Under the Sun (73 page)

1944 film based on a story by fighter-pilot Richard Hillary about Air-Sea rescue launches that patrolled the Channel picking up downed airmen.

Chatwin's first proper stage role, in A. P. Herbert's
Fat King Melon and Princess Caraway
, performed in December 1949. The reviewer called him ‘a good-looking chap'.

E.C.: ‘He had great skill with his hands. He could paint and sew and mend things, stick handles back on, so that you could never see the join.'

H.C.: ‘Form masters had different means of achieving discipline. Mr Peregrine (Latin) kept a slipper handy; Mr Pye (Maths) preferred to beat with the flat side of a set of wooden board compasses. For more serious misdemeanours, a “chit” would lead to an evening interview with the headmaster. Usually, Boss followed his reprimands with two to four neatly laid cuts of his four-foot bamboo cane. The bruised backsides were there for other boys to comment upon at bath-time. This was Bruce's only whacking – compared with my four. He did not complain.'

H.C.: ‘After we moved to Brown's Green Farm, Bruce quickly became proficient in recognising all the woodland birds to be seen there; an aptitude rewarded by great-uncle Philip passing on his four volumes of Thorburn's
British Birds
. This gift, with gold-edged coloured plates, was the first antique thing for him to own.'

Performed on 14 December 1950. ‘Perhaps pride of place should go to Bottom the Weaver. A very young member of the cast this one, who had a lot to do and did it with great gusto. Ass's head or no ass's head, you did well, “sweet bully Bottom” . . .'

Philip Howard. The ordeal took place in Hall. Boss wrote that Chatwin proved ‘a hard, relentless hitter and gives the impression of immense solidity'.

Charles kept 37 pigs at Brown's Green Farm, driving the pigswill from Birmingham in the same all-purpose grey Ford van that shuttled Chatwin's trunk back and forth to Old Hall.

H.C.: ‘As a stamp collector, he went on to specialise in unused “British Colonials”.'

H.C.: ‘Months before, I had accompanied Bruce to Birmingham's Model Aerodrome shop where he bought this birthday gift. Formally presented on the day, the toy became mine to enjoy – albeit one of several “elder brotherly” things that remained in his custody, lest I should break or lose it.'

Raymond Ghalib (
b
.1939).

Tommy Garnett (1915 – 2006) had been appointed Master of Marlborough in 1952.

Christopher Massey (
b
.1939).

E.C.: ‘Bruce never learned to play an instrument.'

A renowned English designer of cruising yachts.

The pine houses were painted blood red with iron oxide from the copper mine. One day, Chatwin would paint his house near Oxford with the same Swedish oxide. E.C.: ‘He was always in love with Sweden. It's where his colour sense gelled. The moment you go to Stockholm, there are his colours. Grey green, grey blue and contrasted with amazing ochres.'

Percevald Bratt – ‘A delightful old gentleman always dressed in a white smock and sun hat . . . he lived in a log cabin lit by crystal chandeliers,'
Anatomy of Restlessness
. Peter Bratt (Thomas's brother): ‘Shortly before his death, Bruce came to Stockholm because he wanted to revisit us. He mostly talked about the conversations he had had with my great-uncle [Percevald], who was erudite and knew classic literature very well, and Bruce said this was what incited him to start writing.'

E.C.: ‘Sailing wasn't his great passion, as it was with Charles and Hugh.'

Grängesberg.

In
The Songlines
, Chatwin meets a young
ébéniste
(cabinet-maker) on the road from Atar. ‘Although he had no passport, he had in his bag a book on French eighteenth-century furniture.'

John Wilson Carmichael (1800 – 68).

The original schooner.

Philip Boughton Chatwin (1873-1964), architect and amateur archaeologist dedicated to the restoration of old buildings. E.C.: ‘I met him once, a beautiful old man, very civilised, tall, thin, with white hair.'

Hugh O'Flaherty (1898-1963), Irish Catholic priest and notary of the Vatican who saved up to 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews during the Second World War.

