Indecision

Birds at Bushy Park near Hampton Court

Feeling uncertain

Cannot decide at all

We're sitting on the fence

AUTUMN AT VIRGINIA WATER IN PHOTOGRAPHS

 

VIRGINIA WATER LAKE is surrounded by beautifully cultivated parkland. It is located about 7 miles south of Slough and about 22 miles southwest of central London. We visited it today, the 16^th of November 2021, to enjoy the many colours of the autumn foliage, and were not disappointed.

 

In 1746, William Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765), who fought in the Battle of Culloden and became the Ranger of Windsor Great Park, developed the marshy waste where today the Virginia Water Lake and its park are located. The painter Paul Sandby (1731-1809) and his older brother Thomas (1721-1798) designed the lake and landscaping around it. They drained the swamp and dammed the lowest end of it as well as diverting local streams to create a lake. The dam collapsed in 1768 and was then rebuilt using stronger materials. At the same time, a waterfall, which we were unable to see on our visit, was created to carry the excess water from the lake. Another feature, which we were only able to see from afar as it was closed for maintenance works, is a set of ruins near the waterfall. These consist of archaeological fragments brought from Greece and North Africa. Prior to being brought to Virginia Water by order of King George IV, they had been stored in the courtyard of the British Museum.

 

While we wandered around the parkland, it occurred to me that when it was laid out back in the 18^th century, its designers would have had to imagine how the park would look when its trees and shrubs eventually matured. They would not have been able to see the magnificent grounds as we see them today but could only dream about what is now a reality, something that they would not have lived long enough to see.

 

After an enjoyable walk with our friends from Richmond, who have introduced us to many places new to us, we ate lunch in the restaurant close to the London Road car park. The quality of the food available there is a cut above what is available in many other parks in and around London.

AN 'ICONIC' LONDON LANDMARK

The southern tower of London's Tower Bridge seen from between modern buildings close to the River Thames is  a glorious sight for both tourists and locals. The bridge was built between 1886 and 1894. It was designed by Horace Jones and it was engineered by James W Barry. For many visitors, it symbolises London. Contrary to a popular misconception, it was never for sale and the authorities in Lake Havasu City (Arizona) who bought the last London Bridge knew that they were not expecting to receive Tower Bridge

GUJARAT - a new link

GUJARAT has been an important trading area since time immemorial and a place where diverse peoples have mingled. It offers the visitor a rich cultural tapestry: history, tradition, architecture, and much more. Its people are welcoming. 

Good accomodation is available, and transportation is not a problem.

Find out more about GUJARAT at this exciting new website:

https://gujarat-travels.com/ 

FRESTONIA lives again!

Overshadowed by the charred remains of Grenfell Tower (built in 1974 as part of the Lancaster West Estate), Freston Road runs close to Latymer Road Underground Station. During the early 1970s when tower blocks, such as the ill-fated Grenfell, were being built, Freston Road was a jumble of run-down, mostly vacant, Victorian dwellings.

Squatters moved into these empty houses in the early 1970s. When the Greater London Council (‘GLC’) wanted to redevelop the area that included Freston Road, all of the residents adopted the surname ‘Bramley’, so that the GLC would be faced with housing a very large family. When the Council threatened compulsory eviction at a meeting attended by more than 200 residents, the residents under threat declared that the area around Freston road should become an independent republic, separate from the UK. Thus, was born the ‘The Republic of Frestonia’ in 1977.

The Republic, which applied for membership of both the UN and the European Economic Community, survived for several years. Life in the ‘Republic’ was recorded in photographs by the photographer Tony Sleep. An exhibition of his beautiful photographs of life in Frestonia opened this evening (11^th October 2017) at the Frestonia Gallery at 2 Olaf Street, W11 4BE. It will continue until 10^th of November. The gallery is housed within the Peoples Palace (built 1902), which is almost the only remaining building amongst those which existed during the lifetime of the Republic.

