughly the same at each meeting?

Well, you can't call it a book really. It was really a rather fat brochure.

It's in the RIBA Library, isn't it?

I'm amazed to hear it! Because I thought it was really a little advertising book, and I don't think anybody ever bought it, I think you were sent it free, via the paint company, to encourage you to paint your bathroom.

Was he really interested in that sort of thing?

I don't think he was interested in that particular little book. He always had interests very close to the surface of his life, then you could prick that skin, and out would come little eruptions of interest. And often, I think, slightly self-consciously outre or provocative. But he was a terrific professional. And I think he turned up on time with his, with his scripts and things, and later on, when he went into television, I think he did very little script writing, but he was very seldom, in fact, I think, ever, stuck for a word or a sentence, or a view. So he had, I suppose, what appeared to be a slightly superficial attitude to things, but I think he felt very very deeply about most of the things he wrote about, and cared about. And in his published books, his guide books, and he was editing the Shell Guides and, he was really, I think, very innovative, and perceptive, and drew attention to things which normal people wouldn't notice. Which is why I think his guide books, he did a series of talks about places like Bournemouth, and Plymouth and Worcester, places which were not tourist traps at all, and made them interesting. But he'd also go to a tourist trap, like Stratford-on-Avon, and not be funny about it, facetious about it, but to see what the point was, and what was worth looking for. Because he had a wonderful eye, and that poet's choice of words, which I found magical. And he taught me, I'm sure, a great deal, when we were working together.

What sort of things would he have taught you? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 369

How to avoid reaching for the obvious, I suppose. And to look a bit harder. I mean, he would have, I think, approve very much of Ruskin's rule, that you mustn't look at things, you must watch them, which I always thought wonderful advice, and he did watch things.

And when you were doing pieces for those sort of magazines, or thinking about the way paint was used in interiors, England was quite a dreary place in terms of interior design, wasn't it. And now we've gone, it seems to me, almost full circle. There was a period when it was exciting, when people started to be more alert to their surroundings, but now there's a terrible colour supplement way of living, which seems to me, everybody's values have gone rather wrong.

Well, it's certainly true that, I suppose, every magazine, and every newspaper, has design correspondents now. You can buy designer hamburgers, and designer shoes, and designer shoelaces for that matter. And designer has become a sort of buzz word, which is added to absolutely anything from anything from food to sock suspenders. And I think it has become degraded in that way, not because those of us who were in the business, in the olden days, wanted to hug the ... the capacity for creative viewing to ourselves, I really don't think that was the reason. It sometimes happens with academics, that they don't like giving away knowledge, because they want to hug it to themselves, because that's their only life raft they've got. But I think it's been pretty bad for designers, because the, the tremendous burst since the war, almost, I suppose, 25 years, but more recently still, the tremendous burst of ... that every magazine having a young designer staring moodily through black glasses out of the page, in ammunition boots, and being written up as, as a sort of guru figure. I don't think it's been really good for designers, because the real thinkers about design, I think, don't have that attitude, you see, I think the thinkers I was brought up to follow, or to not actually worship and respect, would be people like Pugin, and Ruskin, and William Morris, and Lethaby, and if you can, were to sum that up in a ridiculously oversimplified way, you would say that they believed that you could not be a good designer, unless you were a good person. That all design had a social, ethical, moral constituent in it, and I think it was Ruskin, but it may have been one of the others, who said, "it must have kindness in it". And the interesting thing about being a designer, I think, is that you're not just pleasing yourself. If you're a painter, you have nobody to please but yourself. You take the decisions, nobody else is involved, they'll like or not, as the case may be, but their lives aren't altered by it in a practical way. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 370

But, if you're a designer, designing a chair, or a kitchen, or a jam factory or whatever, you involve a lot of other people, not only the workforce, whom you must respect, not only the materials you're working for, which you must respect, but also the people, so far as it's possible, who are actually going to use it, or live in it. Now, the problem nowadays, of course, is that so many buildings, and so many things have an anonymous customer. You can build a very nice office block, but you have no idea what sort of business is going to go on there. Is it going to be largely male or female? Is it going to be largely machines or human beings? And you've lost that particular closeness, which the designer, in the old days, and the craftsman, I mean, if he was making a hay-rick, or a stone wall, or a barn, or ... simple things which he knew were going to be used in a certain way. He was very close to the client, even if he'd never met him. And now you aren't close to the client, because most of the buildings put up in cities, in the Western world, are put up by people who don't, aren't going to live there.

But the other problem to do with design, say, of furniture, or even hairstyles, the fact is it's inseparable from consumerism, isn't it.

Yes, it is.

And that's, to me, where it's become rather offensive. Because it's actually, I mean, you see people, men in particular now, with very carefully designed hairstyles, which no doubt, they think, defines them as individuals, but, in fact, they're simply buying a product. And it's that that I find disturbing, and in a way, something like Habitat was, on one hand, absolutely marvellous, because it woke everybody up, and made things accessible, and yet, in another way, people spend all their time thinking about whether their kitchen looks right, and fitting it up, and spending lots of money, and it's actually not very interesting in the end. It's, it should be something you do before breakfast, and then get on with living, and it's become something that traps people into being the point of their lives, almost.

I think it's possibly got so bad because of this ten years of boom, when there is a lot of spending going on, and people can buy things which they don't believe they will last in their houses for very long, and so you get people who are buying chic, or outré pieces of furniture, or whatever, which become conversation points, and are rammed down our noses and throats in the magazines, particularly in the magazines, and I suppose, with motor cars, it's not so bad Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 371 now, I mean, the, the sort of ridiculously over-finned American cars of the immediately post-war years, have all vanished now, and most cars are quite simple and quiet, and unostentatious. And the only absurdity is the person who has the personal number plate. You see, I mean, that is just a straight sign of insecurity, to have a personalised number plate. What does it mean? What it means is that when you see a car which is called a Rolls Royce, say RR 1, you immediately think, "I say, he must be rather somebody". Even if he is a very ordinary industrialist, living a very ordinary life, but in order to give himself a ... everybody wants to be somebody, and a nobody, don't they, that's fair enough, and you can do it by being really rich, or being really clever, or, or having a personalised number plate. And there was a great fashion for it, everybody putting dark glass in their cars, so you think, "oh, that must be a pop star". Because it's mystery ... "I say!" And the portable telephone is another version of this. You immediately think, "heavens, he must be in touch all the time with his lifestyle". I think the male sex are very very insecure in this, and they need these props, to convince them that they are not nobodies. And I don't think it's at all shameful to not want to be a nobody. But it's sad when you can buy a, somebody's gear to dress up in.

So where would you put the line between it being important to have well-designed goods for your home, and feeling so insecure if you haven't got certain things? Such as a fitted kitchen and all that. I mean, there's a very thin line, it seems to me, between consumerism and selling things, and feeling obliged to buy something. Or even not thinking, but buying something, and completely losing the impulse, so that one goes back to badly designed things that fall apart and look horrible. I mean, it's a ...

Well, I don't, you see, the ... there are certain countries which have always had a good steady standard of design for furniture, or architecture, cars. The Scandinavian countries are one, the Swiss are another. I think you could say that the Germans are the same. Italians produce wonderful designs, but also their bourgeois houses are just as hideous as any country in the world. But I think the Northern, the Northern countries, have always been very good, and, of course, the other people who are usually very good are the primitive and Third World people, because they've got very limited materials to work with. They know exactly what it's got to be able to do, to be able to cut down a tree, or hoe a crop, or cook a stew in. And they don't do more than adorn these simple objects, with traditional patterns, because they're the only ornaments they have. And so they, they keep what you might call simple basic rules of design, and they're doing it for themselves, you see, not for a market, in your point of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-A Page 372 consumerism. They make their own things. But it's, I think the television sitcoms, have a terrific influence on design, because every time you see a sitcom, you see a certain sort of fitted kitchen, and a certain sort of cushion and carpet, and curtain, which become a sort of norm, and you see them in the shops. And a lot of people buy them because you always have to tread this extraordinary line between being exactly the same as the people next door, but just a little bit different. And that balance is always difficult to maintain. And if you're sophisticated, you're probably better at it than if you're not sophisticated. But I think the design industry has become very very self-conscious, because everybody's camped on your door, saying, "what's new?" And novelty is a, very often a rather trivial quality, I think, in objects you use. You get shops called Novelties, in which you can see through the window, there isn't a single thing in that shop you could conceivably want. It's a novelty, that's all it is. You might sometimes give it away as a wedding present, I suppose! Toys for businessmen's desks, you know, America's full of them. And they're all symbols of the sort of support that most human beings feel they need, to face the competition of their companions. But I think, you mentioned just now, about Habitat. Now, Habitat, and to some extent, in a more old- fashioned way, Laura Ashley, both were sharp-witted enough to see that there was a gap to be plugged, that people hungered for the Laura Ashley printed fabrics, because they hadn't seen it for so long, and they for the simplicity of Conran's ...

End of F1881 Side A

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-B Page 373

F1881 Side B

... and they hungered for the simplicity of Conran's furniture, because it was easy to accept, it had, it had the gloss of the colour supplements, so you were in the groove, if you're a colour supplement world we live in. And because Conran was extremely clever, in that he combed the world for French cooking pots, and Japanese matting, and Czechoslovakian glass. I mean, he wasn't, he wasn't lazy about it, he actually combed, combed the world for these things, and if he couldn't find them, got people to do them in a similar way. And, of course, the success, success always brings failure afterwards, because people say, "oh, you've had this done by Conran's". Forgetting what an enormous contribution he made, actually, to the comfort and simplicity of a lot of sitting rooms in this country. And, indeed, in France too. He was rather like, you see, in my young day, there were about three shops where you could get what you might call Conran stuff, I'm talking about the thirties now. Heals, Tottenham Court Road. Gordon Russell, who was upmarket, and was still building in Gloucestershire, with lovingly hand-polished stick-back chairs, and also good modern furniture as well. And that was about, that was about the lot.

I think in Moggie's tape, she talks about one shop, possibly at Sloane Square, run by a woman, when you had just got married that had wonderful ceramics in it.

Ah! No, that, ... she ... that was Miss Rose, Muriel Rose. She had a little craft shop down in Sloane Square area, which sounds ordinary and twee enough, but in those days, she was a one-girl comber of the world for good pottery, good glass, nice furniture fabrics and things. I mean, the whole shop was the size of an ordinary living room. But she was a ... she had a very good eye, and if ever you wanted something which was really well made, and beautiful and pretty, you would get it there. And Heals was a sort of larger version of that, because they commissioned a lot of pottery and silverware, and glass, and those sort of things.

Did the woman with the shop in, near Sloane Street, did she close down because of the war?

Yes.

And did she ever open up again? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-B Page 374

Muriel, she, funnily enough, at the beginning of the war, she was our landlady, she had a house in Church Street, in Chelsea, and we lodged in there at the beginning of the war, when the first bombing arrived, and there was a bomb under the street one night ...

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

She never came back. She must have been about 50 at the beginning of the war, and I think she did certain advisory jobs for various people.

But she must have been a real one-off at that stage? I mean, it was quite remarkable, wasn't it?

Well, she was one of these people who, have an eye like a bird, you know, they can't walk into anything, without seeing something which is worth picking up. And she was very modest and quiet, rather like a little postmistress in a village, and we were very devoted to her. And she had a, I think, quite an influence, as indeed Heals did, at the time. Because Heals was a sort of large scale craft shop. I mean, the, the lady who ran the ... had an art gallery, called the Mansard Gallery on the top floor, it was run by a Mrs Morph, who was the wife of an architect, Edward Morph, who was an RA and rather distinguished. And she wore buckle shoes, and Augustus John pleated skirts and rather strong hair ornaments and that sort of thing. And she was rather alarming, but she, I think she had quite a big influence, too, because Heals in, you might roughly call the Home Counties, had a reputation for quality, but was quite expensive. If ... they made their reputation on good bedding really, mattresses and, and pillows and things, which they were very specialised in. And they had a huge success, and deserved it too.

But, I mean, when we were talking last time, in your flat, you were saying that most of your furniture was secondhand, and sort of came to you in a rather haphazard way. I mean, you never, at any stage, decided you were going to refurnish from top to bottom with Habitat furniture?

Oh Lord no! No.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-B Page 375

I mean, why not, if you were supposed to be so excited about modern design and teaching at the Royal College?

Well, I think the trouble was, when we were young, any what you might call, high quality international scale good designs, was totally beyond your pocket. I mean, you couldn't even have bought a new bad chair when we were first married, and we bought secondhand things off the pavement, like most young married people do, and a lot of it is extremely nice, and most of it was, in fact, not directly contemporary. We had very little contemporary stuff, because it was extremely expensive.

Now, I'm not implying any criticism at all, I just think it's interesting that someone who has been so associated with design, hasn't particularly possessed it, as you know, contemporary new stuff. It would almost be not surprising to come to your house, and find that it was absolutely full from top to bottom with metal things, or whatever.

I don't think, you see, I'm not myself an innovatory or very imaginative designer and I was ... such design work I did in furniture was hardly anything really. It was the days of fitted cupboards and fitted shelving, and so you got it out of your system in making a lot of the furniture part of the architecture, with bookshelves and cupboards and that sort of thing. And then you bought, well, we bought those huge old Victorian bulging sofas, and stick-back chairs, and, but not necessarily orthodox ones, I mean, a lot of them are pretty odd, they catch your eye as you drive past some old furniture store in the suburbs.

I mean, did you like, for instance, the furniture that Conran produced?

Yes. I thought, I thought the standard he had in his shop was excellent.

But you didn't want to own it?

But I didn't terribly want to own it, because it was such a stamp of a period and attitude, that it became rather dominant.

Did your children own it? Did they go through a Habitat phase?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-B Page 376

I think they might have bought the odd chair and the odd bed, and the dining table, and certainly quite a lot of kitchen equipment, which is excellent always. But they, they stick to, really, individual pick-ups, in their houses. Plus the fitted furniture which the, the husbands or the wives, according to which they were, designed themselves. So, I mean, Conran's difficulty has been the stamp, I think, of his design image, is so strong, that you immediately know where it's come from, don't you. And it looks, in a way, as if you've made no personal choice.

Well, I suppose that's my point about a lot of the so-called designer goods, is that people think they've made some great decision themselves, and, in fact, all they've done, is been sold something. Just like ...

Well, they've been sold an image, haven't they.

Yes, just like with certain rock music, they think it's very sophisticated to follow some part of it, and own all the music, and spend their time listening to it, and actually, they're just being sold to.

Mmmm. Well, it's the same, you see, once it becomes a sort of fashion, it's like everybody, overnight, has to wear long black stockings, and skirts about two inches long! And then 6 months, they're doing something else. Because that's cheap to do, you can change your appearance all the time, but it's rather expensive to do that with your house. And people who re-do their rooms, to bring them up to a new fashion standard, I don't think that all that number of people do that, do they?

But do you think it's better now than it was in, say, the forties?

Yes ...

I mean, that people weren't aware? I mean, do you think the general awareness is better?

Oh yes, I think ...