E.C.: ‘For him to complain about the heat means it's desperately hot. Most of the time he didn't notice.'

A huge cost, when you could take only £50 out of the country.

Roasted Englishman.

John Peregrine: ‘This refers to my mother arguing what they were going to do with both pictures and feeling Sotheby's were out to swindle her.'

Carmen Gronau was organising the sale
.
Some friction may have been caused by the amount of restoration required. The restorer Herbert Lank had sent a bill of £231. 10. 9d. On 22 July 1960 Gronau wrote to E.F.P.: ‘As you know it was a terrible business getting the blue over-paint away from the gold which had to be done immensely carefully by hand and penknife and could not be done by solvent.'

Rawlinson & Hunter, accountants representing an American client interested in the second panel of St Anthony Abbot.

Charles Chatwin had served in the Mediterranean on the light cruiser
Euryalus
. ‘Bruce was very cross because we bombarded the grain stores on Rhodes. “You bombarded beautiful windmills.” It was a show of force.'

Royal Cruising Club to which Charles belonged.

At Easter 1960, Charles had launched the
Rakia
, a 26-foot family cruising boat, to be shared with his partners at Wragge & Co. Hugh Chatwin: ‘Father had me ask Bruce's classics master at Marlborough the ancient Greek word for rags. Hugh Weldon gave us: ro, alpha, kai, iota, alpha – hence the name
RAKIA.'

Ivry had married Paul Freyberg, second Baron Freyberg, in July 1960.

Avril Curzon had lived with Ivry at 34 Boscobel Place.

I.F.: ‘He was going to paint my bedroom and then had a cold.'

E.C.: ‘He later took me. It was like stepping into a rainbow.'

They met by accident in the Via Veneto in Rome in August, Chatwin on his way back from Greece; Hugh from Africa, on the last leg of a 10,000-mile hitchhike from Cape Town.

New York dealer and collector. On 15 April 1964 Chatwin sent Peregrine a cheque for £6,000. It can be assumed that he took a commission.

This is the first suggestion that Peter Wilson had lured Chatwin with the temptation of becoming a Sotheby's director, only to renege on the offer.

David Nash, or ‘Nashpiece '. Chatwin had known him at Marlborough. Before joining Sotheby's he worked as a gravedigger in a Wimbledon cemetery and as an electrical engineer at the Horton lunatic asylum.

Rear-Admiral Paul Furse (1904 – 78), botanist and plant collector, had been forced to abandon a mission from Kew Gardens to bring back a sample of cow parsley growing only on the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. Chatwin decided to complete Furse's quest.

Indian miniaturist, (1600 – 27). C.W.: ‘On the afternoon I first met Bruce I took him to Charles Ratton, a great dealer, and the flat from which he sold. At about 3.30, I found a magnificent signed Mughal painting of the Infant Prince Shashuja by Abul Hassan. Bruce then came back ten days later, bought the Daulat and sent it to Howard Hodgkin, who sent me a photo. One year later, I bought it off Howard. Bruce was cross that Howard had made money by selling it to me.'

Howard Hodgkin (
b
.1932), British artist.

George Ortiz Patino (
b
.1927), millionaire collector known by Chatwin as ‘Mighty Mouse' and grandson of Bolivian tin magnate Simon Patino, who since 1949 had used his fortune to build a collection of art from the ancient world; also known as Tizberg. C.W.: ‘We always had nicknames: Bruce was known as Marcel Bruce, or Preuz; Elizabeth and Bruce as “the Chattys”.'

Welch's children – Nellington. Thomas, Adrian, Sam, Lucia – were known by the collective noun Knellingtons; Ortiz's children as the Tizbergs.

Hunting for a specimen of cow parsley among small bushes of holly oak, Chatwin fell and scraped the skin off his arm. D.N. diary: ‘Awoke next morning, B feverish and his arm v swollen & septic. Decide reluctantly to return to avoid gangrene.'

