I was soon to discover that this could not be said of other parts of the globe. Nor, as the 1960s were soon to show, did it satisfy the inhabitants of the lands of the blessed.
14
Under Cnicht
In 1961, shortly after sitting down with Bertrand Russell and perhaps 12,000 others, on a famous anti-nuclear occasion in Trafalgar Square, fortunately unarrested by the police, I was told by my friend and brother-Apostle Robin Gandy that I looked a bit stressed, and that he thought a few days with him in North Wales would do me good. He had a small, almost aggressively primitive cottage there, next to a dying chapel, where, between hill walks and rock scrambles, he pondered the problems of mathematical logic. In those days, before the wonderful network of small rural railway lines in Britain had been destroyed, it was still possible to travel gently between trees through the heartlands of central Wales and, once the coast was reached, by a not entirely misnamed Cambrian Coast Express to Penrhyndeudraeth in what was still for Anglophones the county of Merioneth, the last area in the British Isles that still voted to ban the sale or public consumption of alcohol on the Lord’s day. There Robin met me on his motorbike, in his habitual black leather gear, to save me a few miles’ trudge across the coastal ridge and the table-flat plain (The Traeth) that had been a sea inlet until it was drained in the early nineteenth century by the seawall built by a Mr Maddocks, after whom the new port of Portmadoc was to be named. The enterprise had been much admired by progressive visitors, among them the poet Shelley. Before that, ships had been able to sail to the foot of the mountains, using the dramatic and unmistakable triangle of Cnicht (The Knight) as a landmark. The name suggests that it reminded them of a medieval helmet. Where the road left the Traeth and started to climb gently to the high Croesor valley just below Cnicht was the frontier of Clough’s kingdom. There I and, when I remarried, Marlene and the children, would spend most of our holidays for the next quarter of a century.
The ruler, indeed the maker, of this kingdom, Clough Williams-Ellis, was a tall, straight, affable, roman-nosed figure, invariably in a tweed jacket, breeches and yellow stockings – he was the only man to wear this gear on his visits to the Athenaeum – by then in his later seventies. The best way to introduce him to a generation for whom the Britain he came from is as alien as Tolstoy’s Russia, is to say that when he married during the First World War, his fellow-officers asked him what he wanted for a wedding present. He wanted to build a folly – a fragment of a mock medieval fortress with a view of the sea. It was built. One got to it through an iron gate, painted in ‘Clough’s green’, the unmistakable colour of iron and woodwork in Clough’s kingdom, opposite the main entrance to his house, Plas Brondanw, a small ancient pile with a wonderful formal garden opening on a vista of the peak of Snowdon framed by Clough’s characteristic urns and arches. From the gate one strolled a couple of hundred yards along a gently rising avenue whose trees he had also planted. (Trees were one of his many passions. He was so outraged at the proposal to sell off for property development the wonderful Grand Avenue of trees which led to the great house of Stowe, which he was engaged in turning into a public school, that he bought it himself and saw to it that it was preserved. It was perhaps his major contribution to the project.) Our children loved to play in the tower, climbing the stairs that went nowhere except to a view over the sea and a damp stretch of moorland beyond which, a few miles away, one saw the Big and Little Moelwyn, the other two mountains of the kingdom, after which Clough had named his son, who had not returned from the war. It had once served as a set for a movie about China. Clough was enormously pleased about this. It was not romantic absurdity as such that he loved, but play, not to mention celebrities. Besides, it is almost certain that the film company had come to Merioneth not because a small piece of it could be made to look more Chinese than any other part of Great Britain, but because star and crew could stay at the best-known of Clough’s creations, the greatest of his follies, Portmeirion. This was and remains a life-size quasi-baroque toy-town pretending to be on the Italian Riviera, colours and all, which suddenly emerges from rhododendron-covered rocks across the grey waters of the wide shallow estuary that leads into Cardigan Bay. He paid for its constant extension by turning part of it into the sort of hotel and holiday village which slightly bohemian showbusiness people found irresistible (with fireworks rather than golf courses), and eventually, perhaps more reluctantly, with the money spent by day trippers. (Friends of the family were let in free.) Nothing about Portmeirion was or is quite real – although it was filled with authentic statues and bits of architectural decor saved by Clough from destruction – but everything represented daydreams, not, however, without the potential for nightmares. It was later chosen as the setting for a cult British television series, The Prisoner, in which a Kafkaesque victim found he could not escape from an environment full equally of charm and menace. Neither could the makers of the series, which therefore came to a sudden stop after seventeen episodes. It is still repeated from time to time for a large community of aficionados.
In some ways Clough, proud of his standing as a professional architect, also became the victim of the environment he had created and could not escape. As the younger son of a landowning family, he had to earn a living, and architecture, his passion from childhood, fitted both his background and his inclinations. He had only one term’s formal training. What he lacked in professional qualifications, he made up for in country roots, informed enthusiasm and the sort of contacts a handsome and charming young man of good family could easily make in the weekend-party environment of Edwardian Britain, which was, after all, his own. Friends, or friends of friends, gave him the chance to build stables, then estate cottages, then wings of country houses, and public schools, even a complete and massive Edwardian pile, Llangoed Hall, on the Breconshire banks of the Wye, which survives as a hotel. (Actually the great majority of his buildings were of modest size.) And yet Portmeirion typecast him as ‘not a serious architect’ by the standards of the highly developed professional puritanism of the era of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He got the official recognition of a knighthood as Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis only at the age of eighty-seven.
This was a complete misunderstanding of the man. For him buildings without trees, walls, views, roads leading to farmyards, cottages or water, had no real meaning. What he wanted to create or shape was not buildings but small worlds in which people lived and worked in a unity of masonry, landscape wild and tame, vistas, symbols and memorials, no doubt also to be admired as an ensemble by visiting travellers. Because it was not a place in which people went about their usual business, but a fun place, a jeu d’esprit, or, more seriously, a momentary dream of utopia, Portmeirion was not typical of what he was about. His ideal was not Lutyens but Squire Headlong, the lord and enthusiastic shaper of, and guide to, a wild Welsh estate in Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall. (The novels, or rather conversation pieces, of Peacock, friend of Shelley and amused admirer of Wales, were required reading in Clough’s kingdom.) And the essence of such an estate must be the characteristic combination of wild natural beauty, poverty and the inhabitants’ indifference to visual aesthetics, so surprising in a people as receptive to music and words as the Welsh. Though he thought it essential to embellish them with suitably symbolic masonry and metalwork, and to draw attention to their romantic potential, his environments were not supposed to be ‘beautiful’ but to be themselves. And, above all, to remain themselves. His campaigns for the conservation of rural landscape against ‘the octopus’ of unplanned ‘development’ went back to the 1920s. Largely to preserve them as they were, he had between the wars bought up the bare hillsides, moors and mountains that constituted his kingdom. Fortunately – for he was comfortably off rather than rich – they had virtually no market value at that time. ‘A ten-guinea fee earned in London paid for many acres of hill-land.’1