The Glass Chronicles – Part 1: The Journey Begins…
When the gleaming, slippery snout of the deep blue E-type Jaguar 3.8 Coupé purred into the driveway outside our house, I knew that this would be a special day. Here was a man with style and a taste for the finer things in life, come to take me for a ride. I was 11 and had met him at a cocktail party, as they called them then, in his house in the posher part of Cheshire with my father some days before.
But the subject that had prompted this visitation, in the days when E-type Jags were considered to be “the most beautiful car ever made” by no less than ‘Il Commendatore’ Enzo Ferrari himself, was not cars at all. It was glass.
At that party, in 1963, feeling somewhat excluded from the smoky, alcoholic crescendo of this predominantly adult gathering, I had been drawn to an illuminated cabinet in the corner of the drawing-room of our host’s house. Within it stood an array of the most beautiful objects I had ever seen – with the exception of the E-type Jag and, rarest of all, the Ferrari Superfast, of course.
It was a collection of drinking glasses, for the large part, as I learned, from the earlier to the later part of the 18th century, all made by English glass-makers of that period. Glasses that people had drunk their ale and wine and – wonderful word – ‘ratafia’ from up to 250 years ago, in some cases, and there they were, gleaming and miraculously intact.
Not only had they in their fragility survived a conservative estimate of 12,500 well-oiled evenings over that time, including, no doubt, not only the odd duel, fisticuffs, riotous gambling sessions and passionate bodice-ripping encounters over the dining table – but the washing up as well!
The more I looked, the more I became seduced by their presence, their shape and subtle curves. And something about the colour of them, not in terms of red, white, green or blue, but of the pure, plain, pellucid glass itself. There was a depth and brilliance to it that I learned later is called the ‘metal’ of the glass by those in the know.
The metal of the good 18th Century glass is, above all, that of an oxide of lead, mixed in to the molten silica from sand or flint in the kiln, which lends this particular quality of brilliance. It gives a deep, gunmetal kind of transparency to the glass, and has helped in no small way to give them the resilience to survive so many near-death encounters over the centuries.
But there was something else as well. Something that drew me in a similar way to ‘the most beautiful car in the world’.
Proportion, that’s the word. A balance, harmony, a kind of Golden Mean, coupled with what William Hogarth would have called his Line of Beauty, not that I would have known what that was at that time in my life.
On exploring in later years in a growing collection of books on glass, both the making and collecting of it, I have found no better phrase than that of the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in his A Notion of the Historical Drauft of Hercules, an unfinished work on taste published in French in 1712, the last year of his short life:
“One view”, he called it, “to comprehend the sum or whole.”
And that is exactly what the great but unsung Malcolm Sayer’s iconic design for the E-type Jaguar, in coupé form particularly, represented for me and so many others from its first, show-stopping appearance in 1961 to this day.
From that day in 1963 to this, some 57 years later, glass has always held a fascination for me. But as I sank into the deep-set, leather-and-hot-oil-scented passenger seat of the Jaguar, I was far more excited by the prospect of experiencing the sound and fury of 3.8 litres of William Lyons’ iconic XK engine at, hopefully, full throttle.
I was born and lived in an old brick cottage on Racecourse Road, Lindow Common, in the quiet little town of Wilmslow, famous now for superstar footballers and their supercar-driving WAGs. In those days Racecourse Road meant Austin Devons, steam-rollers, and rag-and-bone men on their horse-and-cart. While the gorse and heather covered common had a lake you could skate on every winter when it froze solid as it used to do in those pre-climate change days.
The ‘Black Lake’ of Lindow Common was featured in a book by Alan Garner called “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen” which he himself read to us at school in manuscript form, well before it was published in 1960. I was so frightened at the age of 7 that I hid my head under the lid of my little wooden desk. Like the discovery of Lindow Man, the disturbingly well-preserved body of a Romano-Iron Age man found in the peat bog behind our house after we’d left in 1983, Garner’s mythic characters and the dark Tolkien-like forces experienced by two children just like us haunted our young minds in his tale of Good versus Evil. It was set in our very own home ground around Wilmslow and the pot-holes of Alderley Edge and it was not unknown for dark things to happen in those parts, even in those seemingly more innocent days.
But no darkness hovered as we emerged from our gravel drive into Racecourse Road, coming into its name at last. There was a lighter kind of beating heart at work. Being barely able to see over the dashboard, I was enthralled purely and simply by watching the big round dials swing in synchrony as the engine note changed from its disarming purr into something closer to a growl. It wasn’t until we hit a clear stretch of the main road to Alderly Edge, however, that I joined the ranks of John Glenn and Alan Shepherd in their Mercury-Atlas rocket.
