Simon Courtauld

Sunday

26 Apr 2020
Simon Courtauld

The radical history of The Spectator

A newspaper – it would be more than 100 years before it became a magazine – calling itself a spectator of events, while consistently standing up for individual freedom, was bound to fall out with its readership from time to time. In the early years, under the editorship of its Scottish founder, Robert Rintoul, The Spectator’s support for the Tolpuddle Martyrs, for the Chartists and for the abolition of slavery in the colonies did not cause too many raised eyebrows. Thanks to Rintoul’s enlightened imperialism, a fund was established to settle labourers and young married couples in Australia and New Zealand. But when the new joint editors, Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, declared The Spectator’s position at the outbreak of the American Civil War – ‘the quarrel.

The radical history of The Spectator

Thursday

12 Oct 2017
Simon Courtauld

Trains in Spain

The first railway line in Spain, from Barcelona to Mataro a few miles up the coast towards the French border, was built in 1848 by British workers and with British expertise. I was reflecting on this, and the huge difference today between the services provided by our two countries’ railways, as the train passed through Mataro on the way to Girona. The 90-minute journey, for those of us of a certain age with a tarjeta dorada, cost five euros. The return journey to Barcelona by express train took 38 minutes and cost less than ten euros. Train travel in Spain is not only amazingly cheap; it is comfortable, efficient and almost always punctual. When you buy a ticket, you are automatically allocated a seat, and a screen in each carriage gives the destination, intermediate stops, the time and outside temperature.

Trains in Spain

Thursday

1 Jun 2017
Simon Courtauld

Towering tree of God

In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the Sagrada Família, otherwise we undo the web of power that is elaborately woven into this mysterious religious spell’. But he now appears to take the view that it should, and will, be finished by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí’s death (though the sculpted decoration will take considerably longer to complete). If indeed this extraordinary building is ‘topped out’ in nine years’ time, it will have taken 144 years to build, which is a good deal less than many medieval cathedrals (Toledo’s took more than 250 years). Gaudí famously said, ‘My client is not in a hurry,’ but after the Sagrada Família was consecrated and proclaimed a basilica by His representative on earth in 2010, it was reasonable to infer that those responsible were being encouraged to get on with it.

Towering tree of God

Thursday

2 Feb 2017
Simon Courtauld

‘Above all else, fun’

Alexander Chancellor’s ‘Long Life’ is over; but it was not nearly long enough. I was feeling rather gloomy last Friday, having just had our old terrier put down, when I opened The Spectator and was immediately cheered up by the first paragraph of Alexander’s column. It was so typical of the way that he often looked at the world, and of his delightfully quirky sense of humour, that he should relate a children’s song to the new President of the United States. Recalling Nellie the elephant and her trumpety-trump, he wrote: ‘I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came.’ (A few weeks earlier, he had perceptively ridiculed Trump by comparing him to Liberace.

‘Above all else, fun’

Thursday

12 May 2016
Simon Courtauld

Bullfighting

Looking at the programme for the feria of San Isidro in Madrid this month (bullfights are being held on 31 consecutive days), it may be hard to believe that there is any threat to the future of the spectacle — it is not a sport — of what in Spain is called la corrida (the running of the bulls). But its popularity has undeniably been declining in recent years, due to two factors: growing opposition, in the sometimes spurious name of animal welfare, and Spain’s economic crisis. The decision taken in 2010 to ban bullfighting in Catalonia had considerably less to do with the welfare of bulls than with the Catalans’ wish to distance themselves from the rest of Spain and Spanish traditions. The reaction from the Madrid government was to transfer responsibility for bullfighting from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Culture, formally giving to la fiesta nacional the status of patrimonio cultural.