In addition to the wonderfully composed black and white photographs, there are also display cases containing documents relating to the Republic. These include contemporaneous press-cuttings, the application to the UN, and special postage stamps issued by the Republic. The exhibition is a worthy homage to a fascinating episode in London’s complex history.

Tony Sleep with one of his photos projected behind him

The opening of the exhibition was a very special occasion. Not only was Tony Sleep present, but also some of the now ageing inhabitants the short-lived Republic.

This is an exhibition well worth visiting – not to be missed.

See also: https://londonadam.travellerspoint.com/32/

Now, it's time to read a book by ADAM YAMEY:

visit: http://www.adamyamey.com

 

EDWARD LEAR IN BANGALORE

 

Telicherry (Kerala) sketched by Edward Lear in 1874

On September, the 24^th 1874, Mr Edward Lear (1812-1888), who was staying in Bangalore (now ‘Bengaluru’), wrote in his diary:

“Walked to Orr and Barton’s and got my photographs…”

Lear is best known for his nonsense verse, lesser known as an artist. Although never as successful as his contemporaries (e.g Holman Hunt, Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Turner, Millais, and Rossetti,) in the 19th century UK art world, he was a wonderful landscape artist. In addition, he was highly skilled at depicting flora and fauna (especially birds: he was said to rival Audubon). Oddly, his talents did not extend to great representations of the human form except in comical cartoons, at which he excelled.

Restless, Lear travelled the world in search of the ‘picturesque’. He visited many places, including Albania, which is what got me interested in him in the first place. He recorded his travels in sketchbooks, and later transformed some of these into oil paintings - the medium which he hoped to master - but never really managed. Lear described his trips in diaries that he later published as travel journals, his pen producing portraits of the places almost as eloquently as his fine sketches and watercolours.

Recently, I discovered that Lear visited India (including Ceylon). He did so at the invitation of an old friend, Thomas Baring - Lord Northbrook, who had become the Viceroy of India in 1872. I bought a reasonably priced second-hand copy of Lear's "Indian Journal", introduced and edited by Ray Murphy (published in 1953). Unlike his other travel journals (e.g. for Albania, Greece, Corsica, and Southern Italy), this book contains Lear's actual diary entries rather than a later polished-up literary version of them.

Lear describes almost every day of his trip to India, which lasted from November 1873 until January 1875, when sickness and bad back pain forced him and his Albanian servant Giorgio to end their rambles, which had taken them from the heights of the Himalayas to the deep south of India and through Ceylon.

The trip was dogged with problems: logistic, illness, food, and so on. Yet, even on the worst of days, Lear found something redeeming to write about. Lear enjoyed Indian 'local colour', but was often less than lukewarm about British colonial social life. He preferred the ‘really Indian' places to those places favoured by the British. Many a place where the British liked to spend time relaxing were loved because, to use Lear's words, because of their: 

“un-Indian qualities."

Lear visited Bangalore twice. His first sojourn was between the 13^th of August 1874 and the 21^st of that month. He arrived there on a train that passed through:

“Arkonam … at the junction of the Bombay-Madras and Madras-Malabar lines.”

At this his junction in Tamil Nadu, now known as ‘Arakkonam’, he had to spend a night in a waiting room. In Bangalore, he took rooms for himself and his servant in the Cubbon Hotel, which he did not rate highly on arrival. However, a few days later, he noted:

“The food at this hotel is good, and the service quiet and unobtrusive…”

Kora Chandy wrote in “The City Beautiful” by TP Issar (published1988):

“…let me turn to Infantry Road and the present office of the Commissioner of Police. Some 100 years ago, it was the leading hotel in Bangalore, called the Cubbon Hotel. The facilities it advertised included a ball room, ‘complete suites of the bachelor’s apartments’ and ‘carriages on the premises. In the early years of the century the British Resident purchased this property and his office was located there until 1928…” 

In 1911, the Cubbon Hotel still existed, when it was leased by Spencer’s, which was then in the hands of the Oakshott family.  The Cubbon Hotel was rated along with the (still extant) West End Hotel as being above average in Murray’s “Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon” (10^th edition, published 1920). Therefore, the Resident must have purchased it sometime after 1920. Maya Jayapal writes in her “Bangalore: roots and beyond” (published in 2014):

“… the Cubbon Hotel… was constructed in the prevailing style of colonial architecture, sometimes called Greco-Roman. It is now the police commissioner’s office…”

A photograph (see below) in TP Issar’s book confirms Jayapal’s description of the architecture. 

