Patrick Bade
1910: London Goes Modern

Patrick Bade - 1910: London Goes Modern

- Centuries don’t always end punctually when we want them to. And I would say that, for Britain, the 19th century continued into the early years of the 20th century. It’s round about 1910 that we detect signs of serious change. And a whole series of political-cultural events around 1910 that dragged Britain, I think rather reluctantly, into the 20th century. The view you have here is of Westminster Bridge. That’s a view that hasn’t changed very much in the last 120 years. And just a reminder that this is, of course, the peak of the British Empire, when Britain owned or ruled approximately ¼ of the entire land surface of the globe. So this was the centre of power, this is the Foreign Office, very lavish, as you can see, as it looked in the early 1900s on the left, and as it looks today. And probably the most important event as far as the British Empire was concerned in 1910 was the founding of the South African Union, which, as you can see, united the recently defeated Boer republics with the British colony of South Africa. This is a period of naval rivalry, particularly between Britain and Germany. Britain had always relied very heavily upon its navy. And the policy followed by the British was that the British Navy should be more powerful than the next two most powerful navies together. But Wilhelm I had this obsession with having a navy that would equal the British Navy. And that changes the whole dynamic of politics at the time. Britain had been a natural ally of Germany for centuries.

Most British royal family was entirely German. And but this threat to naval supremacy persuaded the British to rethink their alliances and to ally themselves with their traditional enemies of France and Russia. Now, the period of this brief reign, 10-year reign, less than 10 years, of Edward VII was a period of moral relaxation, I think one could say, after the stuffier times under Queen Victoria. And the king himself, of course, represented these rather relaxed morals in a rather spectacular way. On the left is the Hotel Edouard Sept, where I shall be staying in November with a group from Martin Randall. We always stay there. It’s a very nice hotel. But it was Edward VII’s private residence in Paris. He used to nip over to Paris for naughty weekends and stayed in this building. It was conveniently situated very closely to his favourite brothel, Le Chabanais. All he had to do was waddle across the Avenue de l'Opera, walk a few hundred yards, and there he was in this wonderful, exotic, luxuriously-appointed brothel. And they kept this chaise d'amour especially for him. That still exists. I’ve seen it in a couple of exhibitions. And by this time, of course, he was a very corpulent man. But this strange contraption, don’t ask me to detail how ‘cause I dread to think of it, enabled him to have sex simultaneously with two women. And it was a sign of the relaxed morals of the English aristocracy and royalty that when Edward VII died in 1910, his very tolerant and understanding wife, Alexandra, invited his long-term mistress, Mrs. Keppel, who you see on the left, to come and say goodbye to him as he was dying.

And I’m sure you know she’s the direct ancestor of our present Queen Camilla. So there’s a certain irony there. Edward VII’s funeral has been described as the greatest gathering of royalty in history. Very shortly afterwards, of course, after the First World War, many of the crowns in Europe would fall, empires would fall. There would never be that many kings and emperors to gather together again after this event in 1910. Very lavish coronation as well. Much more lavish than our recent one for George V and his wife, Mary of Teck. All this happened in the midst of great political upheaval. In 1909, it was a Liberal government and they tried an experiment in redistribution of wealth. That had never really happened before in this country. They wanted to redistribute wealth by raising taxes for the wealthy. And unsurprisingly, I suppose, the House of Lords, which was full of wealthy people, resisted this and refused to pass the bill. At this time, the House of Lords had an absolute veto. If they vetoed something, it could not become law. So there was a kind of crunch situation. There were two elections in 1910. And each time, the public reelected the same government, and they made it very clear they wanted this. This was the will of the people. It’s was what they wanted. So George V, the new king, he resolved the situation by threatening to flood the House of Lords with new lords.