British aesthete and eccentric (1906 – 87) who spent much of his latter years in bed in Wilsford Manor, designing jackets for a novel set in Marseilles that he never wrote:
Lascar, A Story of the Maritime Boulevard, A Story You Must Forget.

Probably the cottage on the Wilsford estate later rented to V. S. Naipaul.

Tahitian Woman and Boy, 1899. A photograph of Chatwin holding up this painting appeared in the
Daily Mail
on 24 November 1964 under the headline: ‘Lot 32, star of the biggest sale of Impressionists and drawings ever held.' The article went on: ‘It was Chatwin who arranged the Gauguin sale. Sotheby's had a telephone call from Mrs Austin Mardon, American-born widow of a tobacco company director. She has nine children, lives in Ardross Castle, Ross-shire. She said she had a painting to sell. Chatwin went to Scotland, was staggered to see the Gauguin in a bedroom. Its whereabouts had been unknown for 40 years. Mrs Mardon bought it in 1923 for £1,200.'

C.W.: ‘I had a small Graham Sutherland which Bruce talked me into selling and a Samuel Palmer sketchbook page.'

Derek Hill (1916 – 2000), landscape and portrait artist who had been at Marlborough and known Robert Byron; Bruce and Elizabeth often stayed with him at St Columb's, Letterkenny in County Donegal.

The case was at last coming to court.

Chatwin called more than once on the archaeologist Sinclair Hood who was excavating at Knossos. Together with Hood's wife Rachel, they went to look for the endemic Cretan tulip on the Nida Plain on Mount Ida. ‘We did find one example, growing up through a terribly prickly thorn bush!' This may have been the specimen he brought back for Admiral Furse.

E.C.: ‘It was the first time my parents ever met Bruce, and then I announced I was engaged and they hadn't paid much attention. “That's nice,” but they couldn't remember him.' On 26 June, Gertrude Chanler wrote to Margharita: ‘At the time we did not realise that all this was so serious . . .'

The first transatlantic sale using the Early Bird satellite, featuring paintings by Winston Churchill. E.C. to G.C.: ‘The Early Bird sale went like a bomb. Churchill made unheardof figure – £14,000.'

E.C.: ‘He'd overheard my parents calling me Lib and misheard it as Liz.'

E.C.: ‘We kept the engagement secret because we didn't want people at Sotheby's to rag us.'

Ivry's brother, Alexander Raulin Chevalier Guild (1940-66) had come back from Northern Rhodesia and was working for the Conservative Party in Woodbridge.

Mummy and Bobby.

E.C.: ‘This is exactly what he did wear, a pale grey suit.'

The Chanlers were Catholics. G.C. had written to E.C.: ‘One thing you must do is see what can be done about Bruce getting the required religious instructions . . . This is very important.'

Peter Levi (1931-2000), Jesuit priest, author and poet. Through Levi, Chatwin found a Jesuit priest, Father Murray, to give Pre-Cana instructions.

At Cowes.

E.C.: ‘Now he's got it.'

E.C.: ‘We never gave this party.'

Katherine Maclean, personal assistant to Peter Wilson or ‘P.C.W.'

There was also slight amazement. E.C. wrote to G.C.: ‘We told Katherine and P.C.W. last Friday & then ran. They were really flabbergasted.' Another person to register surprise was the American writer Leo Lerman, who had been asked by Wilson to write a history of Sotheby's. On 13 July 1965 Lerman wrote in his diary: ‘Elizabeth is marrying Bruce. We couldn't be more astonished at this Sotheby's romance.'

Female, 3rd c BC. E.C.: ‘People said, “What do you want for a wedding present?” and we said “You can give a contribution to the Greek Head.” It was one of the things Bruce had to sell when he needed money.'

Close friend of Wilson and Bond Street dealer (1919-94) with a special love for tribal and ethnographic art, who virtually ran the Antiquities Department; also known as ‘K.J.H.'.