Bullfighting

Thursday

30 Oct 2014
Simon Courtauld

Why Gibraltar needs its hunt back

The British overseas territory of Gibraltar, or, as some would have it, the wart on the bottom of the Iberian peninsula, is not an exciting place for a holiday. You don’t go for the food (mostly English pub grub and pizzas), or the nightlife (there isn’t any) or the beaches (overcrowded, with sand imported from the Sahara). But there are a few interesting legacies of three centuries of British occupation of what was known in Greek mythology as one of the Pillars of Hercules. In the Trafalgar Cemetery, containing the graves of those who died in Gibraltar following the battle, a typical inscription records the death in December 1805 of an officer of the Royal Marines ‘after having suffer’d several Weeks with incredible Patience and Fortitude under the Effects of a severe Wound receiv’d in the great and memorable Sea-fight off Trafalgar’.

Why Gibraltar needs its hunt back

Thursday

2 May 2013
Simon Courtauld

Verdi’s Don Carlos is the tops

I go to about half a dozen operas a year, mainly by 19th-century Italian and French composers, plus some Mozart, bits of Handel, Richard Strauss and Britten and, most recently, Wagner. Having seen my first Don Carlos — the memorable Luchino Visconti production — more than 50 years ago, I thought then that it had all one could wish for in an opera, and it remains my favourite. Hearing the live broadcast from New York of the Met’s Don Carlos in March, I was reminded once again of the treats in store as the Nicholas Hytner production (which had its first outing in 2008) returns to Covent Garden this month. The seven performances at the Royal Opera House begin this weekend. Our eminent opera critic, Michael Tanner, will no doubt pen his usual perceptive review, perhaps finding fault with the structure of Verdi’s opera, or with aspects of the production.

Verdi’s Don Carlos is the tops

Saturday

25 Jun 2011
Simon Courtauld

Art and the raging bull

In these days of growing concern at the methods of factory farming and the welfare of the animals which are raised and killed for our consumption, it is instructive to compare the life of domestic beef cattle with that of a Spanish fighting bull. The cattle may have less than two years of life in cramped conditions, while the toro bravo roams free and unmolested on pasture for five years. Alexander Fiske- Harrison makes the comparison succinctly: ‘Five years on free-release and then the arena, or 18 months in prison and then the electric chair’. He maintains (there is some evidence for this, to do with beta-endorphins) that the fighting bull’s suffering is reduced because, once in the ring, it feels no fear, only aggressive anger.

Art and the raging bull

Saturday

15 May 2010
Simon Courtauld

Cherchez la femme

The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’.The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The deed was duly done one night in 1941: Erroll’s body was found in his Buick on a road outside Nairobi with a bullet in his head, his lover Diana’s husband, the seemingly complaisant cuckold Sir ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, was tried and acquitted of the murder and, despite years of speculation and gossip, the mystery remains unsolved.

Cherchez la femme

Saturday

29 Sep 2007
Simon Courtauld

Farewell to a noble figure in Spectator history

Ian Gilmour was not the only proprietor of The Spectator also to be its editor, but he was unquestionably the best. Patrician, wealthy, high-minded, unassuming, the 28-year-old Etonian ex-Grenadier Guardsman raised a number of eyebrows when he bought the magazine in 1954 and took over the editorial reins himself. However, the five years of his editorship were to cause a lot more surprise when, in fostering The Spectator’s libertarian tradition, he not only espoused radical causes but frequently opposed the Eden and Macmillan governments. In some important respects The Spectator under Gilmour’s direction anticipated the free-thinking mood of the 1960s. He was a junior barrister, in Lord Hailsham’s chambers, and not getting much work when he decided on an impulse that he would like to own a political weekly.

Farewell to a noble figure in Spectator history

Saturday

10 Mar 2007
Simon Courtauld

Who wants to buy our old office?

‘A unique opportunity to purchase the home of a famous weekly magazine.’ Thus might an estate agent market No. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1, now up for sale after more than 30 years as the offices of The Spectator. But an estate agent cannot know how des a res is this early-19th-century house in Bloomsbury. It should be sold not so much for its fabric — handsome as it is, if slightly worn — as for its recent history, for the rich variety of people who have passed through its doors and the voices which may come out of the now possibly rotting woodwork. As someone associated with The Spectator for most of its time in Doughty Street, I offer an insider’s guide for prospective buyers, confident that the building will be bought, whether for a business enterprise or to return it to private use (for which listed-building consent has been given), by a discerning Spectator reader.

