Fields Elysian

Winston Churchill

Simon Blow wrote Fields Elysian about hunting society.
Then he filled it with cool pictures of hunting society.

Given the miserable heat and a certain lack of enthusiasm for most things, I stumbled across my copy while trying to do something. Then I realized that sitting in front of a fan looking at vintage hunting photos was just the "something" I should be doing.

The lovely daughters of Earl Beauchamp, made famous by friend Evelyn Waugh as part of the Marchmain clan in Brideshead Revisited. Left to right: Lady Mary, Lady Sibell, and Lady Dorothy Lygon.

Notice that Lady Helena Gibb and the Duchess of Beaufort are both side-saddle. It was the late 1920's before one saw women riding astride. After that, the world simply went to hell in a hand basket.

And, after a long day of riding side-saddle one needs to take a break.

One Last Visit -- Brideshead

One last look a character from the Brideshead bunch. As stated earlier, Robert Byron was an Eton pal of Hugh Lygon. Byron traveled with Hugh and his father Lord Beauchamp. Of his traveling companion Byron would write:

"Lord Beauchamp is one of those indefatigable sightseers, who maps out every moment of every day beforehand... Lord Beauchamp has a mania for Italian dishes & we frequent the grubbiest little restaurants in search of what I strongly suspect is horse."

The experience, however, changed the life of Robert Byron. He took his love for art, architecture and travel and turned his writing into a virtually new genre. Byron hit his stride with his work, The Road to Oxiana, the account a nearly year long journey through Afghanistan and Iran. In his introduction to the Picador Edition, famed travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote:

"Anyone who reads around the travel books of the thirties must, in the end, conclude that Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana is the masterpiece... I write as a partisan, not as a critic. Long ago, I raised it to the status of 'sacred text', and thus beyond criticism. My own copy - now spineless and floodstained after four journeys to Central Asia - has been with me since the age of fifteen."

Paul Fussel said of The Road to Oxiana, it is to travel books as what Ulysses was to the novel or The Waste Land was to poetry. While his books have lived on to inspire many a soul filled with wanderlust, Byron's life was short. In 1941 he was working as a war correspondent with the Sunday Times. Byron was on the merchant ship, the SS Jonathan Holt, when it was torpedoed by a U-boat. His body was never found. He was just shy of his 36th birthday.

As a tribute to his large and winning personality, friends continued to "see" Robert Byron strolling down the streets of London.

Here are a few of Robert Byron's memorable photos of the Oljeitu Tomb in Sultaniya, Iran.

Madresfield Revisited

Upon reading Brideshead Revisited, Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh:

“I suppose Charles ends by being more in love than ever before…so true to life being in love with a whole family.”

The Lygons, 1925:
Coote, Maimie, Sibell, Lettice, Lady Beauchamp, Lord Beauchamp, Elmley, Hugh, Dickie

The whole family Waugh fell in love with was the Lygons and the house was Madresfield Court, home to the Lygons for nearly a thousand years. Madresfield had passed through twenty-eight direct generations of Lygons when Evelyn Waugh first crossed the threshold. The "Brideshead" revisited in the mini-series was in fact, Castle Howard.

The Lygon clan was edited down when they made the pages of Brideshead. The model for the beautiful and doomed Sebastian Flyte was Hugh Lygon. The most often used word to describe Hugh was “exquisite” with his athletic build, blond hair and amethyst eyes.

Hugh Lygon

Waugh was actually befriended first by the youngest of the Lygon sisters, Dorothy, known as Coote. It was Coote who first invited Evelyn Waugh to Madresfield. The cool and aloof Julia Flyte was based on Mary Lygon, known as Maimie.

Mary Lygon by William Acton
(Again we ask the question: Why is there no William Acton monograph?)

Lord Marchmain was based on William Lygon, the seventh Earl Beauchamp, disgraced by scandal. Lord Beauchamp did not flee to Italy to be with his glamorous lover; that was Waugh’s depiction. In reality, he had a predilection for stable boys and was driven out of England. Predilections aside, he was a wonderful father and his exile left the children devastated. (For a lovely look at William Lygon and his children see little augury's post: a father's love.)

The children were not alone in their admiration for their father. Robert Byron, the noted travel writer who was at Eton and Oxford with Hugh, credited William Lygon with launching the passions that led to his career. Of their trips to Italy he wrote:

"Not only did it implant in me a desire to see other countries: it laid the foundation of my delight in painting and architecture, and introduced me to that classical criterion."

The Staircase Hall

It would be easy to see how life at Madresfield might be impressive. The Staircase Hall is three stories high, featuring 3 glass cupolas. Carved into the frieze surrounding the ceiling are fragments from Percy Shelley's Adonais. Of course my favorite room in Madresfield is the library.

For the library, Lord Beauchamp called upon the noted architect and Arts and Craft designer C. R. Ashbee. He wrote of his visit to Madresfiled.:

" There was the same rustling of liveries, plush and crimson, the choosing of rooms to sit in for conversation, the sparkle of champagne and the still plethora of port, there were precious books fetched out for fancy and the epicurean requirements of literature."

The library coincided with movement to the Cotswold by the The Guild of Handicraft. Leaving the city, this group of carvers, jewelers, cabinetmakers, binders and printers followed Ashbee to return to rural craftsmanship and a socialist ideal. Fiona MacCarthy has chronicled Ashbee and his movement in The Simple Life.


