Withnail Returns to Crow Crag, aka Sleddale Hall!

Several hundred people have just had a delightful weekend in the country, thanks to the already legendary Picnic Cinema screenings of Withnail & I at Sleddale Hall, the location used for Uncle Monty's cottage.

Though I wasn't there this year (my experiences last year are commemorated in this epic post), I'm glad to see, via Picnic Cinema's Facebook Page that the fourth annual event evidently went off splendidly. Here's a selection of the photos that have been posted, some of which appear to have been taken from a very, very long selfie stick, or even, rather alarmingly, some kind of drone!

There were three screenings this year, all instant sell-outs. No doubt it'll be the same story in 2016, and indeed in 2017, which will be, believe it or not, the film's 30th anniversary!

Thanks should be given once again not only to the Picnic Cinema team who organise it all, but also for the kind permission given by Sleddale Hall's owner, Tim, to allow Withnail fans this ultimate pilgrimage. (And yes, the house is private property, so please don't be tempted to go trespassing around it the rest of the year!)

I'll close this post with a lovely bit of Withnailia, spotted on twitter earlier this week when it was posted by its creator, the fabulous artist Jonathan Edwards. While the original is in his sketchbook and not for sale (yes, I asked...) Jonathan is considering doing a print of it. Count me in if he does! His website is here, his online shop is here, and you can follow him on twitter @Jontofski or read his blog.

He's sitting down to enjoy his holiday...

Is This The Most Beautiful Jane Austen Edition Ever?

There's a particular edition of Pride and Prejudice that has become highly collectable. It goes for a decent whack, but is somewhat more affordable than the fifty-odd thousand quid a first edition will set you back.

This edition was first published in 1894, and it's the interior illustrations and especially the spectacular binding design, both by Hugh Thomson, which are the draw. The peacock design, now conveniently out of copyright, has ended up on everything from t-shirts to bags and watches.

A copy of this edition has recently come (and gone) from the Little Shop...

... which prompted me to look for a bit of background to the original design.

There's an interesting piece on Thomson's binding designs by Simon Cooke here.

This is what Cooke has to say about the now iconic Pride and Prejudice design.

"Thomson’s bindings are further concerned with the visualization of tone. Representing key scenes and characters is a fundamental device, but Thomson tries to convey the texts’ ambience as well. The gilt extravagance establishes a cheerful note, yet at a deeper level the bindings crystallize the tenor of novels’ imaginative worlds. The image on the front board of Pride and Prejudice exemplifies this approach. Austen’s tale is primarily concerned with wealth and display, but Thomson suggests that its main focus is courtship and the working of vanity, symbolising the various love-stories in the emblem of a peacock with spreading tail-feathers. Thomson’s design is extravagant, excessive, self-indulgent, and, in a calculated sense of the term, pointless beyond its ornamentalism: the very qualities that characterize the lives of Austen’s personae and are summed up in his luxurious image."

 
So there you go.

Bruce Robinson's Jack the Ripper Suspect Revealed!

Last week there was a flurry of excitement round these parts with the news that Withnail and I creator Bruce Robinson's long-awaited non-fiction magnum opus about Jack the Ripper was finally scheduled for release.

In this interview with the Independent about the forthcoming They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper (pre-order it here folks!) Bruce was understandably not about to reveal the identity of his suspect. As the interviewer Richard Jinman points out, "his publisher wouldn't thank him if he did."

Well, sorry HarperCollins, but I can confirm who it is. (Look away now if you don't want to be spoiled). 

First off though, let's see what Bruce did say in the interview. He's pretty damn sure he's got his man:

“I say in the introduction to the book that this isn’t a theory, it’s an explanation – and I sincerely believe it is. I’m not a man given to kidding himself – I wouldn’t have spent this long working on it unless I was pretty damn sure of it.”

“It’s much more complicated than some weird freak living in a lair and coming out [to kill] for no apparent reason. It ain’t like that at all.”

“He was a prick – a psychopathic prick. Somehow he’s managed to accrue this almost heroic aura, but I have no time for that. I go after the bastard.”