Saturday

13 Jan 2007
Simon Courtauld

Small is beautiful | 13 January 2007

My grandfather used to enjoy eating ortolans in Biarritz, sometimes in the company of Rudyard Kipling. In London, it amused him to ask for these little birds of the bunting family when dining at the Savoy, though I don’t think they were ever on the menu. Ortolans have always been a French delicacy: la chasse aux petits oiseaux, which involves trapping small birds in nets, may continue in parts of south-west France, but their sale for the table has been banned for some years. President Mitterrand, no great respecter of the law, was said to have had ortolans for one of his last meals, a week before he died — almost fulfilling the wish expressed by a character in Disraeli’s novel, The Young Duke, that he should die ‘eating ortolans to the sound of soft music’.

Saturday

2 Dec 2006
Simon Courtauld

Talking turkey

There won’t be any wild turkeys eaten in Britain this Christmas.There won’t be any wild turkeys eaten in Britain this Christmas. However, a few of these birds, which are indigenous to north and central America, are being reared in south-west England. It is possible that one or two dark-plumaged turkeys may be seen in flight over Salisbury Plain or the hills of Devon, though no one is yet treating them as game birds, which they are in the USA. In the eastern states, in Texas and New Mexico, the male birds are shot — when strutting about they have beautifully fanned tails — and no doubt their gamey taste was enjoyed at a few tables in celebration of Thanksgiving last week.The English turkey nearest in flavour to the wild American bird is the Norfolk Black which tastes, so I am told, rather like pheasant.

Saturday

4 Nov 2006
Simon Courtauld

Good hare day

In my early days as editor of the Field, I read an article submitted by one of the magazine’s venerable hunting correspondentsIn my early days as editor of the Field, I read an article submitted by one of the magazine’s venerable hunting correspondents — the subject was harehunting and a day out with, I think, the Cambridgeshire Harriers — which mentioned that, in the course of the chase, ‘puss clapped’. This slightly disconcerting expression apparently means, in the recondite language of the harehunter, that the quarry stopped and ‘froze’, trying to make itself invisible. I decided that the clap of a puss, so described, was unlikely to assist in expanding the readership of the Field, and that, for aspiring country sportsmen, a hare was and should continue to be called a hare.

Saturday

7 Oct 2006
Simon Courtauld

A little snack

The countryside writer Ian Niall, a columnist in these pages some 50 years ago, told in his classic work, The Poacher’s Handbook, of one of the fraternity known as Black Bill who had an affection for partridges and could never bring himself to kill them. ‘The partridge is the one bird I don’t touch,’ says the sentimental old poacher, expressing his contempt for those to whom it is ‘just a little snack on a plate with gravy runnin’ round it’.One can understand Black Bill’s feelings as he listens to and watches a partridge collecting its family together, huddling in a furrow when danger threatens. Yet those of us who enjoy eating partridge think better of it on the plate than he did, whether or not we have shot the birds as they flash challengingly high over a Wessex valley.

Saturday

12 Aug 2006
Simon Courtauld

King of the moor

The red grouse is a resilient little bird. Prone to an unpleasant disease called louping ill which is transmitted by sheep ticks, and vulnerable to attack by nasty, invasive little worms, its population may crash in some moorland areas for several years; and then it will reappear in healthy numbers as if nothing had happened. Grouse-shooting in Scotland has suffered a serious decline recently, due in part to the increased population of red deer, which may also be infested with ticks, and to cold, wet weather during the hatching season. (I have only just learnt that the Dr Edward Wilson who did so much valuable work in the early 20th century on the causes of grouse disease is the same Wilson who perished with Scott in the Antarctic.