The library includes two carved 11 foot panels depicting the Trees of Life and Knowledge. Lord Beauchamp among his many talents, was also skilled at embroidery, particularly bargello. Two dozen chairs bear his flame-stitched handiwork. (If you are an embroiderer, you will be unusually impressed by 48 bargello seats and backs!)

For the historical perspective of Madresfiled, take a look at Jane Mulvaugh's book.

And I didn't even get to the chapel! Read on...

Brideshead Revisited, Revisited

Do not be dissuaded by my Brideshead post. Do find a particularly rainy weekend to immerse yourself in the full eleven hours of Brideshead Revisited. After carefully spending the first few hours flush with headiness of those Oxford years, you can continue watching while you read Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead.

Byrne focuses on Waugh during the years he conceived of (and lived) his novel and much of the aftermath, including Waugh’s first marriage. On the 27 June 1928 Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner making them Evelyn and Evelyn Waugh. (Let me take this opportunity to say that if you are planning to write a novel where the protagonist marries a women with the same name and you present this manuscript to a “writing” instructor, you will be told in no uncertain terms that one cannot have a book where both the protagonist and his wife bear the same name. The reader will forever be confused as to which on you are writing about.) This is why truth is stranger and often far more interesting than fiction.

She-Evelyn and He-Evelyn

It was quickly decide by their very quick friends that the Waugh’s would be known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn to differentiate them. The ever-quick Nancy Mitford felt they looked a bit like twins, like schoolboys. Present at the wedding were two of Waugh’s Oxford friends; Harold Acton acted as best man and Robert Byron gave away the bride.

Acton and Waugh remained close even though Acton was a bit ruffled by the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited.

Nickolas Grace as Anthony Blanche

Aesthetes, Acton and Brian Howard, came together in one of Waugh’s most notable characters, Anthony Blanche. Waugh, trying to appease his friend often said that Blanche was one-third Acton (the good third, presumably) and two-thirds Howard (the stammering, wicked parts). Harold Acton said of Waugh, “I still see him as a prancing faun.” The sophisticated Acton infatuated Waugh. Of Brian Howard, Waugh was a bit more leery believing him to be “bad, mad and dangerous to know.” It was Acton who stood on the balcony reciting T. S. Eliot from a megaphone. Brian Howard was thought to have had the greatest promise of his group of friends but his potential was never fully developed. His only biography/collection compiled by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster bears the title, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure.



Acton went on to write extensively and is known for book, Memoir of an Aesthete and for writing a memoir of Nancy Mitford.


Another great read about this period (remember, Brideshead is ELEVEN hours, you will have plenty of reading time) is D. J Taylor’s Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of the Jazz Age.



It casts a wider net of the characters and their hedonism in London during the 1920’s. Truly, the era between the World Wars was a unique and traumatic period of history. After enduring the ravages of World War I and believing it to be a war to end all wars, World War II happened. The youthful frivolity and reckless hedonism came crashing in around Bright Young Things as they faced a growing global darkness. So, yes, Brideshead grew darker as did the times. I won’t fault Evelyn Waugh.

Brideshead Revisited

I have vivid memories of the first time I saw Brideshead Revisited --the sweeping mini-series, not the recently miscast abridged version. I am told that when it first in Washington, D. C., dinner reservations were easy to come by on the night Brideshead was shown as EVERYONE was home watching it.

WETA, the PBS station in DC loved it so much that it seemed every time someone need change for the parking meter, they would launch a fundraiser with Brideshead Revisited. But nothing beats that first experience. I was smitten. Pasty-faced English boys reading poetry and drinking champagne! It was divine. In fact, as memory served me, Brideshead Revisited was the perfect embodiment of Evelyn Waugh's novel. As I remember it, there were hours and hours of those pasty-faced boys and their alcohol.

So I can't tell you how happy I was when I received the 25th Anniversary re-mastered DVD of Brideshead. I was so excited that it took me months to actually watch it. I wanted just the right time to allow for the full 11 hours of uninterrupted viewing. Finally that weekend came to fruition. Just as had remembered there were hours of lovely boys drinking to excess. Actually there were about 2 1/2 hours of what I had remembered. And there were nearly nine hours of abject tediousness.

Needless to say I was crushed. How could I have remembered it so poorly? Why did Evelyn Waugh ever want to become a Catholic after writing Lady Marchmain? Was my love of Jeremy Irons clouded by my first sight of him? Should I even bother to watch the Medici's?

I turned to the great Nancy Mitford for clarification on these matters. Mitford had asked Waugh how he could behave so abominably and yet still consider himself a practicing Catholic to which Waugh replied, "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."


Mitford and Waugh carried on a robust correspondence which has thankfully been published for all to read. While Mitford believed Brideshead Revisited to be a classic, she found the character of Charles Ryder a bit "dim." Waugh wrote, “Yes, I can see how you think Charles is dim, but then he’s telling the story.” Still, this minor exchange was a revelation to me. "Dim" seems to be the perfect word for Charles Ryder and the more I watched my DVD's the more I wanted to smack him! It is inconceivable that anyone would have fallen for Ryder and allowed him to be a part of their lives.

I was reminded of an old Fraiser re-run. (Yes, I read AND watch television.) The Crane Brothers find that their favorite actor (the one who came to their school and preformed a Shakespearean tribute and changed their lives) was now a "space alien" in a popular television show. They rent a theater to produce a big stage comeback, re-creating his Shakespeare. And then they see it and he is AWFUL.

Memory is a terrible thing to waste! I have given up watching Brideshead and have concentrated on more extensive reading. More later....