They really didn’t want that, of course. So very, very grudgingly, they agreed not only to passing this new taxation, but also to legislation to restrict the power of the House of Lords so that they could not have a total veto. They could delay the inclination of laws, but they couldn’t defeat them altogether. On the right-hand side, you see the chancellor, Lloyd George, and the home secretary at the time, Winston Churchill. So here are images of the elections of 1910. The other great political crisis going on at the time, of course, was the suffragette movement, which was becoming extremely strong and extremely militant at this time. This is Emily Davison, who was a martyr to the cause of the women’s rights. Of course we’re seeing a lot of very violent and aggressive protests at the moment against climate change, against the use of oil and so on. However good the causes, I must admit to having a certain, I don’t feel comfortable ever with the use of violence by a side with these things. But so Emily Davison, she actually killed herself by throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby. And the suffragettes were imprisoned and they went on hunger strikes. And as you can see on the left-hand side, they were forcibly fed with great cruelty. And there was violence. Politicians were physically attacked. Shop windows were smashed in the West End. And most shocking for me, really, was of a suffragette who went to the National Gallery with a kitchen knife wrapped in a copy of “The Times” and she slashed Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. I mean, what good that did, I really don’t know. And it was, of course, a terrible precedent for later protest movements. 1910 saw two of the most celebrated criminal events in modern history. This is the siege of Sidney Street. I imagine Trudy’s talked about this. It was a group of Latvian-Jewish anarchists who were holed up in a house in Sidney Street in the East End.

And it was besieged by the police. This is the first ever such police event that was filmed. So we have film footage of it, which I’m sure you can see that on YouTube. Here you can see Winston Churchill wearing his top hat attending the siege of Sidney Street. And the other very, very sensational criminal event of 1910 was the arrest of Dr. Crippen. He was a resident of Islington, very close to where I am now. And he murdered his wife and buried her in the basement. And he fled to America with his mistress, not very convincingly disguised as a boy. And the captain of the ship spotted him and realised who he was. And this is the very first time that the radio was used to apprehend a criminal 'cause the captain of the ship radioed back to England, that he had Dr. Crippen on board. Everybody was searching for him, of course, in England. And a faster ship was sent with police on it that arrived ahead of Dr. Crippen’s ship. And as soon as he arrived in New York, of course, he was arrested. And that’s what you can see on the right-hand side. He’s walking down the gangway, accompanied by British police officers.

Now, if we could go back to, I always have this fantasy, you probably heard me say it before, having a time machine would be wonderful to go back to London in 1910. It was such an exciting year. There was so much going on. And we could do it in style 'cause there was a whole spate of luxury hotels that had just been opened. The Ritz, the London Ritz, was completed in 1906. And as you can see from the image on the right-hand side, it was actually the first building in London to use the American technique of a steel frame, although you wouldn’t know it from the outside 'cause it’s covered with Norwegian granite and Portland stone. Has a skin of stone over the steel frame. Here’s the inside of the very luxurious Ritz. You can still have tea in that dining room if you want to. There was the Piccadilly Hotel. That was opened in 1908, building of Norman Shaw. And here is the interior of the Piccadilly Hotel. And lastly, there was the Waldorf Hotel, which boasted that it was the first hotel to offer a bedside electric lamp and a telephone in every single room. And I just discovered very fascinating, well, to me, fascinating, fact about Waldorf Hotel. When it opened, it had a very high-quality palm court orchestra. And Thomas Beecham went to the hotel and he heard this orchestra and he was very, very impressed by the lead violinist of the hotel’s palm court orchestra called Albert Sammons. And he immediately recruited him for his own orchestra and promoted him. And he became one of the leading solo violinists of the first half of the 20th century in Britain.

This is Piccadilly Circus. Again, it hasn’t changed that much since this photograph was taken. What’s interesting here, of course, is to see the mixture of horse-drawn carriages and horseless carriages. This is the moment of transition when people are leaving behind horses and moving. So you get a different kind of pollution. In 1900 Paris and London, you would’ve smelled horseshit absolutely everywhere. But by 1910, that was beginning to be replaced by petrol fumes. Fascinating, these photographs. And, again, if you go on YouTube, you’re going to think I spend all my time on YouTube. You can Google moving pictures of London, Paris, New York, wherever, from this time. Now, I find them absolutely mesmerising. These people going about their ordinary everyday lives. That woman there in the middle next to lamppost about to cross the street, hesitating. The fact that these people were completely unaware of being caught in this way by the camera and immortalised. And always very interesting as well to look at the headgear. And every single person in this image has some kind of hat. And, as I’ve mentioned before, the hat will classify them, whether they’re upper class or working class. New cars from around 1910. These are state-of-the-art motorcars. And in London, it was a period where there was some quite important urbanisation going on. London has never been, it’s always been haphazard, the way London has developed. There’s never been a very coherent plan from above to reorganise London in the way there was in Vienna and in Paris. But there were two very big schemes in the centre of London going on in 1910.

