Andrew Ritchie, the inventor of the Brompton Bicycle, gave a very entertaining, but also extremely informative account of what it takes to invent and market a new consumer product in the hostile world of British investment finance. He devised the first bicycle in the bedroom of his flat opposite the Brompton Oratory and then spent several frustrating years trying to raise capital from long-suffering friends and avoiding being taken over by bigger operators, including Raleigh. It was a classic story of Samuel Smiles perseverance in the teeth of suppliers of components going bankrupt. Now, after twenty years of success and after moving into a new factory, the Brompton has become too expensive.
Dovedale
One of the pleasures of coming to the Dovedale Literary Festival is the pleasure of being in Dovedale itself: the view across the valley of the River Dove over the hill from Cheadle with clouds settling in the valley; the walk over the fields to Ilam in the morning; walking up Dovedale; and looking across the valley to Hazelton Clump:-
Jeremy Hutchinson QC
We have heard Jeremy Hutchinson talk about his life and work as an advocate before. I would happily hear him do so many times again. At 101, he is still able to recall with extraordinary vividness his childhood memories of T.S. Eliot who, oddly, had a cottage at Bosham, while Hutchinson’s mother, Mary, was at West Wittering; the time when the destroyer serving in the war was bombed by the Germans; his defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by calling on the evidence of Richard Hoggart, then a Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester; his defence of Kempton Bunton who stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington by climbing through the National Gallery’s lavatory windows after hours; and his mockery of Mary Whitehouse’ s lawyer who brought a case against Michael Bogdanov, the Director of Romans in Britain. He can still dominate a room with humour, ribaldry and intellectual sarcasm.
Trees
We went on a morning walk up Dovedale, punctuated by talks about the trees by Thomas Pakenham, the great tree expert. We began with the ash and the alder and a description of the difference between natives and invaders post-1500. Then we had information about the origins of the Horse Chestnut – the false belief that it had come from Istanbul whereas it really came from the border of Greece and Albania. And about the resilience of limes and their ability to reseed themselves:-
Angela Carter
After a performance on the cinema organ (not by him), Christopher Frayling gave a talk about his friendship with Angela Carter in Bath in the early 1970s. They shared a common interest in Gothic fiction. Chris had done a Ph.D at Cambridge on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was writing a book on vampyres. Angela Carter was a young writer, writing the stories which became The Bloody Chamber. They tried to persuade Bath City Council to erect a plaque to the fact that Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein in Bath and used to go to Bristol together to watch early Hollywood horror movies. She recorded their conversation in a notebook. The question everyone wanted to ask was if they had an affair. We thought not, only because the character in The Lady in the House of Love who is quite obviously based on Christopher and travels to Romania in search of Bram Stoker is described as young and innocent.
Pipes in the Peaks
I have been once before to the surreal garage on a hill on the edge of the Peak District which contains the best and most spectacular collection of cinema organs. Even a second time, it makes a big impact:-
Duncan Macaskill
I went last night to an exhibition of paintings by Duncan Macaskill, a Scottish artist who has been working away for the last forty years since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1966, only occasionally sending postcards of his work to the outside world. Now he has been taken up by the Vigo Gallery in Dering Street and his paintings are as fresh as if they were painted yesterday:-
York Road Station
I was walking down York Way north of King’s Cross and realised that it has one of London’s ghost underground stations, opened in December 1906 to serve the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. It closed in September 1932. I am surprised that it hasn’t re-opened now that it is one of London’s property hotspots. It’s got odd, wobbly lettering:-
Antony Gormley RA
I spent the morning with the Trustees of the Royal Academy and of Royal Academy America in Antony Gormley’s studio in north London. He reminded us of how and why the studio had been designed by David Chipperfield: that he had visited the RIBA in 1990 in search of a young architect to help work on his house; and had (rightly) picked out Chipperfield on the basis of his attention to qualities of interior space and light. The studio has these qualities, but also an attentiveness to proportion:-
157, Piccadilly
As I was getting money out of the cash machine, I saw a building I have seen a thousand times lit up in the evening sun. It’s the former Royal Insurance building on the corner of Piccadilly and St. James’s Street, designed by J.J. Joass of Belcher and Joass, a Scot from Dingwall who trained in Glasgow and who seems to have imbibed some of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s adventurous indiscipline. As Pevsner says – or maybe it is Simon Bradley – ‘the indiscipline must be considered a positive quality. The endeavour here was clearly to smash up the classical conventions, but the fragments are left in a restless disquieting pattern’:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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