Or the selling is just better? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F1881-B Page 377

No, I think awareness is better. But you can't actually have it thrown under your face, night after night on the telly, you see furnished rooms, absolutely night after night, and they're very accurate on social structure, I mean, whether it's the home of a bus driver, or a duke, or a smart advertising agent, or something. The designers are pretty accurate, I think, in assembling the props and the sort of things that they ... you'd expect to see in those houses, and they are supposed to be trendsetter people, the people in ... but at any social level, the trendsetters either as layabouts, or as yuppies, or whatever it may be. I think telly's had much more influence on the, on what you might call domestic design than magazines, really, I would have guessed. I've no proof, but I would have guessed that, because it's being used all the time, and it's, it's now quite common to see a very ordinary, modest, three-bedroomed house as a background for a serial, which has a portable telephone, and ... not an exceptional prop, isn't it? I mean, and as these things move into general life, they become symbols, I suppose, talismans. I think, I think everybody needs these badges, you see, in Russia, it seems to me they have all these medals which go from their collar to their waist, which establishes a stature in society, which people seem to need, and not unnaturally, and you can do it with props in your room, but the thing about the Conran experiment, I suppose, is that nobody wants to be too dashing, that they don't mind buying a rather difficult picture, say, providing it's done by a child, or a prisoner or a mental patient, because then you get credit for being rather nice, and supporting people who are hard up, or in some way deprived. But if it was a difficult picture by somebody who's very ordinary, not a huge millionaire artist, I think people are rather nervous, and refer to it rather laughingly ... "my husband rather liked it, and picked it up ... funny little gallery ... Nero or somewhere". It's all, it's all very interesting, and I'm not a sociologist, or you could study all this minuet that people dance through their lives. It would be very interesting.

End of F1881 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 378

F2837 Side A

Was Norman Foster chosen by the Academy, or was there any kind of competition? How did it work?

We didn't have a competition. We have, we have about 20 or so architects, members, and the only decision taken was that it shouldn't be a member to do it, and I think the general consensus, without any argument, was that Norman Foster is our best British architect at the moment. And so he was asked to do it, and although he was very busy with doing a big arts centre in Nimes, and work in Germany and Stansted Airport, he's a very busy architect, he took enormous personal trouble with this, because it was a, actually, a very intricate, entertaining thing. And sometimes much more interesting to do a small thing than a very big thing.

You haven't been to Stansted Airport yet, have you?

No. We've several times made dates, well, with Norman, and we're now not going to do it until September, I think.

... Norman Rosenthal has made quite a lot of controversial statements in the press, and I wonder what you thought about them?

Oh well, I've only seen one controversial statement. I think that Norman is a man of enormous enthusiasms, and they're so strong that he, that he really almost explodes with excitement about it, which means that he has a degree of impatience with artists' work that he doesn't like, and there are quite a lot of artists he doesn't like. And he's particularly knowledgeable, in fact, about contemporary German art, I mean, by contemporary, I mean in the last 20 years. And, but he's, he's pretty good on French and Spanish and American as well. And he's been a great success as an organiser. Being an enthusiast always means you're difficult, and if you're discussing at, at Council Meeting of the RA as to what exhibitions we do next, we usually have about half a dozen ideas, and I always watch Norman's eyes, because they roll up to the ceiling, with a heavy sigh, when certain people are mentioned! Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 379

Like who?

I can't remember now, because, I mean, there are quite a number. But I think the ones he loves ... are sometimes quite ... unknown in this country. I mean, as I say, I think his main interest is in, in modern German. And he, he organised these three exhibitions we had of post-war German, post-war Italian, and post-war English exhibitions, which we had, in sequence, to see what everybody was up to, and who was influencing who. And he was very good on this, because he's very knowledgeable, and knows where things are. And I think, I think he's rather like a sort of prickly pear, roaming around the place, you know, drawing a bit of blood every now and again as he, as he goes. But he's been a great success. And I am very pleased that I, I am, I recommended he be hired, because there were all sorts of warnings, you see, about prickly pears, you know, because they, they, they don't pour cream over everything, but they do stimulate you, even more, they annoy you.

Yes. You had quite a lot of people write to you to warn you against him didn't you?

Not a lot. I had, I think, I had three specific warnings that he was, he was very difficult, that's the usual phrase in, in the sort of discreet way people say. "Awfully nice chap, you know, but a bit difficult. And I think, perhaps, he wouldn't be quite right for the Royal Academy ..." you know the sort of thing. Well I thought these all sounded rather points in his favour, and ... and, of course, he wasn't used to the discipline. When he arrived he'd had little discipline at the ICA, but the, that if you find him rushing off to Rome to look at a picture, you see, well, I mean, that was sort of 500 quid gone, you see. And it isn't, the Academy is not at all rich, and you didn't actually have to claim your bus fares or get permission to go to Sheffield, but Norman started off in very ... ambitious way, by foreign trips. But then one got to know him better and, and found that, that he never went anywhere for anything but very good reasons, and he was sensible enough to stay with friends, of which he'd got very many all over the world. And, in fact, in the last, he's been there about 12 years, I suppose, now, and I think he's extremely well-known all over the world now, in the, in the art world.

Didn't you say he was soppy about babies?

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 380

Yes. That was interesting. He had a, he had a sister, who got married and had a baby, and, and she used to come and see him at the Academy, and he used to take it from her arms and carry it around the place for hours, absolutely besotted. And then he got married himself, and has just had a baby. So whether he'll ever look at a picture again until the baby's grown up, I don't know! There'll probably be another one then! But it was, it was a, it was an unexpected chink, if that's the word, in, in his make-up.

And the other gallery that's recently opened is, of course, the National Gallery, and you went to the opening of that, didn't you?

Well, I was involved in that thing for quite a long time.

We did talk about the ...

Competition, the previous competition.

... problems. And then we talked up to the point that Sainsbury had taken over.

Yes, well, the, the decision of the Sainsburys to give one of their huge donations in the art world to, that family, to England, was a huge relief, because it meant that the new gallery was totally for the arts, and was not, in fact, as the original idea, we were going to have a ... knock offices with a couple of floors for pictures. That was all the government was prepared to give. It was very good, but that was dropped when the Sainsburys came along. Sainsburys conditions were, I think the only condition was that they could choose the architect. And they went travelling in Europe, in America, ………. (INAUDIBLE) and meeting architects, and those chose Robert Venturi and his wife Denise, who are very celebrated architects in America. Not, not known here, they haven't done anything here. And it was, in a way, a surprise appointment because, to the, the don architectural circles, he was a totally unknown choice. An extremely nice man, and a quirky architect, if I can put it that way. And he, he's very very thoughtful, which always comes out in his buildings, that he thinks things out. And his thoughts are pretty odd from time to time. But he's very good at defending them. His wife is a very close partner of his, and ...

She's quite fierce, isn't she? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 381

She's ... she comes from South Africa, originally, Denise, and she's, I think she feels like so many wives of architects do, that they're treated with some ... I don't quite know what the word ... not ... lack of the ... professional respect which they'd get if they were men, because the proportion, I'm ashamed to say, in this country, women architects is 15 per cent. I think in most countries in the world, it's more like 30. And, of course, in the, in the old communist world, it was a straight 50/50. And Denise, and I was talking to Robert one day, in the National Gallery, I met him about a couple of years ago, and Denise was there, and somebody came up and said, "ah! Mrs Venturi I'm told you're an architect too". "No, I'm not," she said, "I'm an architect." So that was bang between the eyes for him. She feels very very strongly about this.

I mean, do you think it, it's worse for the female architect if they're married to another architect, than if they're just married to a vet, or something?

No, I think they have a pretty hard time. And I think it's probably easier, in a way, if they're married to an architect, because ... somehow it brushes off both ways. And I think that's good for the husband architect, I think, to have a ...... a wife whose an architect. I think it's a good idea. At least, I found it so. And we've always had ... jolly nearly 30, 40 per cent of women architects in our little firm, which is very small, it's only about 20 people. But when it was ...

By chance, or by conscious choice?

I don't think we looked, I don't think we searched them out, but we didn't dismiss them as they came through the door, as some architects do. I remember when my wife went to South Africa when she was in her fifth year, and she got a job in an architect's office in Johannesburg, or Pretoria, and the man said, "I'm afraid I've, have to put you in a room by yourself, because if I put you in the general drawing office, they'll start throwing India rubbers about". And I remember that remark, which was sort of typical at the time, which is, of course, the thirties. But I think there's quite a lot of prejudice still. And I think it's difficult for them, I think site supervision is difficult for them, because the, the ordinary bricklayer does find it hard if a woman comes along and says, "that brickwork is absolutely terrible. They'll have to take down three foot of it and do it again." And some of, I think some workmen would only ... walk off the job. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 382

Do you think it was the Tories who, just after the war, when women were more used to (INAUDIBLE).

I suspect so. I think it's been gradually improving in, in, in all industries, and, of course, people worked, extra women in factories all through the war, and they had them on gun sites, and driving them through, through the Blitz, and women wardens and all sorts of things. I mean, women are, I suppose the drawback for women, is that they're often, they're such terribly good assistants, because they're meticulous, and, and very thorough, and very careful, and deeply loyal, more loyal, I think, if I can generalise, than men are, if the office is in difficulties and you want somebody to stay late at night. And I think that makes them frightfully good assistants, but it also slightly often prevents them from becoming principals.

You mean to say that they don't push enough, or because people want to keep them as assistants?

Well, people want to keep them as assistants, and I think a lot of men are resistant to sending a woman up to, to a huge meeting of the Hospital Board in Liverpool, for instance, to discuss a new design. But the progress they've been making in the last 10 years has been pretty extensive, but, sadly, the numbers are still low, and I think the interruption of marriage and family duties and things, and I think also the, probably the advice they get from careers masters at universities and schools. It's like if you say to an ordinary don, an extraordinary don, another member (inaudible) in Oxbridge, if you say you want to go into industry, they practically have a fit! Their eyes roll up to the ceiling and they tap their teeth, and say, "have you thought of the British Council"? And that attitude to industry in the universities, I think, spreads over a bit into the, what to a don, is a, is a trade really. I mean, they regard architects as sort of slightly jumped up plumbers, really.

Back to the National Gallery.

Yes, that's what we started with. Well, the, I never had anything to do with this particular building, because it was left entirely to the Sainsburys, and although I know the Sainsbury family very well, and have worked for them, and have built for them, indeed, I had nothing to do with this particular exercise. The brief had been written already, fairly quickly. What's Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 383 often overlooked, I think, is that the new galleries, in fact, a very high proportion of them, are not picture galleries. I mean, a lot of administration, and cloakrooms, and what you might call supporting activities - restaurants and that sort of thing. And I think, from the outside, the architects have been quite witty in, in, ... as you, as you know, the front, the front of the main building, the old building by Wilkins, is, is, got a lot of columns on it. And they got a lot of columns on it, because they were sold off when they dismantled the garden house stables, a job lot of columns, you see, and you could buy these, and they saved money by buying all these. And Wilkins were quite clever, they were arranging them, so there are rather more columns than you would expect, perhaps. And this, this annexe to this big formal building, facing Trafalgar Square, is quite a modest building, in fact, it's really very, very modest in size. And what he did was to set a ... run the columns out, and when they get to his building, they're fewer and fewer and fewer, and then, eventually, they disappear, as it were, as if like a half rubbed out blackboard. And that ... has reached a lot of criticism from people who think it's saucy and flippant and facetious, and, but I rather like it. I mean, what I liked about it was, he thought, he thought it through, and thought, the solution, do I go straight from columns to plain, or do I take the columns across as if nothing had happened, or do I do something half way between? Which is what he's selected, and I think it's quite a witty suggestion. And ... I know you could criticise it as being, being rather too jokey for a permanent building, but I think it's quite a success. The, the main criticism outside, I think, is that he's expressed the, the workaday side of it, the offices and that sort of thing, behind a plain brick wall, which makes it look like a laundry. I mean, the moment you turn the side of ... the stone stops, and you're ... white brickwork and a lot of louvres coming out of the air- conditioning plant, and that sort of thing. It looks very industrial. I don't know why he, he took the philosophy that once you get round to the side and the back of a building, nobody's going to see it, don't worry. But, in fact, they are two quite busy streets, and that's a great disappointment. As you remember, the, the main features, you come in on a corner, and you climb a great monumental stair, which is two storeys big, two high storeys, it's quite a climb. I mean, there are lifts, but ... periods of climbing up this painful stair, with a huge glass window on the right, through which you can see the old gallery, and also the buses hurtling round, or rather, crawling round Trafalgar Square, is nice, you see, because in most galleries, you know, all curators hate windows. This makes them, I think, all galleries, a bit claustrophobic, with top, top light is, in fact, in a way, an oppressive light, and I think ... and they don't like windows. And I was so pleased when I went to Yale and saw the Paul Mellon Gallery of English Art, and the architect was an American called Kahn, and he'd got Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 384 windows. And you can look out and see whether it's raining, or, or, or what the leaves are looking like. And you suddenly get the feeling of, of light coming in at your level, and not always beating down on your head. So the, a gallery which, in fact, has this huge staircase window, and sees life going on outside, I think, is a, is a great achievement. And it doesn't feel like a temple, like the old building does. But, of course, the jargon and the, and the, and the ... wizardry of the ... which people who know and handle art, is very tiresome. The sort of, they make you walk up, and they make their architects provide it too, they make you walk up flights of outside steps, to make you feel you're going to a place of worship. And then you go through the huge columns, and huge dark entrance halls, and there's a great feeling being in a temple, which, I think, can easily put people off. It was the, it was orthodox solution for art galleries all over the world, that these were temples, and you'd better jolly well take your hat off when you get near them. And the curators, traditionally, I think, are very ... how can I put it? They tend to hug their knowledge close to their bosoms and a little bit reluctant to give it out, because they feel that if they give out knowledge, they are reduced in some way, and they become not an archbishop, but a sort of verger. So I think, I think the general sort of sense of, of, of like upper-class servants look down their nose, or head waiters, when you come in, if you haven't got the right shoes on. And I think that put off a lot of people. Now, one of the nicest things about Burlington House, I think, that we have, I think, managed to keep, not exactly a totally domestic area, but the, but the staff are not sniffy, and you, you wouldn't be surprised to find a retriever tied up to a column at Burlington House. And I've seen mothers suckling their babies in the restaurant, that sort of thing, which, I think, you probably wouldn't find in the National Gallery. But, going back to the, the, the new addition of interiors, up the staircase, which is the main monumental temple side, but it's, but because of this brick window and the treatment, and the use of lettering, because I absolutely adore lettering, I think it enriches absolutely everything, and there's a lot of carved, incised Roman lettering, the names of famous painters. I can't imagine the committee that decided who to leave out, but ... with Raphael and co. And then when you get to the top, passing up past the restaurants and the offices and things, you then get to this, the outfit ... of galleries which are all modest in size, they're top- lit. No side windows, unfortunately, but it, rather enough daylight coming through the top. And they're, they're painted with a very pale cloud grey/blue colour, and I think most ingeniously, it looks, in a way, white, and then you suddenly see it's, it's grey, or pale blue almost. And the, the columns he's used, are that sort of grey/green stone you get in Italian Florentine churches. So when you go in, as the whole contents of the galleries are that particular period, early Italian, you really feel as if you're in Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 385 some huge church in, in some North Italian city. Faintly bluish and grey/green columns. And the pictures look stunning. And they've been absolutely beautifully hung. I don't think they could've been hung more, not only more delicately, but if they have a particular striking ... picture, then you see it best from about two galleries away, through a long vista. You suddenly see this great gold, scarlet and blue altar piece, or something, right at the end, and it's treated with a great sense of drama, and very sparely hung, I mean, absolutely the opposite of any overcrowding. And they've all been cleaned and, of course, look wonderful. So the, as a place, a method, and style and attitude to this display of the pictures, I think it is a huge success, and the, and the pictures really have been strongly coloured for the most part, on these very very pale, almost white, like, not quite what the colour is, it's rather like the colour of a vein on a, on a very white arm. It's very ... very very subtle. And the pictures seem to hold out their arms to, to say, and welcome you as you go past. They don't actually jump out of the wall, which are a bit disturbing, they are making, making an approach to you, which is ... I think, very moving. And as so many of them are absolutely world-famous, it's really like seeing old friends at a party. "Hello!" you say to yourself. I think it's, I think it's a great success and, but I think, on the whole, although it had endless parking, when the designs were published, and before it was finished, I think the general reception from the art press, and from the architectural press, and the lay press, has been pretty uniformly favourable.