One was the rebuilding of Regent Street, which you see here. And the other one was the area of the Aldwych and Southampton Row, just west of the city. That had been a slum area and the slums were cleared, and these very characteristic, rather bombastic Edwardian buildings. It was despite tentative efforts to redistribute wealth and to address the huge gap between rich and poor. That gap was still very evident in London with terrible, terrible slums, like the one I just mentioned that was cleared. So there were people living in London in really subhuman conditions and very bad for public health. Disease and so on. There had been efforts to deal with this from the mid-Victorian period onwards. Peabody Trust, for instance, was building housing that was meant to be safer and healthier. This is an example of that, late 19th century. But the most ambitious scheme and, I guess that there’ll be people listening today who live in Hampstead Garden City. Of course, for those who can afford it, it’s certainly an area that’s much favoured by London’s Jewish community. And this was the brainchild of the philanthropist Henrietta Barnett. And it had a very utopian philosophy behind it. They wanted it to be completely secular. So church bells are forbidden. There are churches. You can see one there on the plan, but they’re not allowed to ring their bells and impose themselves on their non-Christian neighbours. And it was planned in a very idealistic way to mix the classes. That the wealthier and all levels of income were supposed to be catered for.

I mean, that’s an ideal. Whereas these days, when there are new housing developments that, in Britain, they’re supposed to include housing for the less well off. Well, I think nowadays, any house Hampstead Garden City Suburb is likely to be a very costly affair. Here are examples of the kind of housing that you find in Hampstead Garden Suburb. So the predominant style before the First World War was the wedding cake style. Very pompous and grandiose. This is the Cromwell Road facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was completed in 1909. It’s by an architect called Aston Webb, who also designed Admiralty Arch that leads into the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace. Westminster Methodist Hall, you’d think very far from the original ideals, of rather severe ideals of Methodism. It’s, again, a very kind of very grandiose, rather pompous Edwardian building. And I’ve mentioned before the Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic cathedral of London, which was completed in 1906 in a new Byzantine style. And there are many delightful buildings, less pompous buildings from this period. This is the Blackfriar Pub in the city of London, which was completed around about 1906. An expression of perhaps a more enlightened and forward-looking philosophy is Debenham House, which belonged to the owner of the department store, Debenham’s.

And this house, it’s by an architect called Halsey Ricardo. And his great thing was to surface his buildings in glazed ceramic. I mean, London had become a notoriously black and grey city. It was extremely polluted. And the combination of London weather and coal smoke and so on, you know, the London brick is very absorbent. So it absorbs all the pollution. So the idea for a building like this, and there were quite a lot of buildings in the Edwardian period and just after, leading up to the First World War, was that if you have a glazed ceramic surface, that London weather is actually an asset because it’s going to wash the surface clean. Another famous example of this, of course, is the Michelin House in South Kensington. A very delightful, quirky building dating from 1911 to 13. This is how it looks today. Of course, it’s a restaurant today. Decorations for Michelin House. Department stores. Department stores were first developed in Paris in the Second Empire in the 1860s. And they spread to other cities. Berlin, of course. In many cities, they were Jewish enterprises, particularly in Germany. Actually, I don’t know who was the original owner of Harrods, presumably Mr. Harrod.

This is Harrods, which, it’s faced in terracotta, as you can see. That opened in 1905. This is Selfridges, which was begun in 1908 and built in phases over the next few years. This is an interesting building 'cause here you can actually see, of course, that it is a steel-framed building. And steel and iron. And the columns are merely decorative. They’re not really holding up the building. So this is shocking. As it was just before the First World War. Electrical appliances. Electricity, especially electric lighting, which first appeared in London in a few buildings in the 1880s. But by this time, by 1910, quite a lot of London is electrically lit and wealthier households are likely to have moved on from oil lamps or gas lamps to electricity, certainly in London by this time. Now, art and culture. Here are two portraits that were exhibited in 1908. And what a contrast they make, don’t they? On the left, it’s Hungarian artist, Philip de Laszlo, who aspired to inherit the mantle of Sargent in 1907. Sargent declined to take any more commissions for painted portraits. He was still making charcoal portraits, but he was just sick of commissioned portraits. He’d had it. And there were various artists. Orpen, Lavery, and Laszlo, who were trying to fill the gap and take the place of Sargent. And this is a portrait of a woman who later became famous or even notorious, Vita Sackville-West. She was married to Harold Nicolson. They were both gay and that suited them very well. They had an understanding, but she was a pretty predatory lesbian. One critic described her as being Lady Chatterley from the waist up and gamekeeper from the waist down.

