Changing gear in Kensington

Walking from Kensington High Street to the Linley Sambourne House, we went down Argyll Street and it brought back memories of living in one of the fine houses there as a paying guest, fresh from small-town Nuneaton, in the early 1960s.

My hosts were the Bousfields. He had been Professor of English at Madras University and his wife was still working – at the Foreign Office in Whitehall. So most mornings she would drive me in her aged Austin 7 to my day job in the mail room at JWT in Berkeley Square.

The only problem, as I recall, was that she seemed unable to change gear. So, engine screaming, we stumbled along in first… along the High Street, through Knightsbridge… round Hyde Park Corner and into Piccadilly… where, quite relieved, I would be dropped off.

Arriving at 18 Stafford Terrace

How can I have missed 18 Stafford Terrace for so long? We went to visit it on Sunday for the first time and it was a revelation.

On a quiet street in Kensington, the house was bought in 1875 by the artist and Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne, and his family lived there for the best part of a century, filling it with the eclectic and fascinating acquisitions of Linley and his successors.

But the most spectacular part of the visit was the performance by a brilliant unnamed actress as Linley Sambourne’s wife, Marion. She was note perfect, but who was she?

They only take small groups, so it’s advisable to book in advance: http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/18staffordterrace1.aspx  

 

Back to the Five Bells

After a trip last week to see my academic supervisor at Goldsmiths in New Cross, I walked down to the Old Kent Road ‒ to the Five Bells pub.

My brother David and I, together with a small gang of friends, used to go there to drink beer and to hear the live music. It was 1964ish, so you can imagine what kind of sounds they were.

The pub was always packed and the regular house band stoked up a storm. Mostly the feeling was of shared bonhomie. At least, that’s how I recall it. They made a big impression on me, and certainly had an influence on my own style of performing in subsequent years.

The Five Bells is much as it was nearly fifty years ago, but there doesn’t seem to be any live music there these days. The stage is still in its place (above), but no one plays on it any more.

It seemed such an adventure in the ′60s, to drive down to deepest New Cross in South-East London on a dark winter’s evening, across the river from Kensington, where we were living in genteel poverty at the time.

Little did I know then that I would spend so many years living just a short way up the hill in lovely Blackheath.