And just some other things that are happening at the moment. There's been this big disaster of the Paul Neagu sculpture at Charing Cross, that you were slightly involved in at the beginning, weren't you.

The pavement?

No, the Paul Neagu sculpture.

Oh, that one. Well, I could say, last week, interestingly enough, the Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission, who is leaving shortly to become Master of an Oxbridge College, and he was Minister of Arts, St John-Stevas, made a public statement to the effect that he thought the pressure for sculpture in public places, had resulted in some pretty disastrous solutions, and he thought that not enough care was taken in the choice of sculptors, appropriate sculptors, or in the placing of them. As you know the system in, in Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-A Page 386

England is that planning permission has to be given for them, by the local authority in which they occur. You can get enthusiastic groups who are in favour of some fairly obscure, say, Quaker Revivalist who lived in, well, shall we say, Hitchin, and Hitchin wants to, the Quaker Body wants to put up a statue to him. They have quite a, quite a struggle to do it. You've got to get the, apart from getting the money, you've got to get enough public support to not get angry about it, because people are always pretty cross about new things happening in their neighbourhoods. And then you have to get planning permission. And not everybody is very good at choosing the right sculptors for the right jobs. Now, there are two sorts of sculpture, very loosely. One are the portraits of famous men, and old war leaders, for instance, who have been popping up around the Ministry of Defence, like General Slim, and Monty, and Alexander ... there are not many people, and Winston, of course, in Parliament Square. There are not many sculptors, in fact, who are actually interested in doing these monuments, so they, I suppose there's about half a dozen people who, who are prepared to take the ... project on, because, as you can imagine, you have a, you usually have a committee of, whose running the thing, who may be ... representing the, the Church or the Army, or whatever they are, who are not necessarily great judges of sculptural skill. And you usually have a sculptor, or a recognised expert adviser, or perhaps two, and then you have the relations of the, of the subject, if they're still alive. And so the committee, and maybe somebody who gave them money. So that sort of committee gets together and, and, and to create a monument like that. It's quite an achievement to get anything worthy of it done. I mean, I think, on the whole, the, the most recent ones have been really rather successful, and there have been one or two in the, in the House of Commons too, to famous, well, like Attlee, and other famous Ministers, recent Ministers. But it is tricky, it's a very very tricky thing, and successes are, are, I suppose, total successes, rather exceptional. Because it's an art form which, which has really ... been rather ... unpopular, amongst sculptors, shall we say, because the discipline's quite tough. I mean, if you're going to do Mountbatten, for instance, what do you do about his hat? Do you put it under his arm? Do you put it on the back of his head? Does he carry it? What about his binoculars? Do you want to make him look as if he is standing on the bridge looking out to sea? Or do you want to put him in a, in sort of undressed uniform, and rather relaxed? And I, I remember, ………………INAUDIBLE...came up through Alexandria with one leg on a jeep, and there are all sorts of difficult decisions which a sculptor has to take. But that's one form, which is the portraits of national figures.

End of F2837 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 387

F2837 Side B

There are... the second sort, which are, what you might call decorative. Their, their, their, their purpose is to commemorate an event, or to just provide points of interest and emphasis, punctuation points in the normal street scene. Now, that is just as hard as the portraiture business, because England's not very good about spaces between buildings, which I think are just as important as buildings, often very much more important than the building, really decent spaces. You see, most of the open spaces in London, for instance, are, in fact, traffic roundabouts. You can't really walk about Trafalgar Square, except in a sort of size of a tennis court in the middle. And the English, and Leicester Square, I think it's a nightmare. The difficulty is that the, the moment you get an open space, somebody comes full of, a sack full of, of litter bins, and bollards, and railings, and notices, and empties it over the square, so it becomes like a sort of chess board of not very acceptable objects. And then you put up, maybe a fountain, or, or maybe an abstract sculpture. There's a huge one, Paolozzi's in front of Euston Station. And Paolozzi's a very distinguished sculptor, of great imagination, and, and strength, and his work is capable of holding it's own, while the hurrying crowd's going off to catch a train back to, to Liverpool, or Newcastle, or wherever it is. But I've noticed, sadly, that nobody actually ever looks at it. And when I was working for British Rail, as a member of a committee on, on design, we had great arguments about when, when it was established that British Rail wanted to commission something to go there, and everybody was happy with the idea of Paolozzi, because he's a very distinguished man. But, in fact, I don't think it's a great success, because if you watch people, they don't look at it. And there were several alternatives you could have done, you see, I mean, you could take one wonderful great steam locomotive, and stick it up on a pedestal, and it wouldn't have been a piece of sculpture, in the sort of orthodox sense, but it would have great public interest. Everybody would stop and finger the wheels, and smear the brass-work and that sort of thing, wouldn't they. I mean, it would be a really wonderful object. Or we could have something which is sort of symbolic, like a huge flock of bronze sheep, say, walking across the concourse, you know, which is being, probably, rather facetious. But again, I've noticed, whenever you have an animal in a piece of sculpture, people come and smooth it, and wherever you go, if you go to Osborne, there's a white marble statue of one of Queen Victoria's dogs, it's absolutely inky black from people patting it as they go past. They don't admire it or anything, they stop and touch it. And I thought the abstract solution, favoured by Paolozzi, was, was certainly a distinguished object as a, as a, as a work of art, but hasn't, hasn't got, I think, the appropriate, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 388 to me, humanity, which you could have got out. Now, we had, now I was involved in another one, which is of a scheme by Westminster Council.

Can I just, before, you were about to talk about Paul Neagu.

What is he? Was he Nialgo, is it?

Neagu.

Neagu.

But before you do, since you've talked about Paolozzi, what do you feel about things like the Paolozzi tiles in Tottenham Court Road?

Oh, they are fine, I think. Paolozzi, in fact, has done a lot of public work. He's done decorative tile patterns. He's a tremendously ingenious and inventive pattern maker. And he's done some of the two platforms in, in Central London I think excellently. But that is, I think, where he's, he's been a terrific success. I mean, some of the Tube stations have been done pictorially. I mean, if you go down to some stations, they are vaguely representational of where the place is, if you, if it's near Sloane Square, it's slightly sort of Cremorne Gardenish, Battersea Parkish trellis, and that sort of thing. Sometimes when you get near a museum, figures out of history, and pictorial murals in tiles. Paolozzi's are all abstract, and, I think, very very good. But again, as one has to say, always public art is viewed with great suspicion by the English, because they feel nobody's asked them, and, "why have they suddenly stuck this up, just near my newspaper shop"? You know, "getting in the way". And there was one, a very abstract spiky job put up at Fulham Broadway, not so long ago, I mean, a distinguished sculptor, and a work of art. I would have thought, you know, in a park would have been splendid. But stuck there, with a lot of bus tickets swirling round it, in no way, and it looks incongruous, and, in fact, being rather, I can't remember what the sculptor is, I think he's quite a distinguished one, and I think, as I say, I think it's okay as a work of art, but it really looks terrible there, and everybody hates it. And the, and I think the citizens of Fulham were cross, originally, because they felt that nobody had asked them whether they wanted it, or what would it look like whether they ...

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 389

Do you think the ones that, say, Broadgate in the City, I mean, they're in an environment, but they're pretty badly placed as well, aren't they.

Well, I think it's, I think, to be honest, I think it's not the fault of the people who put the things up, or think of having them put up, it's the fault of the architects and the sculptors. You see, both of them, over the, in the last 50, 60 years, architects and sculptors have both got very big for their boots, and architects don't want a piece of sculpture, because it takes some, they say, "ah my building's a piece of sculpture, it doesn't want anybody else's pinned on like a ghastly piece of costume jewellery. Let my building be seen as it's meant to be seen." And the sculptor, I may be exaggerating over this, but as is often the case, and the sculptor is often very lazy, and says, "well, I've got this thing lying at the back of the studio, would this do"? Or doesn't take enough trouble to do more than his own gallery. If he'd have been through a Cork Street Gallery, he'd do the same thing but bigger. He won't be bothered to consider the light, and the, because they're all so grand. And in the old days, when you could ask, when I say the "old days", I'm talking a pretty long time ago, about 150 years ago, I suppose. Perhaps that's too far. That you'd get, you could go to a sculptor, and you'd say, "well, this is the problem", and he'd consider the light and the appropriateness of the problem, and the subject, and the ... and he'd place it well, you see. And he wouldn't, he wouldn't drag out a gallery object and just ask somebody to bang it twenty times the size, for the outside position. And I was considering looking at one the other day. Somebody was putting up a little statue to Mozart in, near where he lived, in Ebury Street. It's a bit of private enterprise. And a group of people who wanted to do this, and as it's sort of, Mozart as a child, when he was about eight or nine, I think this was, when he lived here in London, and it's a child sculpture, so everybody'll like that, in fact, you've got a fairly safe ground on, on ...

So …

But finding people who can do something which doesn't make it look huge, but will do it seriously, is not easy. So I think the whole sculpture, I rather agree with Norman St John-Stevas, that there's a lot of very unsatisfactory, or unsuccessful sculpture, and I think the fault really lies with the people who do it, not so much with the committees.

I mean, what do you think about the Peter Pan sculpture, for example?

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Peter Pan? Well, I think that's absolutely acceptable, and I've hardly ever passed it without seeing children polishing up the rabbit's ears, and things. I mean, he was quite a distinguished sculptor, experienced and ... un-Cork Streetish, if I can put it that way. If you, it's very difficult, not being an artist, to know what they, how they work, and what they think about. But if you're thinking under pressures from your dealer, as you probably are now, I mean, dealers discourage, I think, artists from working together, because they think some dealer's going to lose out on that. "I think my chap's better than yours", or the other way round. They discourage it. And the days when artists liked each other and worked together, and had groups and things like that, this new English club, and all those old sort of groups of artists that formed all over London, in the, I suppose, in the 1920s and the 1930s, met in pubs and things, that's all gone. And I don't know why that, why that is. It's what I can loosely call conviviality, seems to have totally vanished.

Do you think it's to do with England becoming much more of an international art world maybe?

I, no, I, I must say I blame the art market. I think the dealers and the auction houses don't like artists getting together and grumbling about their, their galleries. I really think they, I think they really, that is at the bottom of it. And they've built up the artist as a priest. I mean, when you think of people like ... the Victorian artists, you see, they, some of them are very successful businessmen, like Frith, and Leighton, and things, and they didn't, they didn't consider themselves as, as priests, they really didn't. They just had a skill and a technique, and you could say they weren't really great painters, and most of them probably were not, but they obviously, .... obvious exceptions. But the, the humility, in a way, I think, of that period of artist, I think is rather nice, and I'm rather sad to see it go. And this great bulge since the war, of building up the artists as glamour boys, and taking photographs of them in the colour supplements in dark glasses, looking mean, I think, hasn't been good for the arts, really. And following them to their favourite restaurants, and their girlfriends.

Didn't some of that come from the sort of myths about Paris in the early years, pre-First World War years, really? Of ...... (INAUDIBLE) Picasso, and Braque and…

Well, of course, they were...

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 391

... the restaurants they went to, and all that mythology that went with it? Isn't that part of it?

That was the sort of humbleness of it. You see, they were much more, I think, like out of work actors, in those days. I mean, they just ... peculiar men, they spent hours and hours and hours in cafes, talking, didn't they. And they seemed to like each other. All saw each other a lot. And I don't know where you'd go now if you wanted to meet a group of artists, who regularly met. Where would you find them, I wonder? Maybe it's necessary that they should see each other. Perhaps they're all living in Oxfordshire, or West Wales. But they, they got, I think, going back to this public, this public business, you see, of statues, or murals, or street architecture generally, it's a very vulnerable position to be in, with your work out in the middle of the street. But you get people like that girl who did the floor at Charing Cross Station, which was commissioned by British Rail, she did a decorative floor, or Waterloo, sorry, and I think she's done one at Charing Cross too. A very beautiful patterned floor, and everybody, everybody enjoys that. Nobody makes a fuss about it, or goes on their knees to pass their fingers lovingly over it, or anything, but you wouldn't expect that on a floor. And nor would she have done that sort of design to do it. So if you're, if you're careful in your, in your patronage, you can find people, I think, who are prepared to sink their egos for two minutes, into doing something which is appropriate to what it's going to do and be.

Do you like the new Charing Cross building, by the way?

... I actually think it's trying too hard, as a building. I mean, somebody remarked, ...... (INAUDIBLE), and somebody else said it looked like an old radio. And once you've got that image in your mind, it is exactly what it looks like, I'm really agreeing, rather. And I think what one doesn't like particularly about it is, that the inside of this very highly modelled envelope, you know, it really looks as if it might be some huge international market or something. Inside, it's just straightforward, ordinary old boring office floors, and you'd think, to put on a sort of overcoat of, of arches and, and curves and bay windows and things, over a very thinly clad vest and pants, so to speak, there's something rather unsatisfactory about it. Because you can't really see what's going on under, underneath all this great clobber of stuff. I think probably quite a lot of people like it because it's dramatic, and, but I think it's a bit of a bully on the, on the …………………..(INAUDIBLE) in fact. I really think, and at night it's, it's, I don't know whether you've seen it at night, it's lit like, like a, a Broadway cinema, which I suppose one shouldn't object to, except it's, it's only a railway station office block, and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 392 doesn't seem to me to have the dignity or the, of that, of that parade of buildings. And it's vulgar, I think. It sounds a silly thing, adjective, to use, but I think it is vulgar.

So, back to Paul Neagu.

Now, opposite, on that, on the traffic island outside Charing Cross, if you may remember this, first there's the sort of front yard to Charing Cross Station, and the hotel, and then there's a, the road forks coming from the National Gallery one way, and going out into Trafalgar Square, and the other, and in between them is the South Africa House, there was a traffic island which is very small, really, I suppose it was about 30 feet by 10, triangular, and Westminster City Council thought this was a good site for a piece of sculpture, which they would, in fact, pay for. And they had, as far as I remember, a limited competition among people, three or four sculptors, to what they would do with it. And it was won by, now, what was his nationality?

Paul? He's Hungarian, isn't he?

Is he Hungarian, or Rumanian? I can't remember.

Oh no, he's Rumanian.