Saturday

15 Jul 2006
Simon Courtauld

Eat your hart out

The Countryside Alliance, through its Game-to-Eat campaign, has been doing some good work in promoting venison. It is higher in protein and lower in fat than other red meat; some supermarkets are now offering venison steaks and sausages, but fewer than 10 per cent of the population buy the meat. Since deer numbers in Britain have apparently never been so high, and the government has been advised that they should be reduced by a third, wild venison, generally with a better flavour than deer that have been farmed, should be more generally available. Thanks to friendly persuasion by the Alliance, wild venison was introduced last year on the menus of Great Western and Anglia trains.The Queen enjoyed (one hopes) a dish of roe venison at the Mansion House lunch last month to celebrate her official 80th birthday.

Saturday

17 Jun 2006

Saturday

20 May 2006
Simon Courtauld

Always around

There never seems to be any shortage of pigeons. Whether feeding in a field of corn or rape by day or coming into woodland at dusk, they are always around. Depending on the weather and the time of day, you may have to wait a while for them, but, as William Douglas-Home once wrote in a memorable article for the Field on pigeon-shooting, ‘they always turn up in the end’. They may be shot over decoys in spring and summer or from the shelter of trees on a winter’s afternoon; with no close season there should always be a plentiful supply for the table.These, of course, are wood pigeons. In addition, and especially in France, there are ‘farmed’ pigeons or squabs raised for meat, rather as they used to be in dovecotes in England, to provide food for the mediaeval lord of the manor when cattle could not be fed through the winter.

Saturday

22 Apr 2006
Simon Courtauld

Crashing boar

While we are all worrying about the threat to poultry from an alien virus which has now reached these shores, there seems to be little concern at the threat to our countryside and livestock from an alien animal now roaming free in England. I am referring to wild boar, hundreds of them, which are inhabiting forested areas of Kent, Sussex, Dorset and Gloucestershire, having escaped from farms and bred in the wild. If nothing is done about them, there could be many thousands of wild boar in 20 years’ time, marauding through woodland, threatening walkers, destroying crops and pasture, and spreading diseases — swine fever, bovine tuberculosis — to domestic pigs and cattle. The spread of avian flu may be easier to contain than the proliferation of these dangerous wild beasts.

Saturday

25 Mar 2006
Simon Courtauld

Quail order

I wonder whether the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, will eat quail again after the shooting incident in south Texas last month, when he ignored the most basic safety rules in shooting at his intended target while unable to see that an elderly gentleman was in his line of fire. The birds that Mr Cheney was trying to shoot would have been either scaled or bobwhite quail, both species which take to the air only reluctantly, when put up by ‘bird dogs’. They never fly very far or very high, making Mr Cheney’s negligence — he was apparently firing into a low, late-afternoon sun — the more culpable. No quail are shot in this country, where a summer visitor, coturnix coturnix (common quail), is the only one to be seen in the wild, and only in southern England.

Saturday

25 Feb 2006
Simon Courtauld

A far from plodding pedestrian

How much more do we need to know about Sir Wilfred Thesiger? Alexander Maitland, his literary executor and friend for the last 40 years of his life, collaborated with Thesiger on six books of his travels, and we have Thesiger’s first two classics, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, not to mention two other mainly photographic books. Then there is his autobiography and an excellent biography by Michael Asher published in 1994. One of the merits of Asher’s book was that he retraced, by camel and donkey, several of Thesiger’s journeys. It was also informed by anecdotes, some of which Maitland has overlooked or chosen to omit. Maitland makes only one passing reference to General Auchinleck, Thesiger’s commander-in-chief in North Africa during the war, whereas Asher noted interestingly that in the 1960s Thesiger spent two days in the Atlas mountains of Morocco with the old soldier whom he described as ‘the noblest man I ever met’.