Lear considered Bangalore:

“… an odd place, not over beautiful, but contains three picturesque bits and, I think, one general view. The tall coco-palms are a chief characteristic, but the queer houses are odd indeed…”

On the 15^th of August, he visited the Lal Bagh gardens, concluding that:

“… he had never seen a more beautiful place, terraces, trellises, etc., not to speak of some wild beasts. Flowers exquisite… There is something very rural quiet about this place… walked with Giorgio to some granite rocks, and a little tank, where I drew till it began to rain, ven I cum back…”

This little excerpt exposes Lear’s liberated approach to spelling. I have visited Lal Bagh often, and have seen its large tank, which contains an island. The large tank is separated from a smaller one, often filled with waterlilies, by a causeway. I am not sure about which water feature Lear was writing. Next day, he visited Ulsoor Tank, but arrived too late to sketch it. The Tank, which is still in existence, is a veritable lake with several islands in it. Zafar Futehally and Kora Chandy writing in Issar’s book, noted:

“It extended over an area of 125 acres and was constructed by Kempegowda II during the second half of the 16^th century.”

It supplied drinking water to the civilian and military population of Bangalore until the 20^th century.

That day he praised Bangalore in his diary:

“This station is very extensive and populous, and seems in some ways the pleasantest I have known in India. A sort of homely quiet pervades everything, and the air is delightful, ditto flowers. Birds are numerous but make absurd noises.”

All over India, Lear remarked on the peculiar birdsong he heard. He left Bangalore on the 21^st of August, heading for Madras.

Lear returned to Bangalore on the 23^rd of September 1874, arriving by train from Salem. His journey had not been uneventful.  Near ‘Cajdoody’ (this is probably modern day Kadugodi, which is on a railway close to Whitefields, and, relevantly, a couple of still-extant large bodies of water), a bridge was down. Lear wrote:

“Descending from the carriage, we had to walk along a narrow edge of clay by the steep side of the embankment; this was … difficult. … Next, a descent, with a crowd of natives, and still more awkward pass over loose planks to a boat … ferried across deep and rapid water, the result of a broken tank which had so swollen the stream as to carry away the bridge. Then came a hoisting up slippery wooden steps … to the level of the other train…”

Lear and Giorgio arrived exhausted in Bangalore on the 23^rd of September 1874 after a thirty-minute train journey from the flooded area. It was the following day that he visited Orr and Barton’s to collect some photographs – of what he does not say. Throughout his visit to India, Lear bought photographs, which he might have used to remind him of places that he had seen.

On my last visit to Bangalore in 2016, I bought some jewellery from Barton’s, whose extensive shop is within Barton Tower on MG Road. From its earliest days, it had been a jeweller but it came as news to me that it was also known for its photography. The 1920 Murray’s guide to India (see above) lists “Barton & Sons” both as a jeweller and a photographer.  One of the Mr Bartons must have been an exceptional photographer. M Fazlul Hasan writes in his “Bangalore Through the Centuries” (published 1970) that when an equestrian statue of Sir Mark Cubbon was unveiled in March 1866, many photographers rushed forward to ‘snap’ it, but:

“Owing, however, to the fading light and other difficulties, only two, Major Dixon and Mr Barton, succeeded.”

Bangalore was not Lear’s last port of call in India. He went on to visit several other places including Sri Lanka before returning via Kerala to Bombay, and thence back to Europe. It was noticing that he had visited Barton’s, a shop I know well, that prompted me to write this piece based on the lesser-known travels of a well-known cultural figure of the nineteenth century. 

READ FASCINATING BOOKS/KINDLES 

BY ADAM YAMEY

DISCOVER MORE by clicking: H E R E !

AM I A CAMERA?

I knew that I had them. I knew where these foolscap (not even A4) pages were stored, stuffed into the pages of an old road atlas of Yugoslavia. But, I believed that they contained little more information than the list of places that I had visited with a friend when we drove around Serbia in 1990, the last time that I visited Yugoslavia. I was under the impression that the notes contained only the itinerary that we had followed when we visited lesser-known places in the heart of Yugoslavia, a country that was soon to be torn apart by uncivil civil wars.

However, when I did eventually take a look at these papers more than 20 years after having written them, I realised that I was wrong. These pages contained much more than a simple listing of where we had been and on which day; they contained extremely detailed notes about what we did at each of these places. At the insistence of the Yugoslav friend with whom I had made this trip in May 1990 I had kept a detailed contemporaneous record of our Serbian 'odyssey'.

I re-read these notes whilst I was working on the finishing touches to my book about Albania, "Albania on my mind", and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write something about the numerous trips that I made to Yugoslavia between about 1967 and 1990. Thus, the idea of writing "Scrabble with Slivovitz - Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"  (which I shall now abbreviate to 'SWS') was born. At first, I thought of writing up my 1990 notes into a short book, but soon after this I decided that I would trawl through my memories and try to write about the decades of experiences that I gleaned from visiting Yugoslavia.

I knew that I had taken many photographs during my numerous visits to ths country and its neighbours, but I had not seen them for over 20 years. They were all colour transparencies taken on 35 mm film. When I moved house in about 1993, all of these pictures were placed, along with many other surplus goods, into a lock-up in a warehouse a long way from where I moved in with my wife. I had no idea what condition they were in and what was depicted on them. Consequently, most of the text of SWS was based on what memories that remained stored in my aging brain. The only part of the book that was based on more than pure memory was my description of the last trip that I made to Yugoslavia (that was in May 1990).

Just when the manuscript of SWS was nearly ready for publication, the company which managed the long-term storage of our goods contacted us urgently. The section of the warehouse in which our storage locker was located was due to be remodelled shortly. The company needed us to move our goods to a new locker, and felt that it would be best if we were present to supervise the moving. We agreed, and whilst the moving was in progress I decided to take a look at some of the numerous boxes of colour transparencies that I had not seen for over 20 years.In each box that I examined, the colour slides were in pristine condition. We returned home, and I ordered a slide scanner from Amazon. 

When the scanner arrived, I returned to our locker, and selected several boxes of slides including most of those that I had taken during my trips to Yugoslavia and its neighbours (SWS also describes excursions that I made from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria and Hungary). I scanned furiously for about 3 weeks until the scanner failed to function any more. I hasten to add that this was not due to over-use but to faulty electronics, which the supplier was gracious enough to acknowledge by making me a refund.  Since returning the scanner, I have devised my own slide scanning apparatus, which, incidentally, produces far better results than the one that I bought. I may describe its construction in a future blog.

I had originally decided to illustrate SWS with pictures 'borrowed' from the Internet, from old books and old tourist brochures in my possession, but the rediscovery of my slides made me change my mind.  I illustrated the book with my own photographs. And this is where the process of writing SWS became interesting. As I scanned the slides and turned them into digital images (.jpeg files), I realised that many of the things that I had written about, and which were based on what I could remember, were things that I had also photographed. It was if the act of taking the photograph not only made changes on the emulsion of the 35 mm camera film but also on my grey matter, or wherever it is that memories are stored in my head. Christopher Isherwood once wrote, "I am a camera...". Well, it appears that so am I!