I think he's Rumanian. A charming man, and a very good sculptor. Unfortunately he's, he was pretty ill at the time, and got worse, and he was really a sick man, all the time. Anyway, he won the competition, and it was an abstract, I thought a very fine work. It was sort of, looked like stratified rocks, and he'd, he'd been asked to introduce, if he could, this is the sort of thing that happens, some detail which implied that one of the patrons of the sculpture was ICI, and they would, said they'd give him what Perspex he needed to, if it was a Perspex object, which is obviously unsuitable, because Perspex gets cloudy and, and dirty, and smeary in the open air, in large pieces. So he was asked to work some of this in, and his solution, really, was a sort of a piece of a cliff, almost, and instead of streaks of silicone, you know, that glitter sometimes in rocks, you get these rather exciting lines, like contour lines, in thin shiny glitter. And that was his, his solution for this problem. But I, it was far and away the best solution, I think. And not solution, but as an art object ... but I thought at the time, and still do, that that particular island really wasn't big enough to take it. It was a very Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 393 strong, lonely thing, and, as it would be surrounded, within two or three feet by four London buses waiting to get past the lights, and light notices saying "Cross now", and all the sort of gear that, that city engine, road engineers put on islands, "keep left", and "push off", and all this. You can't put anything down in the street without it being a sort of saucer for an hors d'oeuvre of objects and bollards and God knows what! I thought it was going to have a nightmare time, trying to dominate this thing and not look as if it was like a beached whale, on a dirty old beach. However, sadly, he got so ill that he was ... never able to complete it, and the money ran out, and so it was one of those sad cases where nothing, nothing has come of it, and I'm in a way, rather glad, because I don't think, although I'm sorry for him, but I don't think it would've looked very nice there. I really don't.

But the whole thing was terribly badly managed, wasn't it, all round, really.

Well. I think Westminster ...

... the help with the finance.

Westminster City Council should be praised for having the initiative and energy to start the thing off, and to organise a competition, and to give him a prize, and a commission. But I think the, there was a failure in the management of, of, in what you might call the professional side of the sculptor's work, you see, it's difficult for sculptors. Henry Moore would never really accept a commission which had conditions on it, because, he said, "when you're working on a piece of stone, you don't know what's going to happen to it". And this wasn't just being babyish, when you have a general concept, as you work on it, things become slightly different in form, and you decide that perhaps it should be a bit harder, or knock a bit off here, and that sort of thing, and I'm sure, not being a sculpture, I've no idea how they work, but I don't think they ever quite know what it's going to be like, except in the general strong concept, and as you work on it, as in a picture, you alter it as you go. And I think the trouble was that the, the, the particular sculptor in this Westminster scheme, in fact, was working away, and as he wasn't well, he didn't, he didn't, he wasn't able to keep a, a continual flow of, of fast, you know, flying chisels in all directions. He was, he was a slow worker, and he, and the money began to ran out before he got about half way through it, and then he was ill, so, I mean, these things happen, and it was very sad for him, and sad for us, in a way. But if I'd had to buy the thing, I would have put it in a park, I think. But then you get into trouble Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 394 there. I remember, under, I can't remember who the Minister was at the time, there was a big Barbara Hepworth, down at Park Corner, somewhere near the, where they are digging the ? hole now, or something. A big abstract bronze. And suddenly some Minister didn't like it, and had it taken away, and nobody was asked whether they wanted it to start with, and nobody asked whether they minded it being taken away. Normally, what happens, I think, in most street sculpture, is that people get used to it, normally. If it isn't very aggressive, or tiresome, or hideous, people, and you say, "well, I'm going to take this away", then there'll be an outcry, you know, "we've got used to this, we rather like it". And I remember when I was concerned with some of these exercises, one could say, "look, it's only on loan. It's on indefinite loan. And one day, maybe, it'll go somewhere else", you see, and then that kills opposition at once. Because they ... you know, don't want to make a fuss if it's not going to stay there forever. And then when they got fond of it.

Do you like the siting of the Henry Moore in Hyde Park?

Yes, I, in Hyde Park, by the water? Yes, I think that's very well sited. And I think one of his most beautiful works, actually, too. Great strength. But he was a very very powerful, strong, sculptor, and had a great sense of place, too. But again, you see, he's got space round there, and that lovely reflective water sheet in front of it. A sculpture does need room, and if you cover it with little signs about "keep left", it's a doomed exercise. Look at poor old Shakespeare in Leicester Square, I mean, it's ludicrous, sort of thing. And there's another outfit, which calls themselves The Fountain Society, and they, they put up little fountains. Now, everybody rather likes the idea of little fountains, they are rather old-fashioned, and they're inclined to have cherubs holding conch shells and, you know, I mean, they're silly orthodox Edwardian stuff, which when it's done by Albert Gilbert or somebody, is lovely, but when it's not done by Albert Gilbert isn't, it's a bit trivial. And the trouble with little fountains, of course, is that somebody's got to maintain them, you've got to keep the plug, the drainage clean, and you've got to keep the water going, and so many of them, you see, are full of dead leaves and bus tickets, and neglected ...... (INAUDIBLE). So the whole, I think that public art, which is, everybody's going on about how clever they are in France, where they have a compulsory percentage which has to go to art, and I think they do, also I think, in some cities in America, and some States in America, and certainly in Germany, and that's a dangerous thing too, you see. "Oh God, we haven't used the £5,000 for a bit of art. What can we do? It's so late now ..." And they're longing to put an extra lift in or something, which is Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2837-B Page 395 much more what the client wants, you know, "but we've got to use this". So when the, I don't think that compulsion business is a very good idea, I really don't.

So do you think there is a solution?

A solution? No, no, I think an art system is, is a normal one, that you put up a piece of sculpture if you think the space needs it. And both the sculpture and the building, and the setting, would be improved thereby. But you, as I was saying earlier, you are dealing with the, with the, the tremendous ...... loneliness, or sort of self-imposed loneliness of the artist who doesn't like his work, so often, to be associated with anybody else's. And you go down in what you might call the second layer of what I would call the sort of artisan artist, whom I always greatly admire, who are totally professional in the sense that they really take problems like the weather and the light, and the traffic, and your neighbours, and the snags and the drainage, and all these technical things, which are disciplines, and one goes back again and again to Robert Frost's rule, that you don't play tennis without a net. It just simply isn't worth it, and unless you have a, a, a sort of set of rules and disciplines about what are imposed by the setting for these things. I may be wrong about this, but I do feel rather in praise of these people who do, I think, very very good witty sculpture. For instance, there's a girl who's done a garden bench in Nottingham, with a sheep sitting on it, with it's arms folded. You see, now that's a piece of sculpture which absolutely everybody loves. There are queues to be photographed sitting next to the sheep. And it's beautifully done, because she's a good sculptor, and I think she's been, perhaps because she's a woman, she's been sensible, and thought to herself, in this particular site, which is not a silent grove of trees where you can have a really commanding and rather terrifying monolith, she wanted to, this is a place where prams are being pushed, and balls are being thrown, and life's going on around it, and you can't be solemn, because you look daft. You take advantage of the situation. Now that, I thought was ... Brixton Station, for instance, I was concerned with another one where we had ...

End of F2837 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 396

F2838 Side A

Right, Brixton Station.

I saw a piece of park sculpture somewhere, by somebody else, which was three bronze deck chairs, you see, and people go up to them, thinking they're going to drag them to a place in the shade, and find they absolutely, weigh four tons each. And then the, and then they, again, they like sitting in them, being photographed in them, because, I mean, they just look like ordinary, suddenly get ... I can't remember what it's called, a sort of late flash when you suddenly get an unexpected reaction from what looks like a perfectly normal thing. And I don't think it's, I suddenly find ... always long for jolly jokes in sculpture. But there are places.

What were you just about to say about Brixton Station?

Oh, at Brixton Station, for instance, I was involved in that one again. British Rail had put aside a sum of money for a certain number of stations, not necessarily the grand ones, for art, it could be a mural in the waiting room, or it could be a, some sort of mad windmill device, which had flailing sails over the stuff. And in this case at Brixton, it was decided that they'd have three Brixton residents cast in bronze, and they got one girl and two chaps. And one of them was an African, and they, you know about these, there are systems by which you can actually cast people, and you stick straws up their nose so they can breathe, and you cover them with plaster, in their clothes and everything, and then out comes a total replica, brief case, unlaced shoes, newspapers under the arm, flat cap or whatever. And we stuck these three characters on the platform, at the top end. This was on the rail, British Rail, not on the Tube. And they've been much liked, and they're popular figures, and when they first came on, people couldn't understand, why are those people never getting on the train, they always seem to be standing there. But they've been a great success, and have become sort of, local figures, you see.

There are much more .....

It's not big art. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 397

No, but they are, actually, quite moving, particularly if you go through them on a fast train.

Very.

Whereas those cows at Milton Keynes, or whatever it's called are not, are they?

Nick Munroe's.

I don't know who did them.

Yes. I love those. You don't like them?

I don't care about them, but I do quite like the people.

I was brought up, I was brought up with, when we, in the fields, they used to have men carrying a plank saying, "horse distemper", two men in white overalls, huge giant men, walking through the fields, carrying this board.

What, you mean, cut-outs?

It was a, it was a, yes, cut-outs. It was a straightforward hoarding, but it was, but everybody looked for them. And they also, as far as I remember, carried these, the mileage to London, sort of 27 miles to London, or something. No, I like those sort of bizarre things. And there's some black horses cut out, careering across a field, somewhere in the Midlands, again under this British Rail art thing, and they were lovely. I mean, they were just cut out of black tin. This is all what you might call "second grade art", in the sense that it isn't gallery art. And that's what's right, because you don't want gallery art stuck around on railway platforms and things, do you.

And did you say you had something to do with Reading Station when it was re-done?

Well, I didn't have much to do with it. I was on the committee, Advisory Committee for New Buildings, in, on the, on the Railway, and the ... Reading was one of the stations which was Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 398 rebuilt, and I don't, I mean, one of the problems with railways stations is you can't close them, they have to be kept open while you're rebuilding, so you can't raze them to the ground and start again. You have to keep what, enough bits, ticket office and administration, porters room, and waiting room, while you're rebuilding the new bit. And, and there are new demands, you see, that nowadays stations are regarded as shopping centres, and quite a lot of people go to the railway station to shop, not just for the soft shopping, or oranges, or something, but you can buy a lot of things in railway stations now, from which they make a decent income. So the programme with these stations was always much more complicated than it looks. I don't think it's a particularly distinguished solution, but, I mean, it seems to work alright.

The Reading one?

Mmm.

And have you got any thoughts about Canary Wharf?

Not really, cos I'm waiting till it's finished. And I've been down there once, but it's so full of scaffolding and builders' lorries, and hoardings, and no- ways- throughs, that I'm waiting, I think it's going to be alright. I mean, it's very formal, and American, cos American city architecture is, is based on the Beaux Arts because all the American architects used to train in Paris, at the Beaux Arts, and as I say, they were great ones for formal, formality of layout, symmetric, symmetrically placed buildings and boulevards and, and a great strength of geometry, which this has. And it's very unusual in London, because our, our ... our background is totally unlike that. We're not, I mean, the, the formal avenues we have in London are tiny, we've got The Mall, and then you try and think of another one, and then you've got, I suppose, Regent Street, as a formality, coming down Oxford Circus in a curve, then down to, to Carlton House Terrace, and that's, but again, you see, you edge your way round corners, you don't have a huge sort of piece of geometry on the floor, you just come round fairly gracefully and turn right and down, then open up the steps. And that, I think, is extremely nicely done. And I think the French regard it as rather pathetically undisciplined, and, and not grand enough really. But it's interesting that when I was leaving Architecture School, believe it or not, the Government had begun to destroy Carlton House Terrace.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 399

I think we did talk about that, because that's when your ...

Yes.

You formed your protest group, wasn't it?

Yes.

But the idea of sort of building a whole city, really.

Well, I think, you see, down at the docks, you've got almost a sort of island there, of nothing, surrounded by nothing. And there are no, you can really ... got a flat white tablecloth to work on, and the plan which was got out, was really a French plan, I think, with sort of ... a bit of Bordeaux or somewhere. And it's quite nice to get bits which, you see, Greenwich, in a way, is the same, with this great huge form, buildings, and the hill behind, and the monument at the top. On the outskirts of the old ……...... (INAUDIBLE) port town, which was all shops and alleyways and lanes and things, and then you get this great sort of map, formal map of the Greenwich Hospital, and ...

But Greenwich isn't trying to suddenly become popular, is it, out of nothing, is it. I mean, in a way, the Canary Wharf is supposed to sort of draw people away from the square mile of the City.

Well, they wouldn't be, they wouldn't be drawn away, I don't think, by beauty. They would be drawn away, if they are drawn away, by, by ... these are the very latest equipment, equipped offices.

Do you think that will work?

And, well, it's a risk, because I think, the main risk is whether they've got enough public, good public transport, you see. The English are tremendously conservative about where they work. They don't really like being out of sight of the Bank of England, for some reason, if you're, if you're a City man. And the idea even of going as far as Liverpool Street, makes some shake in their shoes, because they, because they can't walk around in the street and Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 400 meet everybody they know. And upheaving this, and sticking it 15 miles down the river, is a great risk. But, you see, they've done it down in ... Wall Street. I mean, they're, the redevelopment of the end of, of New York Island, the point, you know, where the ferry, the Staten ferry goes off, has been totally rebuilt from top to bottom, and formalised with parks and huge office blocks and flats and everything. And I don't know, I mean, I haven't been there recently, but they were still empty because, or most of them, because I don't think they're selling, started to let them off. But again, you see, in Wall Street, they all like leaning out of the window and shaking hands across the street with somebody else, don't they. They're very conventional in their little areas. No, I think it's quite a big risk. And they've tried also to put flats down there, so that people will live there, but again, that's another great risk.

I mean, do you think Chelsea Harbour is successful?

What, as a building, or as an enterprise?

In terms of actually getting people to use it.

I think any building on the water has a 15 per cent start, at least, on any building that isn't on the water. And if you're looking down on boats instead of parked cars, there's not all that difference. In fact, the noise and the, and the look of things from above, boats somehow have a, a sense of life about them, which cars don't. A parked car looks dead as a dumb-bell. And a boat always, because it's bobbing slightly, has a sense of enterprise about it. It looks as if you could push off at any minute. And so I think the, the idea of living round a marina, which is a Chelsea Harbour solution, and the other ones further down the river, I think they've got more going for them, because people like, they feel as if they're yachtsmen, even if they've never been out in a rowing boat, don't they.

And what do you feel about, oh, actually, since you mentioned the Bank of England, will you tell that story about Robin Leigh-Pemberton having his portrait painted.

Right, start it off then.

Well, it was to do with the National Portrait Gallery competition, wasn't it? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 401

Yes.

What happened?

Well, I was a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery for about five years, and, which was enormous fun. I mean, the, the debates among the Trustees as to whether he or she was distinguished enough was fun enough.

Mmm, we did talk about that.