But here she looks, you know, feminine and frothy in that Edwardian way. A very truculent, deliberately primitive portrait by Jacob Epstein of one of the numerous children, illegitimate children, of Augustus John on the right-hand side. He was called Romilly. So here is Jacob Epstein. He was New York Jewish, came to Europe. Interesting, really, that, I mean, of course, he went to Paris. Everybody went to Paris. That he decided to settle in London rather than Paris. I think he would’ve had an easier time, in many ways, in Paris. But he caused one of the really major art scandals of the early 20th century. 1908, he was commissioned to make sculptures to decorate the facade of the building of the British Medical Association on the Strand, which you see on the right-hand side. Here he is in his studio on the left. And here you can see one of these sculptures being put in place on the building. So why were they so scandalous? And it was the realism of the nudity. The men had genitalia that were, you know, size of real genitalia, not tiny little ones like idealised Greek statues. Most shocking of all was that he showed a pregnant woman. Well, appropriately enough, one would think, on the facade of the building of British Medical Association. But it was his hard luck that the office of the League of Decency was on the opposite side of the street. And the people sitting in the office of the League of Decency, whose whole purpose in life was to go around trying to improve people’s morals, they did not want to look out of the window at these nude statues. This is how they looked when they were first installed.

There was a huge, huge, huge fuss about these statues. And some years later, a workman was sent up to mutilate them, supposedly on grounds of health and safety that bits could fall off. You know, maybe a penis or a breast could fall off and brain somebody in the street. And I mean, I don’t believe that for a second because London and Paris are full of sculptures like this on buildings. And I’ve never heard of anything like that actually happening. But this is what they… Actually, I think they look terrific in their mutilated state. And when I walk down the Strand, I always paused to look at them. And sad though I am that this was done to them, I still think they’re very, very beautiful. But the the great sensational art event of 1910 that really dragged the London art-loving public almost screaming into the 20th century, made them aware that things have been happening in Continental Europe was the exhibition organised by Roger Fry, who you see on the left-hand side, that he gave the title Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Well, Manet was already accepted. I think I pointed that out recently while talking about Stanley Spencer. I showed you that painting, Homage to Manet. Manet was an acceptable figure. But the British were really not aware of anything that had happened since Manet. They weren’t aware of the great Post-Impressionists, Cezanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh. And they certainly weren’t aware of Matisse, who really was the latest thing in Paris in 1910.

So the exhibition was a huge, huge succes de scandale with, you know, the sorts of conservative papers, of course, denouncing it as dreadful European, you know, the usual Brexit-y hysteria about anything European. That we’re being polluted by horrible European decadent culture. Here are two of the paintings that were in that show, Cezanne on the left-hand side, Matisse on the right. Van Gogh was particularly considered to be completely outrageous and beyond the pale. So here you’ve got caricatures of people’s reactions of ecstasy or horror or disgust and caricatures of this comprehensive part. I don’t know which particular newspaper, but very sort of “Daily Mail,” “Daily Express” kind of fake indignation. It had an immediate galvanising effect on young artists in London. As I said, they’d hardly been aware even of Impressionism. But Gauguin was the one that they all went for in a big way. The painting on the left-hand side is by an artist called Spencer Gore, and it’s called Gauguins at the Grafton Gallery. You can see those are the actual paintings by Gauguin on the right-hand side. And this is his view of the paintings hanging in the Post-Impressionist show. So as immediate follow-on, really, of the Post-Impressionist show, a group of young artists calling themselves the Camden Town Group, got together and they exhibited. You could argue that this is the first ever modern art avant-garde exhibition by British artists.

