Handel, Hendrix, Hittites, and Herculaneum

Well, except for the Herculaneum part.  The British Museum's new exhibit on life in Pompeii and Herculaneum is booked solid into the middle of next month, so I didn't see that.

Today Tony and I took the train to London to visit the Handel House Museum and the British Museum.

The bicycle parking area inside Paddington Station seems to go on forever.

This little steam locomotive, named Princess, attracted children and steam railway fans.  It's Welsh, as indicated by the flag with a dragon on it.  Most locomotives have impersonal 4-digit numbers, but this one is No. 1.

Handel House Museum

George Frideric Handel (in German, Georg Friedrich Händel) moved to London in 1712 and became a British subject in 1727.  He spent the rest of his life as a Londoner.  In 1723 he moved to a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, where he remained until his death in 1759.  The Brook Street house is now a museum.  It's the dark house on the right in the photo below.

If you look closely between the right-most two windows on the first floor (that's the floor above the ground floor), you will see a round blue plaque marking Handel's residence in the house.  There's a similar plaque on the light-colored house on the left:

Jimi Hendrix lived in the house on the left during 1968-1969.  Quite a juxtaposition.

The Handel House Museum now owns both properties, and the upper floors of both make up the museum.  The ground floors are rented out to shops, but when their leases are up in several years the museum plans to restore the ground floor and add it to the museum.  Handel himself ran a small shop in his ground floor, selling copies of his sheet music.

As in most museums, photography is not generally permitted. The only inside shot I have is this one of a harpsichord under repair, taken from the one room in which photos are allowed.

The museum has two modern reproductions of Handel's harpsichords, but none of the instruments that he actually owned.  This is one of the reproductions, the other is featured on the museum's home page.

British Museum

It's impossible to really see this museum in less than a week.  The museum staff knows this, and caters to casual and time-constrained visitors with a series of ground floor galleries that have a few of the best objects from a number of areas, to give a taste of the collection's enormous range.  We went through some of those galleries, as well as some of the much more detailed galleries on the upper floors.  These photos are of objects that caught my eye, in no particular order and certainly not in order of importance.

One object that caught my eye was a Roman coin from Jesus' time.  The museum's description said that the coin that caused Jesus to tell the people to "Render unto Cæsar …" was probably very like the one on display.  I took a photo, but the lighting was so poor that the image is not usable.

Close to that coin was this (very bright) gold medallion of Constantine the Great, Thessalonica, AD 326. It's about the size of a US quarter or UK 10p, large for a gold coin.

More gold, from a find in Northumbria in 1911 known as the Corbridge Hoard.  Some 160 gold Roman coins were hidden in a bronze jug, with a couple of bronze coins jammed into the neck of the jug to conceal the gold.  The jug had partly corroded away (note the holes in it), causing it to break apart when lifted, spilling out all the gold.

A steel alms box from 1744, England.  Coins were put into the top, but two separate locks had to be opened in order to retrieve the contents.  This ensured that at least two people counted the money.

Surely the most singular coin in the collection.  It's a copper ingot that served as money in Sweden in the early-to-mid-1600s.  The coins were worth their weight in copper, and large denominations were correspondingly physically large.  This one is some two feet in length. 

The huge coins were very impractical — to make a large purchase, one would need an ox-cart full of coins like this.  In the 1660s Sweden gave all this up and became the first European country to issue paper money, below.

A Dr. Who banknote.  In one episode of the TV show, hundreds of banknotes spew out of an ATM to draw a crowd and disrupt the bad guys' evil plot.  The producers didn't want to use real money, and the Bank of England was very strict about printing anything that might be mistaken for real currency.  The art department came up with this "banknote" with the Doctor's portrait and the promise to pay "10 Satsumas" to the bearer.  Not legal tender, but good enough to appear in a British Museum exhibit.

(Can you tell we visited the money display?  This is the last one, I promise.)  This is a "Trillion Dollar" poster printed on worthless banknotes in 2009, during Zimbabwe's period of hyperinflation.

Carpenter's tools from ancient Rome.  All are made of bronze.  At top left is a folding ruler very much like those that were popular up to the mid-20th century; it measures one Roman foot (29.6 cm).  Below left is a set-square, recognizable and still usable today.  The X-shaped object is a set of proportional compasses or dividers, set at a ratio of 2:1.  On the right are more compasses and dividers.  No modern woodworker would be very surprised if a colleague pulled one of these tools from a tool box and proceeded to put it to use.  The exact shape of the try-square is a bit odd to modern eyes, but it's certainly usable.

Two beautiful Roman glass objects, an amphora and a small jug.  Probably made in the Rhineland (Germania to the Romans) about 400 AD.

"Man Shooting at a Monkey in a Tree," possibly from an Indian story.

A set of weights in the shape of lions.  The largest one is about 12-14 inches long.  Why have weights that look like cylinders or truncated pyramids when you can have lion-shaped ones?  From Assyria, about 500 BC.