But, another great fun was, every year, we had a competition for young artists, they had to be under 35, a portrait painting competition. And the winners were given a commission, with a guaranteed fee. They were given a list of people of whom portraits were wanted by the National Portrait Gallery, living people, and they could choose. The winner chose, had the first choice, and the second, second. And they chose who they wanted to paint. And the sitters on this list had all agreed to be painted by whoever chose them, luck of the draw. And I remember one year, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, who was a Trustee of the Royal Academy, a very strong and conscientious worker for the Academy, and I'm a great fan of his. He's a rather unusual man because he, he kept bees in hives on the roof of the Bank of England, and still does, I presume. And he used to occasionally give us a pot of honey, Bank of England honey. But anyway, he, he was won, so to speak, in this raffle, by a rather beautiful girl, whose name I've forgotten. And she went up to paint him in his office. He sat in an armchair, facing her, and he told me afterwards, it was, it was such an extraordinary experience, sitting there, being stared at, by somebody who wasn't tremendously interested in what sort of a person you were, on the face of it, but who stared at you with a sort of terrifying concentration on your one nostril, for instance, or whatever it might be. And he said, "I got terribly self-conscious about this. I've never been looked at in this way before." I mean, you sit for a photograph, and its two sees, and, but she was very beautiful, of course, and having a beautiful girl stare at you, hour after hour, it was really such an extraordinary experience, he said, "I ... in the end, at the end of one session, I had to get up and break the tension, as far as I was concerned, by walking across the room and embracing her, and then going back to my chair. That sort of broke the skin for a minute for a minute." It was rather like the, if you stay in a Japanese hotel, when you go there, you're, you're met by a girl, in a Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 402 long sort of robe to her toes, and she takes you to your room in which there's no furniture except a sliding door behind where you put your clothes. And there's a low table, and a cushion on the floor. And she, the first thing she does is, to help you undress. And that's ... a sort of unusual experience for a, a man to be undressed by a total strange chambermaid. And she helps you undress, and then she puts you into, she, she turns, you're supposed to turn your back at the crucial moment when she puts on your kimono, which you wear when you're in the hotel. They put, you don't have pyjamas, you, you have this cotton dressing gown thing, which she puts on. Then she puts all your clothes into the cupboard, and then she takes you to the bath, which, in some Japanese hotels, is communal, but now mostly not. You have your, she runs the bath, she, and she goes then, she doesn't wash you or anything. Then she comes back about an hour later with your supper, and she, she kneels on the ground beside you, and serves the supper. And as you don't have any Japanese, unless you're very exceptional, and she seldom has anything more than, schoolboy English, so to speak, it's quite a tense scene, you see. She's undressed you, she's taken you to the bath, she's feeding you, she actually puts food into your mouth, ………………(INAUDIBLE) and then she comes and makes the bed, and lays it all out, which is a sort of mattress on the floor. And then leaves you to sleep it off. And the tension, I think, it was rather like Robin Leigh- Pemberton's tension. You're being extremely intimate, and yet very very distant, and I found the fact that the, the architecture of these Japanese inns is very very severe, and formal, and it's, in standard size panels, and the floor is covered with mats which are always the same size wherever you go in Japan, there's a standard mat, straw mats, the same size as the panels on the floor. But no furniture, no pictures. You have a window on to a little tiny garden, and there's nowhere to put your watch or your spectacles, except on the floor, you know, sort of problems which you ... they do now give you a little bedside lamp. In the old days, I think it used to be a candle. But this, this extreme intimacy, and the formality of the architecture, is a very curious experience.

Right, next. What about your thoughts about what's happening to London Zoo?

Happening to?

London Zoo.

London Zoo. Have we dealt with the Zoo before? Not at all? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 403

Well, we talked about your Elephant House, that was all.

We did. Well, as you know, the, the ... London Zoo has run out of money, and the Government who gave them several million pounds about ten years ago, said, "that's the last. Well, if you can't run it with this, that's the last you're going to get." Now the Zoo has been in existence, I suppose, for well over a hundred years, and it is a small area off the corner of Regents Park, very cramped, in fact, and because of the larger number of crowds in the old days, there was far too many tarmacked paths, and really, too many buildings squashed in, and there's no sense of it being a zoological gardens, really. I mean, they, they kept all the trees as far as they can, and they, they've tried to expand the expanse of turf and flower beds and that sort of thing, but it does, in fact, not give the sense of, which ideally a zoo should be, of the buildings being sort of pavilions set in, in a leafy setting. And you really, for the London Zoo, you want a thing about the size of Battersea Park really, to make a ……………….. (INAUDIBLE), so you can see animals and birds from a distance, as well as close up on the fences. So the, the last I heard that they were going to do was that, they've accepted now that it's got to close in it's present form, the Zoo Council has. They're going to keep their Research Department going, which is on the other side of the road from the, from the main Zoo, and so they, the lecture halls and the laboratories and the library, I think, will remain there, cos that's a very small acreage. They're going to convert such buildings as are convertible, into other uses. I'm told that the Elephant House which we designed, is likely to be an ecological museum of rainforests and similar issues.

What do you feel about that?

I'm quite happy with that. I'd be sad if the building disappeared. And the, the administration of the Zoo changed since I was asked to do this, and we were, it was designed so that the elephants had a, a moat between you and him or her, but the, then the subsequent management authority decided they should be shackled, which the whole point was that they shouldn't be shackled, and so I've always been worried that they'd, that one foot is chained to a staple in their area. They feel that elephants are very unreliable, in the sense that they suddenly get a bit dotty, cross and, and potentially dangerous, but I mean, as there was a moat, I thought that would be enough, and we worked out the length of elephants' trunks, and what they're trying to do also, is not only protect you from the elephants, but the elephants Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 404 had to be protected from us, because people feed them safety pins and Coke tins, and, I mean, the contents of any animal's stomach in the Zoo, opened up, it looks like an ordinary litter bin in Westminster City Council. And they, they, all the animals are experimental in what they put in their mouth, and children and, and adults are just as bad, are merciless.

But isn't it, I mean, the Elephant House is an example, I mean, presumably most architects, you have the feeling that you're putting something up that's going to stay there indefinitely, really.

I don't think any longer now, because the life, for instance, of an office block in London, is round about 30 years now, unless it's a listed, wonderful building, because technology was moving so fast, that the wall, the floors have to be so thick, two or three feet thick to take all the cabling, and all these new devices, you see. I mean, in the future there may not be anybody, nobody sitting on the floors in between, it may be all, all machinery clicking away on the floors. I think, I think, so many buildings ... I know of, have been pulled down, that were built in my life time, as now not appropriate for the way things operate, things like shopping, I mean, you don't go in single shops very much and often now.

But isn't it terribly distressing? I mean, it's worse than, for instance, having a book you've written go out of print, because at least you know it might crop up in the odd secondhand bookshop, and it can potentially be republished, whereas once a building's gone, it's completely gone, hasn't it.

I think if you're very pleased with it, and proud of it, it is sad, really, yes.

And it's very powerful having a building somewhere, isn't it?

Yes. But on the whole, you see, I think, not being a master architect, without any false modesty, one knows one's standing in this, that every, every piece of architecture of somebody's is a battle field, it really is. And the battle is fought over money, over materials. The battle is fought with yourself, and misjudgements, and every building you go and see that you've done, runs with blood, because you remember ... if only you'd made it six inches wider, or 14 feet longer, or hadn't used aluminium in this position, the building would be twice as good, and you've made a wrong judgement, and that's a perishingly permanent ... but Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 405 sometimes, you're quite thankful to see it go. I mean, what I liked about working for the theatre was, once you, once the thing had come off, the opera, or ……………………... (INAUDIBLE) or whatever it is, the thing had gone, you know, and you'd enjoyed it, and you'd, you had a sense of impermanent, and I think you've got to get now the feeling that so many things now aren't going to last very long, and therefore you approach it in a different spirit.

Have buildings of yours been taken down?

Yes, we've had buildings taken down.

Like what?

I can't remember now, I'm glad to say. But we've had, we've had several gone, because of redevelopment.

Did you fight ...?

No, I mean, I don't think it was a question of a battle, the thing had, the thing had outlived its, its useful purpose.

If you don't remember them, it's either because it was so painful, you can't bear it or ...

No, of course it wasn't. No, it's just memory, it's just memory gone. But and I think architects now, I mean, you could, you see, in a way, you take a building like the Lloyd Building, part of the philosophy of the Lloyd Building was that a lot of it would be out of date and the architect, Richard Rogers, being a romantic about technology, said, "why don't we put all the stuff that's got to be replaced on the outside?" So instead of having a building like a shoe box, full of ingenious little bits of machinery, you clamp all the little bits of machinery on the outside, and when they've got out of date, you unclip them, take them home, throw them into the sea, and put on a new lot. A bit like putting on a new overcoat. That was the theory. I mean, of course, it's a romantic philosophy, in fact, because not all the machinery gets out of date quicker than the fabric. Quite often you really wish you'd been able to destroy the shoe box you know. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 406

Would you have liked to have, for instance, been the architect for something like an airport? Would something like that have attracted you?

Yes, oh, I think any job attracts me really.

But you said that at some stage, you wouldn't have liked to have been so involved in planning cities, because it all takes so long, and it's so big.

I'd be very, I'd be ...

… large-scale.

I'd be rather, it depends what age you are. I mean, if you're, if you're young and have a huge building development going on, starts off by being very exciting, and then you get pretty teased out, because things are beginning to slow up, and everybody's tired, and they're beginning to have quarrels and that sort of thing. But if you're, you see, I think very very big building projects have got so many people involved that it's really, half the time, you're, you're not designing anything, you're just administering staff and going to meetings, and there's a drawing board side, is quite difficult to get at. And you've got to be very firm, I think, if you can get at a drawing board, and not spend all your time at site meetings, discussing a hold up in the delivery of bricks or something, you know.

Do many architects break down during the process?

Do they break down?

Mmmm.

I don't think so, no. I don't think I know any nervously, trembling old architects. I think they find their own level of interest. If they, if they're fretty people, I think they tend to go and work in the country, where the rhythms are slower, and the materials are fewer, and the problems are simpler, whereas if you're working in, in London, or in industrial areas, the pace is so quick, nowadays, and everybody wants to get everything up by tomorrow, and now, of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 407 course, it's become international, and half the building materials you get come from Germany or France, or Italy, which you don't know about, and so you have to learn new systems of clipping things together. And the fact that it is, so much of architecture now is, is a sort of Meccano thing, you clip things together, rather than build them up wet, like brick and stone, with water and sand and mortar. And now it's clip on stuff. And ... they're very easy to unclip. I mean, there's ... they go up very fast, buildings, now, because so many of the, the ways you used to join brick and stone and steel windows, and all that's gone, because the manufacturers design these things so that they all join without you having to do a drawing, almost, they've done the drawing, they make the stuff, it arrives, and somebody just goes on and screws it up. And so it's a different sort of exercise, much more like building a ship, I would've said architecture now. Now, the life of a ship, as you know, a big ship, a big tanker, or a big liner, is only about 25 years. Normally, after 25 years, they're broken up or sold to some country which doesn't mind if they're rusting to pieces.

End of F2838 Side A Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 408

F2838 Side B

... Globe Theatre, and what stage that's at?

Well, the Globe Theatre was one of the main Elizabethan theatres at the time when South London, which is really the sort of Soho of Elizabethan London, all the brothels and drinking houses and theatres, and bear baiting pits, and that sort of thing, were all south of London, just opposite St Paul, and there were two or three theatres, one of which was The Globe, and one of which was The Bear, and the Rose, and Sam Wanamaker is an American architect, American actor, I beg your pardon, he is an American actor, thought it was a disgrace that many cities in the world had reconstructions of the Globe theatre, there's one in Tokyo, there's several in America, I think three, but there wasn't one in London, and he thought this was absolutely extraordinary, because we knew exactly where it was in Southwark, and so he came, when I was working on the Festival of Britain, still, 1951, this is when he first came to see me about this, because, at the time, it seemed, the Festival seemed a sort of moment of, of temporary excitement in, in, in creative arts generally. I mean, the, the money was being poured out on various ... projects, musical and literary, and architectural and visual. He thought the climate seemed a bit right. And, actually, the Festival was just over, it was sort of in it's twilight glow, really. And I was working, at the time, on, on the royal yacht Britannia, and Sam knew that I, therefore, was seeing a lot of Prince Philip, and he asked whether we could persuade Prince Philip to be our patron, and to launch it, and to attend the sort of festival of poetry and music in Southwark Cathedral, and we managed to get this, and had Prince Philip too, with us, and he came to this, and launched the thing. He's given quite a number of parties at Buckingham Palace to collect money for it. Anyway, that is now something like 30 years ago, isn't it?

Forty.

Could be. But it must have been after the Festival, the glow was fainter, I know that. I mean, that's how Sam heard of me, was through the Festival, from what I can remember. And Sam was a tremendous enthusiast, and every penny he earned as a film actor, because he was really busy and successful at, at Hollywood, went on this, on this project. And he had several trustees, who joined in in the glow of Prince Philip, so to speak, and then eased off when they saw it was going to be rather a long sweaty run, you know, and they looked at their wrist Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 409 watches, and said, "must be off". Very interesting. I find often at these trustee businesses and gala committees, that people who want their names on the notepaper vanish very quickly, and you're down, usually, to about three people who hang on, either because they like the idea, or they like the person, or whatever. So I think there were about two or three of us hung on, and there was a long quiet time when we didn't, we weren't asked to do very much, except occasionally write letters or go and see people and things, because Sam was such a personal dynamo, the moment he ... he used to go to America for two weeks filming, and then he'd be back for a week, then he'd go for another two weeks, and, and he's been a sort of tremendous one-man fountain of energy ever since. And he never loses heart. And he has persuaded a chap called Sir David Orr, who's Chairman of Unilever, who is our current Chairman, who is, who is absolutely as tireless as Sam, and, thank goodness, he's just retired from being President of Unilever, so he's got a little more time, but he doesn't do an enormous amount of work. And being a very experienced businessman in finance and everything, he's very valuable to Sam. And Sam has never really lost heart. He's had a terrible struggle. We've got ... we've got a, the sort of undercroft, the seller of the Globe, built the, what you might call the, well, the undercroft, I suppose, and we're still short of money to build the superstructure, but all the drawings are done and the scholars have had their quarrels about what it looked like, and, I mean, you can imagine Elizabethan scholars arguing about what it looked like, and what it was made of, and that sort of thing, it had been going on for years, that went on, before we could get out any drawings, because you had to get it authentic as far as you could. And it's, I think it's got a sort of curious rhythm to it by now, that, if you ask people for money, "are they still building that?" you know, "what's happened?" And Sam does now and a bit, and he's determined to get this thing up. And I have a sort of faith that he will, because, luckily, the big power station next door to it, is empty, I mean, not empty, that one opposite St Paul's, it's disused, power stations only have a life of about 25 years, and it's rather like Battersea, I mean, so that's got to go, or be re-used, you see. So that, the whole of that site, which is bang next door to the Globe and to the Rose, is obviously, when times get a little bit better, going to be a huge redevelopment site, and the question is, is it going to be a ... a museum of the British Empire, or the History of Science and Technology, like all those French things they're doing outside Paris, you know, they seem to think up a new museum every week, and get it built. And so I, I feel now that that particular site, which has been derelict for many years now, because people are waiting to see what's going to happen to this power station, now it's actually for sale, somebody is going to have to do something about it. And if they're going to build something like the Scientific City that Paris has built, for Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 410 instance, or Culture City, that, I think, helps Sam, because the, the theatre would be an extra pavilion, so to speak, and he's fought successfully, the Southwark Council, who, like all river, riverside councils, went through the stage of never having anything but public housing, and you remember, there was a great scheme for Coin Street, just near the National Theatre, and the Lambeth Borough Council said they wouldn't have anything at all except three-storey housing, which they've got now. It's pretty undistinguished, and it looks rather silly in this great parade of public buildings, you suddenly go from the National Theatre, to two-storey cottages. I mean, it was a, I think it was a weak decision on the part of the Government at the time, that they want, I think you, you could have done something a bit more majestic along the river. However, I think it has been accepted now that the Thames is something worth taking trouble with. And so I think he's been given a great lease of life now. And I, I suppose I, he asked me really, because I had theatrical connections through my family, Lewis Casson was, was Chairman of the National Theatre for, oh, virtually nearly all my life, and when it was really just a, an office and a, a set of note paper, you know, and various ... Geoffrey Whitworth was the Organising Secretary, and so he was, of course, involved in this. And so I'm still going to meetings and going to one tomorrow about the Globe.