And if Ripperologists tell him he's wrong? “It would only be right and expected. But the book is extremely well sourced. If they want to say that’s bollocks they’ll have to say your source is bollocks.”

So who is it?

It's actually not a secret. Robinson himself revealed the identity of his Ripper suspect in an interview with the Telegraph in 1998. I've only just become aware of it, but it's still quietly sitting on the web for all to read here. It's just a snippet, in a literary diary/gossip column by 'Noggs':

***

NOGGS tags along as a somewhat hungover Bruce Robinson - the mercurial creator of the film "Withnail & I" and, more recently, the novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman - goes on a spending spree for antiquarian books. "I'm in a mood for book-buying, Noggs," snarls Robinson, his handsome nostrils flaring as he picks up the scent of worn calf and vellum. Booksellers stand as still as spiders as they watch him fly about their shop, none wanting to say a word that might break the buying spell.

Later, when we repair to a pub to recuperate, Robinson explains why he has been specifically hunting for Victorian true-crime books. "I am the only person on earth who knows the true identity of Jack the Ripper," he whispers. Noggs politely observes that he himself has a foolproof technique for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, but Robinson is adamant. "His name is Stephen Adams - real name Michael Maybrick - who was quite a famous musician of the 1880s," he tells me. "He died in 1913, the Mayor of Rill [sic, should be Ryde] on the Isle of Wight." And won't Noggs be spoiling Robinson's secret if he spills the blood-soaked beans in his humble column? "Not at all," cries my companion magnanimously. "I shall be glad to establish the provenance."

***

So who is Michael Maybrick, what's his connection with a previously fancied Ripper suspect, and how did Bruce Robinson get mixed up in Ripperology in the first place? You can read the story so far in this post.  

One further nugget of proof if proof be need be (as they used to say in The Day Today) is that, as Mark Ramsden points out in this excellent blog post, Robinson's book is named after one of Stephen Adams/James Maybrick's songs! Here's an old sheet music cover he found to prove it...

It's about how girls love a sailor (Jack Tar), and it came out before the Ripper murders in 1888, but still, you can see why Robinson couldn't resist it for a title.

All will become clear when the book is finally published this autumn (unless the publication date slips again, as it has many times before...). There is at least now a blurb for the book online, which describes it as:

"A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption."

Well I don't know about you, but I'm sold!

Bruce Robinson Resurfaces! Jack the Ripper is coming...

Photo sourced here

The Independent on Sunday has a brief new interview with Bruce Robinson today, which you can (and should) read in full here.

In it, he confirms that his decades-in-the-writing non-fiction book about Jack the Ripper is finally being published, this September. You can pre-order it here. You can read more about the project, and SPOILERS a *possible* candidate for the person Robinson is going to unveil as the Ripper, in my previous blog entry here (which is one of the most-read posts this website has ever published...).

Bruce sounds on good form, and gives good quote, as always. The author of the piece mentions that the Robinson household is hard to find nestling in its remote valley in the Wales borders, but that doesn't seem to have put off hardcore fans making a pilgrimage. Bruce says:

“I found a guy drinking my vintage port in the kitchen at 7am a few days ago. This guy put down a whole bottle of port, ate a bowl of cornflakes and fucked off. I still don’t know who he was.”

Was that a Withnail reference in Game of Thrones?

Just a quick one (while a longer post on another topic is being prepared), but I think it's worth recording that TV phenomenon du jour Game of Thrones included what has to be a sly shout-out to Withnail and I last week (season 5, episode 7: 'The Gift').

In a delicious scene between Jonathan Pryce, as the 'High Sparrow' and Diana Rigg, having a whale of a time as Olenna 'Queen of Thorns' Tyrell, Dame Diana comes out with the line:

"You live among murderers, thieves and rapists, and yet you punish Loras for shagging some perfumed ponce?"

Perfumed ponce, eh? I think we can safely put down David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, show runners of Game of Thrones and writers of this particular episode, as Withnail fans...