Saturday

28 Jan 2006
Simon Courtauld

Bargain brace

It is one of life’s little mysteries that, outside the circle of those involved in game shooting, so few pheasants are bought and eaten, in a country where between 15 and 20 million birds are reared each year. I have sometimes wondered whether the association of pheasants with wartime food — during the winter of 1940 the shooting season was extended into February to provide an additional stock of meat — may provide part of the answer. This may once have been so, but surely not now. The more likely explanation has to do with a fear of the unfamiliar, and of breaking a tooth on a random pellet which may still be in the body of the pheasant — or possibly a distaste for birds that have been gunned down in a revolting blood sport (rather than strangled to death or electrocuted, as happens with chickens).

Saturday

17 Dec 2005
Simon Courtauld

Carpe piscem

Where are the pike, the char, the carp of yesteryear? Still in English lakes and rivers, but they are not to be found in the English kitchen. Pike, then called luce, are mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and they were on the menu at King Henry IV’s coronation banquet at the end of the 14th century; but today the cooking of them is left to the French. Char live in the Lake District: salted char was sent down to Hampton Court for King Henry VIII’s pleasure, and potted char was popular in the 18th century. It was good to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cooking them on television the other day, on the shore of Coniston Water, but I wonder how many others have eaten the fish. As for carp, it was a favourite of Izaak Walton — ‘the queen of rivers: a stately, a good, and a very subtle fish’ — who provided a recipe for it which began, ‘Take a carp, alive if possible.

Saturday

19 Nov 2005
Simon Courtauld

Caviar crisis

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past 20 years. It would seem that the fishing in this sea was much better regulated in the days of communism in the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime in Iran. But the independent, not to say irresponsible, Russians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and Turkmen, and the fundamentalist Iranians, without any joint agreement to protect this hugely valuable resource, have so ruthlessly overfished the Caspian (often by poaching in each other’s waters) that the beluga sturgeon has now been hunted almost to extinction.

Saturday

29 Oct 2005
Simon Courtauld

The joys of rod and gun

The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who in the 1950s co- edited with Max Hastings’s father a magazine which gives this book its title, wrote before the war:When the countryman turns his cows out to grass in the spring, he also gets out his rod and net ready for the fishing. The turning colour of the wheat makes the countryman think of both harvest and duck-shooting. In September he will thatch his ricks and shoot his partridges. He must wait until the leaf is off the tree before he can drive his pheasants. And when winter arrives he ploughs his land, feeds his stock, and goes hunting.Though Hastings does not quote this passage — he has never claimed to be a farmer, and hunting has supposedly been banned by the New Labour government which he used to support — his evocative collection of essays and reminiscences has the same understanding of the rhythm of the seasons.

Saturday

15 Oct 2005
Simon Courtauld

Terrific turbot

You don’t often see a large turbot these days. My guess is that the big ones, like most of the lobsters and crabs caught in our waters, go to Spain or France. The specimen which I saw in Paris earlier this year was being cut into fat steaks for sale at 90 euros per kilo, or about £27.50 per pound. Perhaps there is no market in Britain for the king of white fish at this sort of price. I have in the larder a long, oval fish kettle suitable for salmon, but I wonder whether anyone still uses the diamond-shaped kettle which was designed, probably in the 19th century, to take large flat fish and especially turbot. In France it is called a turbotière and is no doubt still in service in grand kitchens. A 25-pound turbot is not unusual; when cooked it can be simply lifted by the handles of the perforated rack which sits inside the kettle.

Saturday

17 Sep 2005
Simon Courtauld

Shark ascending

The first barracuda to be caught in British waters was landed at Newlyn, Cornwall four years ago. This summer giant fin whales have been spotted off the Pembrokeshire coast. The evidence of these alien visitors may be attributable to global warming, or to changes in the flow of ocean currents, but it makes one wonder if it may be only a matter of time before a fearsome great white shark moves up the Atlantic from its present killing grounds on the South African coast to the bathing beaches of north Cornwall (from where, watching a school of porpoises not being chased by a shark, I am writing this month). I have fished for blue shark off this coast, and I remember once seeing a huge basking shark close to the boat from which we were fishing for mackerel.

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