It's from the Iron Age, but it's a bronze shield.  Made between 450 BC and 50 BC, it was found in the Thames at Battersea Bridge, London.  It probably was attached to a larger wooden backing, which has not survived.  It's highly decorated and was probably intended for "ostentatious display" (as the British Museum's description says) rather than for use in battle.

A gold torc weighing several pounds, English, from about 100 BC.  Now this would be ostentatious display.

Thought to be the earliest mosaic depiction of Christ, from the floor of a 4th-century villa in Hinton St Mary in Dorset, England.  Earlier Roman villas would have had a depiction of a pagan god in the middle of the main floor, where this was.

A 50,000-year-old handaxe from a cave in Brittany, France.

The oldest object in the British Museum: 1.8 million years old.  A chopping tool from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.  Found by one of the Leakeys, perhaps.

The Sutton Hoo helmet, from the 6th or 7th century AD, found at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk.  On the left is a reproduction made by the Royal Armouries that shows how the complete helmet looked when new; on the right is what was found at Sutton Hoo.

After a short break in the café, back to Paddington and the train home.  A very good outing.

Longacres

Ros is scheduled to create a flower arrangement for the Ham church for Easter, and also scheduled to be one of a group of arrangers to create arrangements for Salisbury Cathedral.  She'll do the cathedral arrangement in Salisbury on Saturday, and I hope to get some pictures of that.

Today we went to a very large garden center, Longacres in Bagshot, Surrey, to get flowers for the Ham arrangement.  I took a few photos of the flowers and other plants they had for sale.

 

The Garden Center carries everything from mulch and compost to potted plants to cut flowers to food.

A few of the more exotic flavors of potato chips (crisps, here).  At least, they seem exotic to Americans.

Pork Scratchings?  Pork rinds, in the US.

The March of the Chocolate Bunnies, a few days before Easter.

Basildon Park

Today we visited Basildon Park, a Georgian mansion near the Thames river in West Berkshire.  The property has a checkered history: it has had many owners, has been requisitioned for military use twice, has served as a barracks and as a prisoner of war camp.  By the 1950s it was completely derelict; the Wikipedia article on Basildon Park quotes a contemporary source as saying "to say it was derelict, is hardly good enough, no window was left intact and most were repaired with cardboard or plywood."  All the furnishings were gone and much of the interior of the house itself was in ruins.

The house was completely restored and refurnished by Lord and Lady Iliffe, who must have been exceptionally wealthy, not to mention single-minded and persistent in order to complete the work required.  Only two of the original furnishings are in the house: a portrait of an early owner, and the original china service for the dining room.  These and everything else in the house was found by the Iliffes and purchased for the house in the 1950s.  The furniture is not original to the house but it's all antique furniture appropriate to the period of the house.  One room in the main house was converted to a modern (1950s) kitchen, so that food need not be brought from an outbuilding as in centuries past.

The house sits on 400 acres of beautiful park land.  We visited on a cold, gray day when the landscape was definitely not looking its best.  Still, it was obvious that it will be gorgeous once spring finally arrives.  There are lots of paths marked through the park land, but it was too cold to try any of them.

We warmed up in the tea room while waiting for our guided tour to begin.

The view from the tea room out to the front lawn.

This notice of an auction sale of the entire estate dates from 1829.  The then owner had apparently gone bust.  This happened to the estate more than once.

A portrait of Lady Iliffe who, with her husband, was the driving force behind the restoration and re-creation of the Georgian house and its contents.

Some of the contents of Lady Iliffe's sitting room and the library.  I like the portable spiral stairs used to access the upper shelves of the library.

Chinese dragons flanked the library fireplace.

The grand staircase is in the middle of the house, lit by clerestory windows.  There are lots of plaster decorations on the walls and ceiling.

The dining room, with more plaster decoration.  The table is set with the house's original china, which Lord Iliffe had to purchase at an antiques auction in Sweden.

An invitation to visit the Iliffe's "At Home".  Very 1950s.

Some paintings on deep red walls.

Part of the tea service in a sitting room.

A chair by the fire, with its needlework screen to keep the heat of the fire from a lady's face.

Some of the elaborate ceilings.

A service for hot chocolate.  Chocolate was quite a luxury when the house was new.

A canopied four-poster bed.  An attempt had been made to preserve the drapes around the bed by covering them with varnish.  This was a failure, as the treated drapes are now in much worse condition than the other, untreated parts of the canopy (not to mention very stiff!).

A bed pillar, painted to look like bamboo; it's actually mahogany.  A Chinese figure as a lamp base.

 

A modern 1950s appliance in an 18th century bedroom.  Much like a clock radio, the device automatically brews a pot of tea at the desired time.

A set of Belleek china.  We were told that this pattern is still sold, but the current version is much heavier, without all the fine detail.  In any case, this isn't an 18th century item as the Belleek company began operations in 1884.

This tiny sewing machine doesn't look all that practical, but it's beautifully made.

Lastly, an item from the 1950s kitchen, complete with Easter bunny and eggs.  (It's Holy Week, after all.)

Lord and Lady Iliffe gave the house and estate to the National Trust in 1978, along with a large endowment for upkeep.  It's a fascinating place to visit.