Blowing Up Trains: A Lawrence of Arabia Relic

May 19th is the 80th anniversary of the death of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia. His fateful motorcycle crash was actually six days earlier, putting him in a coma from which he never recovered. (If he'd been wearing a crash helmet, he probably would have walked away from the accident, but that's another story.)

To mark the occasion, I thought I'd spotlight a little piece of history which has been sitting quietly in the Little Shop since it opened...

It doesn't look like much, but it's connected to this...

Blowing up a train on the Hejaz railway, David Lean style.

A recent photo of the remains of an actual train, blown up by the actual T. E. Lawrence.

The unassuming bookend features a piece of the railway track that was blown up by Lawrence and his Arab guerrillas.

The inscription reads:
'A sectios [sic] of railroad track destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia to prevent the Turkish forces from controlling the Arabian Peninsular, 1917. Recovered by Boy Scouts of America, Red Sea Troop 1, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1970.'

I bought it a few years ago, and while it didn't come with any solid provenance, I've no reason to doubt that it's the real McCoy. It's obviously got some age to it, and it would be a strange, not particularly obvious, and rather time-consuming thing to fake. There's also this learned article about the chemical composition of the Hejaz railway tracks of the time, which features a cross section photo which matches the piece on the bookend:

Boy Scouts or not, I imagine it would by frowned upon these days to go around nicking bits of the remaining track, not least because there is ongoing archaeological research into the period, headed by GARP (the Great Arab Revolt Project). You can find out more about them here.

As Lawrenciana goes, it's an interesting and presumably unique piece, but who knows what its value would be. Whatever the right collector is willing to pay for it I suppose.

I like it too much to sell it though.

2017 UPDATE: This link to the National Trust's collection of item's at Lawrence's cottage Cloud's Hill features a familiar-looking object... more proof that this piece is the real McCoy...

Coming up in Croglin: Mary Ware's Legacy in Watercolour

I'm out and about dahn Sarf this week and into next, so here by way of a blog is a plug for a rather special upcoming event in Croglin, the little Cumbrian village where I live (when I'm not in the Little Shop...).

Mary Ware’s Legacy in Watercolour

Croglin village hall to host sale of original art and Sunday afternoon tea in aid of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

On Sunday 17 May 2015, Croglin village hall will throw open its doors to visitors from far and wide for a sale of beautiful original works by artist J (Jean) Mary Ware, accompanied by a delicious afternoon tea. 

Though she had sketched throughout her life, Mary Ware (1915-2012) only really began to pursue her art once she entered her 70s, making both the quality and proliferation of her work all the more astounding. With an eye for finding beauty and interest in everything, Mary’s subjects range from stunning Lakeland landscapes and the tranquillity of beach scenes to the minute detail of wild flowers and the intricate elegance of architecture. As local artist Madge Shaw says, ‘Mary’s legacy in watercolour is a delight for us all to share.’

In this, her centenary year, many of Mary’s previously unseen original pieces will be offered for sale at the event. There will also be a raffle for an individual piece of framed artwork, as well as the opportunity to buy greetings cards featuring Mary’s artwork and an indulgent afternoon tea as provided by the local residents. All proceeds from the event will go to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust to aid the continuing battle against a disease suffered by Mary’s beloved granddaughter, Alena. 

The village of Croglin – once the site of an ancient Viking settlement – is no more than five miles from Kirkoswald beside the Eden river, yet is so tucked away in the foothills of the Pennines that visitors rarely find their way to its unspoiled environs. Featuring a church sketched by Alfred Wainwright MBE and lending its name to a waterfall immortalised in poetry by William Wordsworth, it is the perfect destination for a Sunday afternoon drive and stop for tea – combined, perhaps, with the moderate circular walk on the fell above the village to take in the magnificent vista of the Eden Valley and the well-preserved remains of the village’s lime kilns. 

·      17 May 2015, 2pm-4pm

·      Croglin village hall – CA4 9RZ

·      Art sale and afternoon tea in aid of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust