LONDON TIMES

I am fortunate that I have never been entirely desk bound. Even today I still have occasion to make the occasional foray to London or elsewhere and so it was this week. I’d been at a meeting in one of those elegant houses just off The Mall, where Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone lived in his hey day 150 years ago. He would cross St James Park on the brief walk to Downing Street and this week I found myself retracing his habitual steps only realising afterwards - when I saw his portrait - that this is what I had been doing.

It had been a good meeting as meetings go. Mostly they are tedious and boring and the only sensible work gets done anyway in what these days are called ‘the margins’ in private and informal conversations as you take your coffee or put on your coat to go home. So I was in buoyant mood descending the great steps to the Mall and crossing into St James Park which looked as fine as ever I had seen it, thronged with exotic vegetation and waterfowl.

Early in my career I used to work here - not in the Park, though I must have brought papers out, I suppose, now and again, and sat in the sun eating my lunch - but in the Old Admiralty Building that forms one side of Horseguards Parade.

Shortly after I arrived there new telephones were installed and I was delighted to find I had been given extension number 3. This caused endless amusement. I used to say that extension 1 was the Prime Minister (Edward Heath at the time); extension 2 was the Head of the Civil Service and extension 3 was the next most important person in the government.

Anyway important or not they let me park my car on occasions on Horseguards Parade and for several years after I had moved down to Wales whenever I drove up to town I would park on Horseguards and slip into the office where the girls would write out a permit for me. And then I could park all day in the middle of Central London without a penny to pay.

My mistake was not doing this sufficiently often. For one day they twigged that I no longer actually worked in the building. Security was of course becoming a lot tighter and the easy-come-easy-go days fast becoming a memory.

Today the whole of Horseguards Parade is cordoned off: protected by large steel bollards against, I suppose, lorries packed with explosives. How sad. Nevertheless the bollards are painted a tasteful dark green and outlined in gold and do look as though they belong.

As I didn’t have a car - I can’t remember the last time I ever drove into Central London - the bollards weren’t a problem, so I strolled across the Parade ground and through the archway past an extremely young looking trooper trying to remain motionless as a throng of tourists clicked and snapped in the semi-darkness.

He was dressed of course as for the battle of Waterloo. We have a fascination for that late Georgian period. The time of Pitt and Napoleon, of Talleyrand and Mad King George. The Queen lives in an eighteenth century palace, rides in an eighteenth century coach, escorted by eighteenth century soldiers to the accompaniment of eighteenth century music and along boulevards laid out in the eighteenth century. The French do much the same thing. Indeed swop the troops at the Elysée Palace for those at Horseguards and I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

In my day there were fewer tourists and (possibly the two are correlated) fewer pigeons. The visitors scrummed around the two mounted guards on their shining black horses. Above and behind the horses is the old Admiralty Boardroom with its famous table, a concave segment cut out to accommodate one particularly fat Sea Lord and across the way is Great Scotland Yard, once home to the Metropolitan Police, where the IRA exploded a car bomb in the early seventies. It always was a dingy backstreet and not the romantic sort of place portrayed in police thrillers. I am wondering whether the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris is equally forlorn.

With an hour to kill before leaving to catch my train I crossed Trafalgar Square, up past the statue of Edith Cavell, executed for treason in 1915 by the occupying German forces in Brussels, to the National Portrait Gallery.

I hadn’t been there for years and what a fascinating place it is. Here are Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, Disraeli and Gladstone, Churchill and Queen Anne. Yet what struck me looking at the miscellany of faces was how the men were all recognisable. Take a modern man and stick him in an absurd wig and costume, let him pose for the artist and you will have an eighteenth century portrait. Not so the women. The women’s faces are bland, without character and mostly with charm. They are not so much real faces as an imagination of a face. Why?

Is it because most of the artists were men; or did women really carry that far away ‘lights-on-but-no-one-at-home look?’ A modern woman’s face would fit oddly on the shoulders of Queen Anne, say, or the Duchess of Devonshire, or even of Queen Elizabeth. And she was most certainly ‘at home’ even when the lights were off. Is this a general perception or is this just me? Compare Queen Anne with the photograph of Edith Cavell.


Main Picture is of Horseguards Parade.