And this was in June 1911. Here are the artists that belong to the Camden Group. Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner, Malcolm Drummond, and Harold Gilman. And in the middle, of course, you’ve got Sickert, who is a kind of father figure to the Camden Town Group. All painting, really, in, I would say, a Post-Impressionist way. So another Spencer Gore of Camden Town. Spencer Gore on the left-hand side, Gaugin on the right. It’s very evident, isn’t it? That’s England, but he’s painted it really as though it were Tahiti. But, so yes, for the English, Spencer Gore on left-hand side was wildly avant-garde and shocking in 1910 or 1911. But, of course, by continental standards, it would’ve been pretty tame. This is Erich Heckel. He’s a German Expressionist artist. This is a picture about 1908, 1909. So obviously, Spencer Gore is very restrained by compared with a German Expressionist artist at the same date. And the same, this is Harold Gilman, but it’s fine picture, but tame, I would say, compared to the contemporary efforts of Matisse, like the painting on the right-hand side that was bought by Gertrude Stein. So moving on to entertainment. We would’ve been royally entertained if we could have gone back to London. Theatres were proliferating. Enormous numbers of London theatres that still exist date from this period between 1900 and 1914.

Well, these two theatres, of course, still exist. The Hippodrome and the Coliseum, in the news now. It’s so sad, so sad that the English National Opera is going to lose its home in the Coliseum. What they’ll do with this theatre, God only knows. It’s the biggest theatre in London, so quite hard to fill. And here on the left is the interior of the Coliseum. Actually, I’m not sure which one it is. Maybe it’s the Hippodrome on the right-hand side. So it was the heyday of the Edwardian musical comedy. And the queen of musical comedy was the delightful Gertie Millar. Everybody was in love with her. Here she is with her first husband, the composer Lionel Monckton. And for her, he wrote the hugely successful musical, “The Quaker Girl.” Just realising I haven’t put… Oh, it’s so annoying. I haven’t put the musical things in, so I can’t play you her voice. But you can check her on YouTube. And so “The Quaker Girl” tells the story of a Quaker girl who is thrown out from her family because she sips a glass of champagne and she goes off to Paris. And, of course, she gets involved in all sorts of naughty things. So here is, again, the delightful Gertie Millar. But the highest-paid performer in London in 1910 was definitely the French star, Gaby Deslys, who was moving backwards and forth between London and Paris and getting a lot of publicity because she had a very indiscreet affair with the young King Manuel II of Portugal, who you see in the middle. And she loved pearls. And he reputedly gave her her own weight in pearls to enjoy her favours. Again, do try her out on. She’s delicious, naughty, naughty French, with very French-accented English.

Try her on YouTube. Now, the more serious theatre, the theatre in the late 19th century was just a place of entertainment for the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. But thanks to the great Norwegian playwright, Ibsen, he instituted a real revolution in theatre. And following in his footsteps, George Bernard Shaw and Granville-Barker, who you see on the right-hand side, they took over the Royal Court Theatre. And they were presenting plays to the public that were not frothy entertainment. They were meant to bring about social and political change. So hard hitting. They were trying to make the public think. So, 1910, the Royal Court presented George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Misalliance,” which took a very caustic view of the institution of marriage, very satirical view. So would’ve been regarded by many people as completely undermining conventional morality. There was great feast of opera going on in 1910. Not only at the Royal Opera House, I’ll get to in a minute, but, of course, it was a brand new opera house built in 1910 by the American impresario, Oscar Hammerstein. He’s the father of… Oscar Hammerstein, you’re probably more familiar with, of Rodgers and Hammerstein. And he made his money in the cigar business, became immensely rich. And he built this lavish theatre where he presented international opera in competition with Covent Garden.

And here he is in the middle. Here are two of his biggest stars, Lina Cavalieri, who was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and who could sing quite well. But that wasn’t really the reason that people went to see her. They went to see her for her beauty and for her ill-gotten jewels. And on the left-hand side, the mezzo, Marguerite d'Alvarez who writes very vividly about Hammerstein in her book. He lusted after her and he did everything possible to force her to have sex with him, which she wasn’t willing to. I mean, he was really actually a kind of Harvey Weinstein of his time. He treated her appallingly. And when she resolutely refused to have sex with him, he did everything possible to sabotage her career. So here is the Royal Opera House in the midst of its fruit and vegetable market. And as I’ve told you before, this is the period of the great rivalry between Tetrazzini, who you see on the left-hand side, and Nellie Melba on the right-hand side. You would have had a feast of wonderful singing. The Opera House was taken over in 1910, or the direction of it, by a young conductor called Thomas Beecham who is to play an incredibly important role in the history of classical music in this country in the 20th century, right up to the 1960s. Founding and abandoning orchestras. He was a great mover and shaker. And in 1910, he presented his first season at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, in which he presented the premieres of Delius’ “A Village Romeo and Juliet.”