And what's your connection with Ed Berman?

With Ed Berman? Well, Ed Berman is another actor. He's an American actor who came over from America, and ran a little cellar theatre in Bayswater, seating about a hundred people, rather like those pub theatres. And I first met him there, because my, one of my sons-in-law, when he came down from Oxford, had been very keen on the theatre, and he wanted to go into the theatre, and he'd written two or three plays which were performed in Hampstead and pubs and that sort of thing. And he worked for Ed Berman for a time. And then the next time I met Ed was when he was doing this wonderful scheme of his, I think, called City Farms, based on the theory that a lot of children living in, in deprived areas, had never really seen a goat, and so he persuaded British Rail to give up old waste land, old, abandoned sidings, and fenced them round, and he'd buy goats and sheep and ponies, and, and that sort of thing, and the children had to look after them. And he would, what was good about him, was that he was very fierce, and if they didn't turn up and give the goat the water at the right time, that child was not allowed in again, for a limit, you know, it was punished severely, because it, they would have, they took the responsibility for these things. And that spread into, in building up simple little sheds for, for making woodcuts and simple prints and things, sort of Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 411 arts centres, and crafts, and general ... work for children, I suppose, roughly speaking, from 10 till 16, I suppose, that's the sort of ... and, as I say, he was very fierce, and if the children were making too much noise, he'd say, "I'm closing now. Out. Everyone out." And he'd just close down everything, you see. And I think, in a way, the children rather liked this, because, because they knew where they were, and he didn't want to be liked. I mean, he, he liked to be respected. He, he didn't sort of sit on the floor and pretend to be a child, you know, which is very often the attitude that teachers take, maybe rightly, but I've never dealt with, except my own children, as to at what age you can do that, and still be, keep the show on the road. And he, he did a lot of these, and they were a great success, and he was, he was helped by Government grants for, or educational grants, and then he moved from City Farms down to the docks. And he's now got a shed on the river, where he's now teaching children, of course, how to work computers, and, and he teaches them, again, 15, 16 year olds, how to work, how to get a bank account, and what a bank does, and how you handle a cheque book, and, and all these sort of things which people are rather uneasy about asking, they feel they ought to know, and don't know, and how they get, sort of, in a way, a Citizens Advice Centre for 16 year olds, you see. And he does train them in these, in this machinery. And then he bought, typical Ed, he bought two of those yellow funnelled steamers which sit down by the Temple, on the Embankment, they're both old Q ships, from the first war, and one of them is a, a Royal Naval Reserve ship, and the other was empty, and he bought these two ships, I can't remember the actual figures, but he went up to the Ministry of Defence when they put them on sale, and, of course, there were lots and lots of applicants from pub chains, who wanted. Now, they've got three pub, pub boats, between Westminster and Southwark already, and when, the planning authorities were not keen to have another couple of pub boats, they thought there could be a more imaginative use. So he applied to get these two boats, and, and turn his computer and training facilities on to the boats. And to make money by letting them off, that you could hire them in the evenings if you had a huge office party, or a conference on electrical distributors evening, or something. So he makes money by doing this in the evening, like, hiring a room in a hotel. But he still keeps his training business going on. And I thought, everything he touched, he seemed to me, a good idea to start with, run with, with, with tremendous energy and firmness, and somehow he had a, a pretty competent skill in collecting grants and money, he knew where he could ... and I remember the, when he went up to buy a submarine, and they said it was, he wanted a submarine for that too. And the Ministry said, "this is the last submarine of the, of the standard old workhorse submarine". Meaning it's not nuclear, it's a very beautiful one, actually. The 'O' Class, I think it's called, Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 412 it's the last one. And we were going to flog it off to any country that wanted it. But they are, they want nuclear ones, or they want ones more modern. And it's only two million quid, so, I mean, I think he said something like 150,000, they said, "but you've got to get it down there", you know. And they were, they saw the point of, of it as well. And so I went to, two days ago, to the Royal Fine Art Commission, with a couple of, some ... admirals, and Ed, to, to see whether the Royal Fine Art Commission would give any contrary advice, because I know they went on record, I thought mistakenly, saying they, they don't want any warships. They'd be glad when the yellow funnel jobs go. I think they're much nicer than buildings, ships, always have done. And I think they're lovely ships, you know, I mean, they're sort of 80 years old, and very pretty. Anyway, so we went to the Commission, the Fine Art Commission, the day before Yesterday I think it was, and they were, you know, they won't say, they never tell you, they just say, "well, we'll consider this when you've gone, after you've explained it. "And the, luckily one member of the Commission is a, an ex-submarine serving officer, so, so that was helpful. And so, with any luck, you'll get a submarine there. And the idea of that is, that this is totally an exhibition ship. You pay to go on, inspect it inside, and go off. It's like The Belfast, you see, which is a bit further down. And we're optimistic about it, because the Submarine Centre at Gosport has more visitors than any other type of warship. People queue up, because they can't understand the mystery of this enclosed cigar. How people can, this one has just come back from a cruise, three months under water, without seeing daylight. How people can be ... expected or committed to do this, with about 50 or 60 crew, living in this thing for three months under water, and the big ones are six months under water. And this holds a terrific fascination, apparently. And the figures show that that's the first thing that people want to see when they go. And I can understand it, can't you?

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

... the Labour Party?

No. Not quite. When, after the war, I was recruited into the Ministry of Town and Country Planning Research Department, very grandly titled, I was put into there to write a book about, partly about new towns, and partly about pre, prefabricated housing layouts. And none of it was my subject at all, because I was not a town planner. And the, the Minister, when I joined, was a, was a Conservative Minister, called Morrison. No, I'm sorry, I've got that Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 413 wrong. The Minister when I joined was, was a Labour Minister, in Attlee's Government, he was a solicitor, whose name I'll remember one day. Extremely nice. The Minister of Town and Country Planning was Lewis Silkin, who was a man of extreme charm and a great pleasure to work for, and he stayed until his, the Election, when Churchill came back, when he was succeeded by W S Morrison, who eventually became Speaker of the House of Commons, who I didn't see very much of. But I used to provide speech notes for Silkin, because in those days he was stomping the country, talking about new towns mostly. And he didn't seem to find ... writing speeches, very easy. Anyway, I suppose they all had speech writers, all these Ministers. But I didn't do it very often, I suppose two or three times, and ...... he was, he was an engagingly bad speaker, if I can put it that way, that he, perhaps because he was a lawyer he, he seemed to put emphasis on the wrong words, turn over the page at the wrong minute, and that sort of thing. And he was clumsy in that way, which actually made him, made clear what, in fact, he was, which was a man of great integrity. And funnily enough, this clumsiness, because one gets so suspicious of glib politicians and ... who gabble away in, in, in very sort of practised way, one is immediately distrustful. And he was a ... an extremely, a man of extreme integrity, and as I say, it was really an honour to work under him. And I, I met his son later, because ... years later, in fact, very recently, we were architects for the rebuilding of the, some houses in Whitehall, on the corner of Parliament Square, and the Committee of MPs, was a young Silkin, who was just like his father, excellent. A man of, very supportive, and polite, and firm, and not on the make for one single minute. And was succeeded by a man who shall be nameless, who was, who was absolutely awful. Sort of arch, arch politician, and always looking for blame, and, and shifting, shifting it to other people. I didn't like him at all. However, he vanished too. The thing about politicians is that they have, they have very short lives most of them. They sort of come and go in their jobs and hardly they settle down in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish, before they're Minister for Northern Ireland, or something. So they, you don't have to wait forever for them to go.

Another little subject to end this session. I wanted to talk about your Mini, because it's really become quite a famous car, and it's in the mural in the Academy, isn't it? When did you get it?

Well, I've had Minis, really, I think, since about, I suppose, about 1960, one after the other. And they'd last a long time, because they don't go very far, you see, and they, I never drive to Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 414

Edinburgh in a Mini, or anything like that, it's all, it's all messing about in London. And, for which they're wonderfully suited. And when I became President, 1975, I had a, I think it was a yellow Mini then, and Leonard Rosoman who was doing a big mural in the restaurant at the RA, thought it should get immortality, he's painted it in the mural and got the number plate right too, which is rather marvellous of him.

The number plate you've got at the moment is accidental, is it?

Totally, yes. I didn't notice it until years after I'd bought it.

Could you put on tape what it is?

It's D1 OOH, DI OOH! And I honestly didn't notice. I never can remember the number of my car, whenever I'm asked, people are always suspicious. And it's getting a bit old now, I suppose it's, it must be 10 years old now, probably.

And you did, at one point, have a Rolls Royce, didn't you? You went through a ...

Two points. Two points. I don't know anything about cars. I can't remember them or anything. And when I was working at the College, we came across a Commander Keller in some meeting, somewhere, and someone said, "you must come and see his beautiful old Rolls", which was £95, he said, "and it's a small Rolls, 20 horse power, wire wheels, canvas body, speaking tube from the back to the front, and corded upholstery inside, and runs like a bird". So we couldn't resist that, because we'd got, by then, we had three children and, and a housekeeper/nanny combined, so if we were off to the, on an expedition, we needed something bigger than a Mini. And so we bought this for £95, and it was absolutely beautiful, and ran like an angel, never went wrong. Frightfully difficult to change, if you had a puncture, because the wheels are so heavy, they're about the size of a bus wheel, so heavy, the children couldn't move them, of course. And then he came along and said, "look, I've got an even more beautiful car, but I'm afraid it's £400, and this is a Stack Deville, where the chauffeur sits out in the front, in the open air," you've seen pictures of them, it's a French, sort of, and the people sit in the back in a little sort of gondola. It was black and beige colours, really very long, and actually, the open air bit had a little collapsible hood, which came out, so when the weather was awful, your hat blown off to pieces. Well, that we had for about Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F2838-B Page 415 three years, but that was, wasn't so good as the old one, in fact. It was, began to get occasional hiccups of some kind or other, and we'd sold the little grey, the first one, to one of our students, I think for 75 quid, he got it for. And he was a young man called Seifus Howard, who founded a dance band called The Temperance Seven, but he was in our department. And did I tell you that he came for his interview, carrying his trumpet? He's a most wonderful trumpeter. And he only played thirties music, and he'd got a band together, partly in the Department, in our Department, partly in the College, and they became very celebrated, and he taught one of our students to play the piano, who'd never in his life opened a piano lid, and he's made a living ever since, as a dance pianist. Gave up designing. He wasn't very good anyway.

So he became a clarinettist, and a frightfully good drummer. And Seifus on the trumpet.

How did you come to know Humphrey Lyttelton?

Through Seifus, largely, I suppose. We used to have Humphrey Lyttleton to our dances at the RA because Roger, of course, knew him as well, because he'd been at Eton with him, and, and he was a lovely man. And such a nice man. Beautiful trumpeter too.

And do you still enjoy dancing?

Do I still enjoy dancing?

Yes. I don't know, I love it. I love it. I had a dance, the last dance I had was in November, which is two circuits of the floor, and it was a dance given at, by the Queen for something or other at Buckingham Palace, and I thought, "well, that's the place to finish my dancing career". But I'm hoping I might get back to it, but I love it. I really love it. And, anyway, Seifus Howard then was, he was going to America and Hong Kong, staying, he had a wonderful time in Hong Kong where he was staying in the, that famous hotel, in a suite there, with his band. And they got worried because the attendants of the sort of hotel waiter cum chambermaid, you couldn't wipe your hands on a clean towel before he came in, took the towel out of your hands, brought in a new one, so ... so they tried to think of something that he could do that he wouldn't have expected. So Seifus…

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End of F2838 Side B Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 417

F6797 Side A

OK.

They tried to think of something that would floor him, so Siphus[ph] thought the thing to do was to pick up the telephone and tell him to put it back. So he took up the telephone to ring to the restaurant, and then rang for the house boy, and he gave him the telephone and said, ‘Would you please put it back on the receiver?’ which he did without batting an eyelid, didn’t think it was extraordinary at all. And now Siphus[ph] runs a craft centre on the Isle of Wight, and has got a farm there as well.

The Isle of Wight’s part of your life isn’t it really?

Is what?

Crops up in your life quite a lot.

Yes it does, very often, my childhood I spent a lot round it. So that was the... And then we went back to Minny’s[ph] after, and he sold the old Rolls, I can’t remember but it must be about £30 by the time we had finished with it.

Right. And when we were talking about your paintings, when we did the interview in your flat, you’ve actually got a picture by Prince Philip haven’t you? We didn’t talk about that at all.

Yes.

Can you describe it?

Well, he has a big studio. When I was doing his sitting-room in Windsor Castle, he inherited King George VI’s sitting-room, which only had a light at one end, it was a rather long room and the light was at the far end, so everybody looked like a silhouette. And we got permission to knock a window in the side wall of the castle, which is...I thought was going to be a terrible delay; imagine all the English Heritage and all that sort of thing. But they didn’t Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 418 make a fuss, and we knocked a window in the side. And while I was working on that, the next room is his studio where he works jolly hard painting. And he had lessons, when he went round the world on Britannia he had lessons from Seager who he took with him as a sort of trip artist.

[BREAK IN RECORDING – TELEPHONE]

.....which wouldn’t take a minute, but...

OK.

And, they’re very strong, fresh, rather thickly applied paint, mostly of landscapes, and, buildings and landscapes, all about the same size, of about 6 by 18 inches I suppose, and very freshly coloured. And he had done a lot of course aboard, all over the world, as he had been on his travels. And he had them all propped against the wall, and he said, ‘Would you like to take one?’ and I said, ‘I would love one,’ so he said, ‘Well, take what you like’. And the one I really wanted, but actually wasn’t available, was one, I think a very clever picture which is a difficult one, of the Queen reading the Times at breakfast in a very very grand room, you know, that she sort of sank to the bottom of this great room with the Times at the breakfast table, and up above is Stubbs’s pictures. And what he’s so frightfully good at, it’s interestingly enough, is, when you’ve got pictures in perspective in your painting, he draws them with great skill. I mean a horse being held by a groom in perspective, and the whole size of the thing is not much bigger than a rather big stamp. He’s really very skilful. Anyway the one I...

And he didn’t want you to have that one?

No, he wanted that for his own collection I think. And so I took one of a little Fiji boy in a, a head and shoulders, very small. An interesting thing about that is that, his full face in a black sort of tarboosh thing, but his eyes are swivelled right through, right sideways, as if he was expecting something to approach him, which gives the whole picture a sort of jump, and I thought was rather clever. And I’m very fond of it, and very pleased to have got it. He’s still painting.

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And they’ve got quite a lot of your paintings haven’t they, you’ve done quite a lot for them?

Yes they have. Well they, I send them a water-colour every Christmas, and most of them seem to have gone on the walls or somewhere.

And they’ve just commissioned some for Prince Philip’s birthday haven’t they, or something?

They are, this is going to be a present from his friends and staff, of places where he goes off and, you know, cows and Scotland and Windsor and Norfolk.

Right. And the other question I wanted to ask you about them is, you knew the Queen more or less at the time she became the Queen, which is now quite a long time ago. I mean has she changed much over the years?