The object of this little essay was to illustrate something of how my memory works, and I hope that I have succeeded in doing that. However, many of you may be wondering why Scrabble? Slivovitz or Slivovica almost everyone associates with the Balkans, and especially the lands which were once known as 'Yugoslavia', but few would have reason to associate Scrabble, a word game developed in the USA in 1938, with travels in the Balkans.  Well, if you want to know why I played Scrabble in Belgrade (sometimes after eating Chinese noodles in Novi Sad) as well as Sijarinska Banja and Studenica, you will have to read my book!

"SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ 

- Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"

by Adam Yamey

is available by clicking HERE

OR via Amazon's online stores, 

where it is also available as a Kindle version.

ALBANIA Face of the BALKANS

Some years ago whilst travelling in the south of France, I bought a copy of ALBANIE - visage des Balkans. Published in 1995, it contains a series of reproductions of photographs of Albania taken by members of the Marubi family (See: ecritsdelumiere.fr). Its text is by the renowned Albanian author Ismail Kadare. As it is hard to obtain a copy of this book nowadays, I have decided to present a selection of illustrations from this beautiful book (copied by me with my camera).

1878: A composer of lyrical verse. Kel Marubi is on our left (Pjeter Marubi, photographer).

The Marubi family went to Albania from their native Piacenza (Italy) in the late 1850s (Click here for more about the family). They settled in Shkodra, a city in the north of what was then an Ottoman province. Albania was a relatively unknown place in those days, and pretty wild on occasion.

Young insurgents from the Shala region  ( Kel Marubi, between 1900 & 1915)

But despite its troubles - banditry, the oppressive nature of being colonised, and the endless vendettas between hostile families - life went on as usual, as can be seen in this picture of men making and selling felt hats ('qelesh'). 

Picture by Kel Marubi taken between 1900 & 1920

In 1925, 13 years after Albania became an independent nation, Ahmet Muhtar Bej Zogolli ('Zog')became ruler of Albania(first as President, then as King).

Zog 'working out' on the beach at Durres in 1925 (Kel Marubi)

Zog married the half American/half Hungarian Geraldine Apponyi , the "White Rose of Hungary", in April 1938. Mussolini's son-in-law Count Ciano was present at the ceremony.

Zog's marriage to Geraldine in 1938 (Kel Marubi)

It was during Zog's 'reign' that the beautiful country of Albania became inextricably entangled with Fascist Italy.

View of Shkodra's Lead Mosque from the Rozafat Citadel (Gege Marubi, 1938)

Zog was attracted to Mussolini's brand of, fascism and the assistance that was offered to him.

Celebrating 25 years of independence in Tirana (Kel Marubi, 1937)

Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Ciano, was a frequent visit to Albania, and built a hunting lodge on the coast near the small town of Lezhe.

Count Ciano on a visit to Tirana (Kel Marubi, 1937)

In April 1939, Italy invaded Albania. Later on in WW2, Germany dominated the country. Remarkably, Albania was the only German occupied country in mainland Europe where the number of Jews increased between 1939 and 1945. The occupation was resisted by various groups of partisans, each with their own political agendas. In the end, the Communist partisans under the leadership of Enver Hoxha prevailed, and remained in power until the early 1990s.

Enver Hoxha reading a speech in 1936 at Shkodra (Kel Marubi)

Under Comrade Enver Hoxha's leadership, Albania became cut off from the outside world. It was more isolated than North Korea is today. Its people were not allowed to travel or to learn anything about the world outside their isolated country. Even thier history was doctored, as can be seen in this retouched version of Marubi's 1936 photograph shown above.

Now, read more about Albania in Adam Yamey's 

travel memoir:

"ALBANIA ON MY MIND"

Available in paperback:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-yamey/albania-on-my-mind/paperback/product-20513189.html

 and on Kindle:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ALBANIA-ON-MY-MIND-ebook/dp/B00A7FK1XY/

&

 http://www.amazon.com/ALBANIA-ON-MY-MIND-ebook/dp/B00A7FK1XY/