The first opera at Covent Garden ever composed by a woman, and that was Dame Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers.” That was a tremendous success at the time. But the big, big scandal was Strauss’ “Elektra.” And this was the musical equivalent, really, of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist show. “Elektra” is the most extreme, the most advanced opera that was written by Strauss. It hovers on the brink of atonality. It’s extremely violent. I mean, it’s violent in its action. And got a huge 117-man orchestra. Every instrument in the orchestra treated almost as though it’s a solo instrument. Incredible, incredible cacophonies of sound. As you can see the headline there, “This is the opera that will electrify London.” And like the Post-Impressionist show, of course, the newspapers, especially, the more conservative papers, were full of attacks on Strauss and his opera and caricatures of the cacophony of the music. And so, well, we’re now moving actually into 1911. And another way in which modernity arrived in London was with the Russian ballet. Of course Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet had taken Paris by storm in 1909. And it was the coronation season at Covent Garden that gave Diaghilev the opportunity to bring his ballet company. Also, the other thing that enabled him was that, of course, his chief star was the male dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, who was also his lover. And he was the one that everybody wanted to see. But Nijinsky, in the employment, it was only a limited period in the year in holidays where he was allowed to travel with Diaghilev. But Diaghilev, through cunning and trickery, managed to engineer Nijinsky’s dismissal from the Imperial Opera in 1910. And that meant that he could now not only appear for a short season in Paris, he could travel.

And the first place he came to was London. And here is Nijinsky with Pavlova, who was with the Russian Ballet for the first two seasons. And more images of the first season of the Russian. This is dances. And the big success, of course, was the ballet “Scheherazade.” And the main success of that, actually, was visual. And it was the sets, the incredibly gorgeous, lavish sets of Leon Bakst that had a tremendous influence on interior design and fashion. And it was said that, you know, that the costumes, these wonderfully sexy costumes that Bakst designed for Scheherazade. And it was said that no really fashionable hostess in London or Paris between 1910 and 1914. Well, every one of them wanted to have a salon that looked like a setting for an orgy. And they’re all wearing turbans and very exotic costumes inspired by Bakst’s designs. And here is Nijinsky, who’s never filmed. Diaghilev would not allow it. He could have been filmed. Pavlova is filmed. There’s lots of film of Pavlova. But he was photographed. So you can sort of make him dance for you by just going through these photographs. This is how he looked as the sexy slave in Scheherazade. And that brings me to the end. So I’m going to see what questions we have. Where are they? They’ve disappeared, the questions. Oh, here they are.

Q&A and Comments:

Margaret! How did you not know that? It probably means you read a better class of newspaper. It’s certainly been all in all the tabloids endlessly that Mrs. Keppel was, I think, the great-grandmother of Queen Camilla.

Q: “When was the Eros added to Piccadilly Circus?”

A: That’s Alfred Gilbert. And what is the exact date? It’s a bit before this. I think the Eros is in the 1890s. I’d have to check. It’s very beautiful. You know, we really take it for granted. But it’s worth stopping and looking at, particularly the base, very Art Nouveau base. I think it’s 1890s, early 1890s, the Eros. A book “Thunderstruck” by Erik Larson, page-turner about Crippen and Marconi. Yes. Whose lives are intertwined by the invention of the radio.

Edwardian building means that it’s built in the reign of Edward VII, which is 1901 to 1910. There are various different styles that were going at the time. There’s, you know, Arts and Crafts were still going strong. There’s a kind of French Beaux-Arts style was popular. So Neo-Baroque is one of the styles that was very popular in the Edwardian period.

And then, what’s next? Very international, Hampstead Garden Suburb. Yes. I don’t think I know anybody who lives there, actually.

The little vacuum cleaner. Yes. So I suppose these modern, it would only been for the very, very wealthy, I suppose, to have something like that.

Charles Harrod, thank you. Founder of Harrods. Apparently I didn’t know that. That the correct name’s to call it Strand, not the Strand. Well, it’s a bit recherche.