I see her very seldom in fact to talk to her for any length of time. I would have thought, to me she hasn’t changed, because our relationship so to speak was architect and client, and so, and she is tremendously interested in details about door handles and curtain rods, and, she liked actually being very meticulous about being shown everything and deciding what she liked and what she didn’t like. So, our conversations are very seldom on what you might call general topics, they are all professional, which made it very nice, because it became very easy. And she has this wonderful sudden smile, and strong laughter, and I suppose it’s something like Queen Victoria probably had I believe, she was famous wasn’t she for collapsing into giggles I believe. She never looked as if she did but apparently she did. And I find her extremely easy and nice to talk to. Nowadays, I mean one meets at various grand occasions, and you are just saying three or four pleasantries and pass on to the next person, you know the sort of thing. But we worked very closely with the ship, and with Windsor and Sandringham.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....planting trees with Ralph Richardson, I can’t remember why.

Hyde Park? Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 420

Yes, why?

And I can’t remember what it was about. It must, it may have been the Festival of Britain year or something. It was to celebrate some national occasion. And he arrived on a motorbike and we planted the trees together and then he roared off down Park Lane as if nothing had happened.

And while we’re on that sort of subject, didn’t you...weren’t you involved in getting a plaque in Westminster Abbey for Edward Lear?

Well I was involved in that, yes. I mean I wrote and suggested it, and helped persuade the dean at the time that he was eligible for Poets’ Corner.

And you were the person who unveiled it, weren’t you?

Yes I think I was. I seem to remember, it was in the floor, and the way you unveiled it was, it was underneath a sort of tablecloth, it was dragging it away slowly across the stonework. Funny sort of occasion.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....some of the books you’ve done, starting with the one called Victorian Architecture, which you did in 1948.

Well I started journalism as opposed to serious writing before the war when I used to do a weekly column in an architectural paper, and occasional articles for magazines, because like all architects.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....to the war, obviously if anybody starting practice as an architect again, there wasn’t much work about. And so one did what you might call, what one thought of was side issues to one’s profession. And I did quite a lot of journalism, and I was working on the Architectural Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 421

Review at the time, which at that particular period was, I was beginning to be interested seriously in Victorian architecture, which had been derided for many many years, and I caught a bit of this, a whiff of this encaustic tile and crockets and buttoned-up furniture, and got very interested in it. Because Betjeman of course was on the staff of the Architectural Review at that time, and serious scholars were beginning to take it, as it certainly deserved to be taken, very seriously indeed. And Robert Harling, who was a graphic designer, started a little firm of publishers of monographs and he asked me to edit them in periods; each little monograph, which is quite short and thickly illustrated with drawings and photographs, would be on a period, like Georgian, Regency, Victorian, Edwardian, Modern, and I was the general editor, found the authors, and chose to do Victorian architecture for my personal contribution. And it was great fun to do, and I learnt a great deal about Victorian architecture at the time, most of which I have forgotten. But I did have to go an look at a lot of Victorian buildings, and read about the architectural work. Absolutely astonishing. And these men who were...there was no of course photocopying and virtually no telephones, no fax, no printing facilities. They did most of their correspondence before breakfast. And you get a man who would design a thing the size of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and at the same time the Manchester Corn Exchange, and so many of the drawings were done by the boss, and not delegated to assistants. Mind you, they were dealing with traditional materials, brick and stone, and the beginning of iron, and so the, much of the detailing and structural detailing was known to the craftsman, you just had to indicate the result you wanted and he knew how to put it together. So there weren’t quite so many drawings as there are now, because techniques are so difficult and complicated. Anyway that’s really the first serious little book I suppose I did.

Did it actually teach you anything about architecture, did it change the way you worked at all?

I don’t...I suppose studying any period in architecture can’t fail to have some influence on the way you look at things, and the buildings for instance which I had always admired, like the Natural History Museum...

Hang on, much earlier in this interview you said the Natural History Museum was one of the buildings you all used to scoff at when you were first in London.

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When I said we used to scoff at, or it was fashionable to scoff at?

I thought you said you did.

No.

You all used to laugh up your sleeves about it.

No, I think that was one of the buildings which really was so strong that it conquered you. I think it was true to say that as you were a student, when you are a student any Victorian architecture at Cambridge for instance, nobody bothered to go and look at or to draw, including myself; we would...it wasn’t that we didn’t like it, it never occurred to us that it was interesting enough to draw. Such a great mistake. And it was fashionable, because I was at the sort of peak of the Le Corbusier influence period, when everything had to be stripped bare, and no superfluous ornament. I mean I remember Adolf Loos’s great rule that ornament is a crime, he used to say, and we all thought, dead on. But that little book in fact flung wide open the door which was already beginning to creak inch by inch, and has been one of my great interests ever since.

Are there particular buildings you particularly love that cropped up then?

Well there are some absolutely wonderful monsters, like Harlaxton in Lincolnshire, which looks like a Victorian version of some great Shangri-La imagined by some Tennysonian mystic, and, I mean it, nobody could believe that such a building could have ever got built. That was a sort of real curio. But what one began to like really was streets of Victorian houses, in London particularly where we lived, suddenly began to see the point of these bow windows and funny little crockety porches, twisted chimneys. And although it was all mechanical and the builders bought the stuff off the shelf, you saw the point of it, and why people like to have ornament as part of a natural, not an addition but part of the surroundings you live in. And that is of course what Adolf Loos and co. couldn’t see.

So did it mean you were rather paralysed when you came to design yourself, I mean somewhere between the two?

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I don’t think you can design an imitation thing very well. I did a set for a John Osborne musical which required a full stage size drawing of an imaginary Victorian mansion, rather like Fonthill, a huge stair and groined vaulting and suits of armour, and that was the only time I actually designed a great Victorian mansion. I worked in one or two, a big house in Kent, which was 16th century originally but had huge, enormous Victorian additions with a campanile about the size of the one in Venice on top of the coal shed, and, so one got fond of it, and affectionate towards it. And of course later on in life, when I began working at Windsor Castle, one lived in this Gothic atmosphere of panelling and crockets and huge heavy doors and elaborate door handles and door pushes and things, and one got to like the sort of strength and weight and richness of it, and not, it didn’t feel anything was made of chipboard, you know, it was, you hit it and it didn’t dent, except you did sometimes. And one began to respect and rather hanker for that, the quality of it.

But whenever you designed a contemporary building, it was always fairly sleek.

Oh yes, straightforward. I mean we were straight down the middle of the road in that way, that thing.

But there was, they were just like two different worlds really, there was no meeting point in a way.

One to enjoy, and I mean if you got jobs which involved messing about with a Victorian house, one was affectionate and respectful towards it. I mean I think that was probably criticised at the time, because people said, ‘Why don’t you be absolutely honest and stick a little white box alongside the Natural History Museum?’ But the architect who put on an addition after the war, one wing of the Natural History Museum, he tried to do a sort of strict Gothic in his Fifties style, and it’s not at all bad, but it lacks the confidence an the genuine conviction with which the old boys worked. Because the old boys used to spend all their summers travelling through France and Italy and Belgium and Germany sketching, and if you are a scholar I’m sure you could spot in almost every Victorian building in London where it came from, the original crocket. I mean a thing like the Law Courts, there’s a very sort of continental building, and they filled reams of notebooks with these little sketches, might come in useful a little oriel window or a funny way of turning a staircase. It was romantic you see, and that was nice. Great ones for silhouette they were. Silhouette’s gone now you Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 424 see. And why London’s so boring in so many ways is because all the buildings look like up- ended suitcases, in that when they get as high up as they are allowed to go by the planners, they just saw it off. Nobody thinks that it requires some sort of a finish.

So does that mean that you quite like what Philip Johnson’s been doing recently?

I don’t like what he proposed for that building down by Tower Bridge, which is a sort of phoney Houses of Parliament, with pinnacles at each... I mean this was real dressing up box stuff.

But I was meaning more the buildings he’s done in New York, which have started to do just the opposite from what you’re saying, they don’t cut off, they have a sort of...

Oh no, he’s always, he... Well of course his most famous buildings are very direct and right- angled and pure and, but that, you’re thinking of the telephone exchange building, whatever it’s called, B.T.T., where he, he started to be a bit saucy. But then Philip always used to say, ‘I’m a whore, and anybody tells me to do something, I do it.’

Do you believe that?

There’s a bit of it, yes. Because he’s a wealthy man, so he has to....he doesn’t have to please anybody but himself really, because if he doesn’t like what he’s been asked to do, he just doesn’t do it. So he’s... He’s a very entertaining man, but he’s a bit of a rogue I think in that way.

Since we’re talking about him, let me put on tape your comment to him.

Oh yes, well we were both speaking, funnily enough, once in Washington, a great dinner given in the British Embassy, a sort of debate between him and me, and we both made long speeches. I mean it wasn’t a dinner table, we all sat in an auditorium, you know, and I was terrified. And Philip was extremely entertaining, as he always is, and giggly and throwaway and all that sort of thing. And afterwards he came up and he said something nice about, ‘Most thoughtful talk’ or something he said. ‘My talks are always very superficial and...because, I am really a man of sort of veneer, a sort of thin figure with a veneer.’ And I Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 425 said, ‘Ah, but you’re veneer all the way through Philip aren’t you.’ And he was frightfully pleased with this. Typical, I mean he thought that’s exactly what he was, and went off rubbing his hands, so he wasn’t cross.

And going back to 1948 when you did your Victorian architecture book, was there an audience for it, what sort of impact?

Yes there was, just beginning. And of course after that, the Victorian Society, I was one of the founder members of the Victorian Society, which was founded in a Victorian house in Kensington, which used to belong to the Punch, Victorian Punch caricaturist, Linley Sambourne, and it hadn’t been touched since he died in the late Eighties I suppose. And everything there, the bell pushes, the bath taps, the kitchen shelving, the door handles, everything was absolutely as it was left by him. And it was inherited by a relation who was also a relation of Oliver Messels[ph], and they decided to preserve it absolutely in aspic, you know, so it’s there, and it’s now a sort of little museum, I don’t think anybody lives there, but you can go and see it, and see what a middle class professional Victorian house was like down to the forks and spoons. And we had a meeting there, Nikolaus Pevsner and John Betjeman and about a dozen others, I think John Summerson was there, when we founded the Victorian Society, which of course came, became a huge success and masses of members, and a great pressure group, and keeping an eye open on what they considered to be important Victorian buildings, and seeing that they aren’t mucked about with.

And with this same series of Robert Harling books, can you remember who the other authors were that you got in?

Well my partner Neville Condor[ph] did the modern one; Paul Riley did the one on Regency. Oh dear. There was one on landscape gardening too. No, I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember, but they were all fairly experienced. I suppose you would say they were journalists really, because it was really only a very very long article, and it’s mostly skill in choosing photographs and drawings.

Right.

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So, I think it was in fact almost the first little publication on Victorian architecture, and had been followed of course by masses of studies, serious ones with footnotes and the full paraphernalia, indexes and...

The things you hate.

Well, I like indexes but I don’t like footnotes.

And what about Inscape, what was that?

Well that was another thing which came out of the Architectural Review. At the time I had just been appointed, it was after the Festival, 1952/53, I was appointed Professor of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art, and that was because the head of the Royal College, Robin Darwin, wanted a department of architecture, it didn’t exist. But the R.I.B.A. and the Government between them said there are enough schools of architecture, they didn’t want another one, they would be nothing but a bore. And so - well Robin said, ‘Well my law in this college is, I don’t mind what I call faculties; what I mind about is who teaches there.’

We’ve covered that.

And so it was called Interior Design, and then it was changed to Environmental Design, and gradually it moved into architecture, all the time it moved, it was always architecture teaching there, and now it’s accepted as a school of architecture.

But what’s that got to do with Inscape?

Well during that period I was also working for the Review, and they thought, why don’t we do a book on interior design which is a sort of album of current good interior design in this country. And I wrote the sort of introductory article and assembled a lot of people who talk about various specialities, like cinemas or shops or restaurants or houses. It was a sort of symposium really, it was mostly pictures, which did quite well.

Can you remember what was in it?

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What, the pictures?

Well what you were looking at.

Well, not really. You will now. The thing about interior design you see is, it’s essentially a passing thing, and shops are redone every five or six years, restaurants are redone, cinemas are redone, ships are redone, because the theory is that, unless you wait until it’s been through the fashion trough, unless you wait till it comes up again, for instance like Selfridges, which never modernised itself and therefore survived, with a great saving of money. But most of this work is really like work in a theatre; you fit up a setting for whatever it is, and after ten or fifteen years people get tired of it and say, redo it. These days in fact it gets done about every two years.

Mm.

So that was again really a bit off the architectural press job.

Right. And going completely to the other area, how did you come to do Nanny Says?

Well that was suggested by a friend of ours called Diana Avebury[ph], who was a publisher’s agent, and she suggested the idea that we do a little book on nanny sayings, which Joyce Grenfell would introduce and I would do the drawings. And we advertised the idea in what we thought were suitable books, magazines, like Country Life and The Lady and The Tatler, if anybody who had been a nanny or been a child, if I can put it that way, could remember anything their nannies said. And of course what came out of it was really fascinating. Of course what came out of it really was the fact that nannies never lose their sense of priorities. And Joyce did a wonderful one which was during the war, the charge, she was having her tea in the nursery with the child and the nanny, and a terrific crash outside, and the window blew in, and the child said, ‘What’s that Nanny?’ And Nanny said, ‘A bomb dear. Elbows off the table.’ Because they never relaxed on this...this sort of discipline you see, which is so fascinating. And of course they have very funny phrases. There’s a second-class face looking out of a first-class window, you know, one of these little sort of social snobbish phrases, you know. And I used to, when I was working on it I used to, I had an office overlooking the nanny’s club, which used to meet at the foot of the Albert Memorial every Sir Hugh Casson C408/16/23 F6797A Page 428 afternoon at 3, prams with coronets on them, black beaver hats and grey overcoats with belts at the back, and black shoes with laces. And there you could see them exchanging gossip about their employers, while the babies snoozed away under the silk. And it was, I used to look at them and think, what an extraordinarily dedicated body they all are. And they all lived for hundreds of years. I mean I know of several families where their grandparents are dead but the old nanny is still living in an attic, expecting tea to be brought up.

You didn’t actually have a nanny, did you?

Well, I went through various forms, because as I said previously, when I came back from India with my sister and my parents were left in India for five years, I came back with an Indian ayah. There was a sort of system in those days in the Empire that there were great, how can I...a faint sort of army of ayahs who lived on the P&O, and you would hire them in Bombay or Rangoon or wherever it was, and they would take you home and drop you off, and then they would go to an ayah’s hostel down somewhere near Tower Bridge, and when you wanted to take a child back you just nipped along there and found an ayah who wanted to go back. And they lived there like sort of escorts.

It must be exactly like handing your child over to a total stranger.

Well it was odd, but then, in my sort of social drawer, I had eight uncles all of whom were in the Empire in some form or other, most of my friends were in the Empire, everybody was separated from their parents for long periods, and we all thought it was totally normal.

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F6797 Side B

So yes, after the ayah.

Well after that, as I think I may have said before, we lived...we went to boarding school very early in life, what was it, about seven-and-a-half, and in the holidays we were taken over by aunts. There was always somebody who had a bedroom and some help. And sometimes we, we were taken on by the resident nurse of our cousins there, she just added you to the flock, or once or twice we had resident governesses, one or two who lasted two or three years at a time, who went with us to the various boarding – well if there wasn’t an aunt we went to, we took rooms in a house at Folkestone or somewhere, you know. And we had, I remember in Godalming we were staying with an aunt there, and we had a rather stiff, thin, kindly lady who looked rather like a rolled up umbrella, she was called Miss Rope, and if ever we wanted to really make her cross we used to call her Miss String, which we thought was hilarious, we rolled about thinking how funny it was. But she was very, actually she was very patient, as I think they have to be, poor things.