“Can’t resist. There’s a wonderful family Stein. There’s Gertrude, there’s Ep, and there’s Ein.” Thank you, Josie. Yes. No. Oh, oh, I see. Yes, I see that. It’s just a rhyme you’re doing. “There’s Ep and there’s Ein. Gertrude’s poetry, bunk, Ep’s statues are junk. And nobody can understand Ein.” Nice little rhyme, but very, very unfair. Very unfair to all three, of course.

Q: Where is it now?

A: I’m not sure where. There are photographs of it hanging in Gertrude Stein’s flat in Paris. It was hanging directly above Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. But I don’t know what happened. I don’t know whether she kept it for all her. ‘Cause when she had a quarrel with her brother, Leo, and I think he took the Matisses and she took the Picassos. So I don’t know exactly what happened to them.

“Think the Hippodrome is a casino with entertainment today.” Gertie Millar, thank you. Putting a link. Yeah, yeah, I agree with it. It was an absolute crime that the Epstein statues were mutilated like that. Really shocking. But, you know, the health and safety was clearly just an excuse. They just wanted to get rid of them.

And I also agree with you that however appalling Eric Gill may have been as a human being, that I don’t see the point of mutilating his statue on Broadcasting House. Shocking thing to do. Sadly, sadly. Did you know that opera house, it survived the Second World War. It wasn’t damaged in the Second World War. There were famous seasons. It became known as the Stoll and my favourite singer of all time, Magda Olivero, she never sang at Covent Garden. She sang at the Stoll in the 1940s, but in the 1950s, it was demolished. Thank you, Hannah.

Q: “When is the ENO going to close down?”

A: I’m not sure about that. There’s a big, big protest movement, of course, against it. So it would be wonderful if the government policy could be reversed.

Thank you, Miriam. Thanks. Debenham House is in West London. It’s very close to Holland Park and I have been there. It’s now sort of sanatorium for people recovering from mental breakdowns. That was not why I was there. I was actually visiting somebody who worked there. But let me explain.

“1910, Modernism had only a shelf life of a couple of years.” That’s true. That’s a very interesting point, Shelley. I mean, things really looked. Actually, that’s something I will address I think in my next lecture, that the sort of buds of burgeoning Modernism that looked so healthy, they were really going places, say between 1910 and 1914. And it was all kind of knocked back by the First World War. And it’s like the British really took fright and many of them rejected Modernism after the First World War. Thank you, Rita.

Lillie Langtry. No, she’s an earlier period, Lillie Langtry. Of course, she was a lover of Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, but we’re going right back to the 1870s and '80s when Lillie Langtry was at her height. And a very interesting woman. I mean, she deserves a lecture. Maybe sometime we’ll get round to that.

“This is Bernard Victor. His grandfather opened the first record shops in London in 1913. So they started with cylinders, and they also sold gas and electrical appliances.” I did talk a little bit about that last time with, you know, the gramophone. It’s a bit earlier, actually, than 1913 that flat records were first introduced. Just after the turn of the century with the Gramophone and Typewriter company. Thank you.

Somebody’s checked. Thank you. Eros erected, as I said, in the early 1890s. Dan, you thought they’d always been there. Yes, I suppose especially some of the ones in a Historicist style, they look like they might have been there a lot longer.

Q: “What is the bistro in Paris you’ve spoken about?”

A: Oh, my favourite restaurant probably, well, of many I’ve talked about, my favourite, of course, is La Fresque. It’s Rue Rambuteau, very close to the Pompidou Centre. But I did talk several times recently about the wonderful Train Bleu. If you want to go to Train Bleu, you need to book well in advance. It’s a very spectacular Belle Epoque restaurant.

Thank you, Rita, again, checking that the Matisse is in the San Francisco Museum of Art. That’s a good place for it to be. Thank you again, Peter. Thanks, Margaret.

Q: Do I know the sculptor Dora Gordine?

A: No, I don’t, actually. I don’t even know the name. Thank you, Suzanne.

And more people telling us that the the Matisse is in San Francisco. Thank you all very much. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over. I’m really losing my marbles. I had a couple of musical excerpts that I would’ve like to play you. But you can, as I said, both Gertie Millar, you can certainly find on YouTube. And I imagine you can also… Can’t remember her name now. Dear, I am losing my marbles. But YouTube is a fantastic resource and you can find some of the things that I was talking about.

Thank you all very, very much, and I’ll be back with you on Sunday talking about what happened immediately after the First World War.