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Then later on we had one called Miss Frampton, who came when we were about ten I suppose, my sister and I, and she lived with the family, my parents came home then, and she became a sort of housekeeper and general household aid to the household. And then she stayed until she retired at 60 or whatever it was.

With your parents?

Yes.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

There were certain servants who we were rather nervous of. We had an old aunt who spent the day on the sofa in her drawing-room just, in Montagu Street off Portland Square, she was about 70 I suppose, and by then, in those days she put on a little black cap and she spent the day on the sofa really, and tea was brought up, and she would nip downstairs for lunch. And Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 430 she had three servants looking after her, all of whom were late sixties and seventies, and they lived in an attic. I once went up there, and there were truckle-beds beds and bare boards with cotton mats. And they were all devoted to this aunt Victoria, who was I’m sure a very kindly and thoughtful employer. But when we stayed there we used to spend all our time down in the kitchen, in the basement, with these three servants. And one of them, the cook, was suitably traditional cook shape, and always covered in flour, and then there were two little rather bird-like, a housemaid and a parlour maid, always in apron and cap, and creaking, funny creaking belts they all had to keep their aprons in place, they were sweet to us, and we spent hours down in the kitchen while they gave us little tarts to make out of spare bits of pastry and things. And they were very good to us. I was slightly frightened of them because there were three of them, and if they got fed up they could easily say, ‘That’s enough of that Master Hugh, and you can go upstairs now.’ But they were, I was very devoted to them.

But were you naughty in other ways?

Not really, no, I was never really very naughty. I mean, I think being naughty on the whole, you do need fellow conspirators to enjoy it really.

But you were never inadvertently naughty, I mean they never came in and found you had painted a wall or something because you were just enjoying yourself?

No, I was... No, I wasn’t really very courageous about that sort of thing, I was a rather timid child I suppose, didn’t like getting into trouble, wanted to be liked.

Did you ever get into trouble by mistake?

I expect so but I don’t remember any famous occasions.

Right. And what was Joyce Grenfell like to work with on the book?

Very professional, frightfully funny. She lived in Elm Park Gardens. And she looked exactly like she was, I mean she had a very straight back and sort of, sense of pearl necklace and rather well done hair. Huge teeth, a wonderful smile, and very giggly.

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And was her religion really something that showed through?

I never got hold of that much, although I did some, a big drawing for her which, she ran a Christian Science school, I mean she ran it, she was chairman of the governors or something, down by Esher, and I did a drawing for the school which they made prints of and sold to the old girls, but I never got involved in any argument about Christian Science.

But did it affect, I mean would you have known that she had those beliefs, just from being with her?

No, I don’t think I would. I never really...I met her a bit during the Festival because she worked in one of the pavilions, one called the Lion and Unicorn, which was the pavilion dealing with the British character, and she did six little scenes, there were six little tiny theatres beautifully designed, sort of setting, and one or two lines of dialogue. And one I remember was a beautiful drawing, I think it was by John Ward, of a house maid drawing back the curtains and the lady of the house sipping her morning tea on lace pillows, and she said, ‘What was Paris like Mabel? It was your fist visit wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes Ma’am. It was quite nice.’ Then you go on to the next one, which might have been an old girl stroking her hat, her cat on her lap. ‘Oh Pussy, your hair’s all coming out. Come on Mr Kettle, boil up.’ And then go on to the next one. And they were all little... You know she had such a sharp ear for the things you hear on a bus. ‘Treat it philosophically dear, don’t give it a second thought.’ All these wonderful things, and she had such an ear for it.

Do you think she was happy?

I hope so. Well she was much loved, and she was... I mean I went to her memorial service and Westminster Abbey was packed to the teeth, you couldn’t have squeezed anybody in.

Do you have any religion?

I was brought up in the normal way, I was, I suppose for my period and style. I was christened, and I was confirmed, and I went to chapel twice on Sundays at boarding school. But at home we were rather relaxed. We went to church always on sort of great days like Easter or Christmas or something, and my mother and father used to go usually every Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 432

Sunday, because my father was devoted to choral music in church and most of his records were.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

My parents used to go pretty regularly, because my father was a great enthusiast for choral church music, and as we lived near Winchester he used to go over there a lot to choral services. And indeed he sang in the local choir in Southampton for a bit. So we were, yes, I suppose we had... Family prayers ceased among the aunts, I suppose when I was about ten, and I think they gave it up, but I remember in my aunt Jocelyn’s house there were about four maids, and they all trouped in after breakfast and then they used to turn round and kneel facing the back of the chair, a tremendous creaking of petersham belts and rustling of skirts.

But what does it all mean...

Striped bottoms.

What do you mean, striped bottoms?

Well they all wear striped dresses under their aprons.

Oh I see.

And then you would hear the, the collect for the day would be read, and a couple of prayers, and everybody would get up and on with the day.

But what does it mean to you now, anything?

I’m afraid no, nothing I’m afraid.

And did you make your children go to church?

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No, not really. I think the war was a difficult period for anything, transport was difficult, and if you didn’t live near a church, and the children were all under six or something, it was too difficult. They had chapel at school always, and morning prayers at school, like we did.

So are you actually an agnostic, or you are not anything?

I’m not really anything, I’m ashamed to say I give it very little thought.

But when you listen to Bach, his sort of, B Minor Mass and things like that, is that entirely music to you, does it have...?

Yes, it’s music.

Mm.

And very uplifting, and... It makes you, I wasn’t going to say, it doesn’t make you sing much but, because it’s an aesthetic experience really for me. And you feel uplifted by it. But I’m afraid I’m a really very lazy... I was married in church.

But that was fluke though wasn’t it.

Well it s partly fluke but it was partly I think, both my wife’s parents and my own would have been very upset I think if we had gone to a registry office.

But you wouldn’t really have minded?

No.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

When you were talking about Joyce Grenfell and the Festival, it reminded me there was a detail about Wells Coates you once told me but not on the tape, which I thought you might tell again.

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Well Wells Coates was one of the most advanced architects in the country, in between I suppose the years of about 1935 to 1960, and he had lived a lot of time in Japan, which had given him a very strong Japanese influence of simplicity, and if I can put it this way, a reluctance to use furniture in a room. As you know the Japanese live on the floor really, and they sit on the floor and they sleep on the floor, and everything they own, like books or ornaments, they keep in cupboards behind sliding doors, so the whole room is empty and quiet and serene and very peaceful. And Wells had caught this very strongly, and he had a house off Beauchamp Place somewhere in South Kensington, a flat rather, and his bed you reached by a sort of ladder above the kitchen; the kitchen had a low ceiling and the ceiling of the kitchen had his mattress on it, and a little sort of ladder rather like a ship’s bunk and you climbed up. I don’t know, I always wondered why he didn’t get cramp in his instep as he went up the rungs, because it was agony. Anyway, and the floor was absolutely empty of furniture. But he had built round the fireplace, he had built a low curving wall about sort of tummy high, within which, this sacred enclave, were a lot of cushions on the floor, the whole place was a sort of wonderful sort of soft place to jump up and down on. And this I always suspected was a winner when he was courting girls, because he was a very attractive man and had lots of girlfriends. But anyway we always used to rather envy it when we went to see him, and we felt as men, or boys or whatever we were, rather reluctant to go there and lie on the cushions [INAUDIBLE]. But Wells was totally at ease, because of his Japanese upbringing [INAUDIBLE], what normally happens in Tokyo.

[BREAK N RECORDING]

.....London come about?

Let me try and think about...switch it off for a minute.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

.....approached by the publishers to do it as far as I remember.

But wouldn’t have been something you had thought you wanted to do?

No I’m rather passive in a way, I mean I wait till the invitations come in. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 435

And the brief was really just to do a book about the buildings you liked in London, or what?

No. I’m a little forgetful about how the London book got started. As far as I remember it was an idea put to me by a publisher, would I write some form of anecdotal book about London, not full of dates and street numbers and facts, but something which was, I suppose lighter-weight and strictly personal. And I had the idea of writing about something like twenty or more buildings which I had greatly admired in London, and which had also had some personal connection with myself, either a house I had lived in or a shop I loved going round as a child, or a museum I remember with great affection, and places where I had been, say, a trustee, an institution like the National Portrait Gallery for instance, of which I have been a trustee, and which for five years I went in and out of that building almost every week. And they were all interesting buildings architecturally; I mean all buildings have got some interest to an architect at any rate. So the idea was to do a picture of these buildings and then write, I suppose not very much, about six or seven hundred words about it, anecdotal about how I got involved in the buildings. And it could have been really, it could have been developed into an autobiography. I mean it could have been a, I could have spun out the personal side of it and kept the architectural side as a subsidiary, but it came out the other way round, it was more about the architecture than about my personal experiences. It was great fun to do.

And do you find that sort of thing quite easy to do, or is it very laborious for you?

Well you see, as I am not a scholar and I am very lazy about research with a capital R, it is anecdotal, because anecdotes I can remember very easily, and facts I can’t remember very easily. So, and every building has scores of wonderful, wonderful stories. Because what people never write about, and this I found out with my books on Oxford and Cambridge too, that they write about the buildings, but they never write about who was the man who commissioned them, and who was the architect who designed it. For instance, I have never read in a guide book to Cambridge, Sir Christopher Wren who did one of his finest buildings at Trinity College, the great library, well a wonderful building; as far as I know he never visited it when he was starting, half-way up, or finished.

How did you find that out? Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 436

I found it in some obscure article by chance I was reading. Well that’s interesting isn’t it. Or the fact that the Master of Trinity – no, it was the Master of Caius, who died falling off a horse, and the college, all the college scandals, you can find them sometimes in college, histories of colleges, they’re more anecdotal. And I think that’s always absolutely fascinating. And, there was a poet who was at Peterhouse, a famous poet, I can’t remember his name now obviously, but all I remember about him was, he was frightened of fire and he had a personal fire escape fixed to the window of his room , which is still there, and this was in, sort of 1820 or something. And those, I like those sort of stories, because you always wonder what the hell that thing is up on the wall. But ordinary guide books never never have that sort of thing, do they? They have silly stories about, that if you put all the stones in King’s College chapel one on top of the other, it would be as high as the Eiffel Tower or something; that’s not interesting, is it? I mean it’s totally uninteresting.

So did those two books come about again because the publisher approached you, or did you want to do them, or...?

The Oxford book came from the publisher. They wanted, again they wanted a picture book really with a brief text, which would be gossipy. I mean Oxford and Cambridge, I mean there’s so many anecdotes.

Mm. Are there other British cities you would like to do?

I’ve always rather longed to do something about Liverpool, because I find the river front so fantastically dramatic, and thinking of all those ship-loads of emigrants, their last view of England as they sailed off. There was this great drop curtain of huge buildings, which in those days were very very dramatic and powerful, because it was the most successful and prosperous and busy city in England in those days, and I think Liverpool is full of potential stuff. But everywhere is, I mean you can’t go to a single place.

But do you like working that way?

Yes, I do. I have this terrible thing, as I was saying, that I can remember stories about places but never facts. Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 437

And you are thinking of doing an autobiography aren’t you?

Yes, I am. I mean it’s been suggested that I should. But I’m rather cross, because I started on it with that book on London you see, and so it would be bound to be a bit repetitive. And I’ve had an interesting life, I mean I can’t pretend I am...

And what about the diary that you did?

I can’t remember, I’m sure that came from, that was published by Macmillan. Oh I know, it was, there was a young man on the Architectural Press who was one of the assistant editors, and he was, in his spare time he was a book packager, in other words he thinks up an idea, finds an author, writes the sort of brief, gets you to do it, packs it all up and finds a publisher for it. And that I greatly enjoyed, it just took one year and it was totally honest, no cheating. If nothing happened on Wednesday, you said nothing happened, you didn’t pretend something happened from the previous year. Because I thought the only way you’ll get it done is by being totally honest and no dressing up and pretending, and bringing in interesting things from other years.

But you left a lot out, didn’t you?

Oh you leave a lot out, but everything in it actually happened the day it’s put down. And it was quite fun to do, it really was.

And you don’t...

And it did happen to be a very interesting year.

And you don’t normally keep a diary, do you?

No, I don’t think I’m disciplined enough to do that.

And why is it you don’t keep letters?

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I don’t know. My wife keeps, she‘s got all the letters she wrote home from school to her parents in South Africa, year after year, boxes of them, and they’re hilarious of course to read now. But I have no letters written as a child, absolutely none, and, I don’t...I think, I don’t really like the thought of them all mouldering away in shoe boxes.

I didn’t really mean letters of your own, but didn’t you say you don’t keep anybody else’s letters as well?

No, well, no I don’t. I think I’m right in saying I don’t. There was a time when I, if I had a letter from somebody very famous, like the Prime Minister or Stephen Spender or somebody like that, you thought, well maybe I could sell this at Sotheby’s for fifteen quid when I’m hard up, but in the end I didn’t. I mean if they were very interesting, if somebody wrote to me, if a Prime Minister wrote to me and told me what he was going to say next week, that would be of historical interest and you would keep that and send it off to somebody who is writing the man’s biography wouldn’t you.

And you said that there are no letters of yours at Windsor?

Well I worked at Windsor for about ten years between 1960 and 1970, but all letters from you to the Queen and from the Queen to you are by Crown request returned to the archives in Windsor Royal Library. Because they like to have all the letters of anybody who wrote to members of the Royal Family for their researchers who come and are doing lives of people. I don’t think my letters would have been much, except they are mostly drawings, but there were a few words in them.

And what about your work on the Summoned by Bells, the Betjeman?

That was a commission straight to the publisher John Murray. John Murray was the publisher of Betjeman’s work, and he wanted to bring out an illustrated edition of this autobiography in verse by John, and he asked me to do the illustrations, which was enormous fun. The sad thing was that John had just died, and so we couldn’t giggle over it, as we were doing, and I had to do without his help. But it was great fun to do, because I was a great friend and great admirer of John.

Sir Hugh Casson C408/016/F6797-B Page 439

So did you go back to Cornwall and all that sort of thing, or...?

Not much, because I had been to Cornwall quite a lot as a child myself. In fact his life is so like my own, in the social layer and the sort of things that happened to him, having his school cap thrown over the hedge by horrible little boys on the way to school, and then going to university and the sort of sudden arrival of privacy, which had its side effects of loneliness, the first time you were in a community but you weren’t necessarily a member of it, for about a year, you know, you had to, it was lonely. But it was all, all his life was so alike to mine, and I was tremendously in tune with what he wrote.

What do you feel about solitude now?

I don’t I think really thrive on solitude. I’m very bad at reflection. I mean I don’t sit in a chair reflecting upon immemorial truths or anything, or even what I may do tomorrow. If I am writing anything I usually start right away writing something, it wouldn’t be the first sentence, eventually, but in order to get going I have to write something, and I cut it up and fetch[ph] it about and then rewrite it. But so much of the work I do now is not serious writing, it’s journalism, introductions to people’s books and that sort of thing.

But leaving writing aside, do you need time to yourself every day, or not?

I don’t think I ever have to find it, but I think really I’m rather nervous at being by myself, looking out of the window and biting my pen.

But where you paint in the mornings now, you’ve got people around you in the office haven’t you. I mean do you prefer having people round you while you paint?

No, actually I would rather not in fact have a secretary in the room, not because, I would like her but not the telephone. I do find the telephone is a terrible interrupter.

[TELEPHONE RINGING] End of F6797 Side B [End of Interview]