Snapping open the gaping throats of three 2 inch SU carburettors, the high octane petrol exploded into the six cylinders slung in line beneath the curving bonnet stretching out endlessly before us and, with a sonorous howl, the Big Cat pinned me to my seat and launched us into the ultimate Ride of the Valkyries.
We reached my new friend’s house in Prestbury rather more quickly than my father’s Austin A60 had the week before and, with the music of the straight six still singing in my ears, went over to the cabinet. There he gave me my first introduction to what makes a glass a glass.
Picking up what he described as “a classic three-piece Newcastle baluster wine glass of about 1710 with a bell bowl, triple-ring, annular knop and domed and folded foot”, he passed it to me with the caution: “Try not to drop it. I might have to sell the E-type to replace it.”
He was exaggerating, I knew, by the twinkle in his eye. Nevertheless, as I held it, still trembling from my ride in the Big Cat, I knew I was holding something actually irreplaceable. Something that had survived everything the last 243 years had thrown at it. That some artisan at the peak of his skills had crafted. That countless hands had held, countless lips, from coarse to cherry, had touched round tables of the highest in the land. And, most of all, that it was undeniably, breath-takingly beautiful in its own right, whatever strange words he might have used to describe it.
“Good job that mad Scotsman, Cherbourn, didn’t get anywhere near it,” said my friend.
“Why?” I asked. “Who was he?”
“He used to hold court at the Blue Bell Tavern, Douche Street, wherever that was, according to a character called Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach who recorded curiosities back then. I was reading about him in Thorpe about his party trick which was to shatter wine glasses by shouting and singing at them. Must have been an appalling racket, let alone a waste of glass.”
I felt dizzy with the language and the names, let alone the fact of holding something that had survived mad Scotsmen shouting at it on top of everything else. But what I was holding – it felt soft to the touch and fitted my small hand as if made for it, my fingers curling round the ‘annulated knops’, little swellings in the stem drawn out between the ‘foot’, with its folded rim, and the ‘bell bowl’ that begged somehow to live up to its name.
“Try it,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “Just give it a light tap with the knuckle of your other hand.”
And so I did. The pure treble note floated out and filled the room. This was better than the tune from the upswept exhaust-pipes of the E-type. So clear and simple like the last note of the solo first verse of Once in Royal David’s City in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, fading into the fan-vaulting above.
“Now give it back and have a look at this,” he said, handing me a smaller glass with an engraving cut into the bowl.
“Look at the stem,” he said. “Do you see the white twist inside it?” I did. “That’s made with fine enamel rods of different thickness placed upright in a circular mould. Then you pour in the clear, molten metal – which is the glass – and draw it out, twisting as you go. They did the same with bubbles of air before they started using enamel as well but this one was made sometime just after 1766. You can tell that both by the enamel twist, or ‘cotton’ twist some call it, which didn’t start until after 1755 or so, but more precisely by the engraving on the bowl.”
I looked at it, turning it in my hand.
“Do you see the Rose?” he asked. I did. “That’s to represent the Crown – but not the reigning Crown of dear old Mad King George III, who was from the House of Hanover. No, this was the mark of the Jacobite claim to return the Crown to the Stuarts, who’d ruled the roost up to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Then came the first of the Georges, who were Germans really, let alone Protestants, so the Catholic Stuarts thought this wasn’t right and staked their claim through James, the Old Pretender. And when he died, his son, good old Bonnie Prince Charlie, useless drunken sot that he was, became the Young Pretender. He’s represented by the bud on the left. There would have been two buds before 1766, but that’s the year the Old Pretender died and so they left off the right-hand bud to mark the change. Or so the theory goes and if it’s good enough for Barrington-Haynes, then it’s good enough for me.’
Barrington-Haynes meant nothing to me, some kind of historian, I presumed, like Thorpe, but I’d heard of Bonnie Prince Charlie and had been told the story of my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather, William Douglas of Fingland, on my Mother’s side of the family. He was a Jacobite through and through, born in 1672 at Sanquar Castle in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, where his posher cousin, the 2nd Duke of Queensberry, another Douglas, employed his Dad as Chamberlain to his household.
As William grew up he gained the reputation of being a bit of a rough diamond, loving nothing better than a fight, a drink and a flashing-eyed girl. One of these was called Anna, known as Annie to her friends. She was blue-eyed, young, vivacious and pretty – what more could a young, hot-blooded Scotsman wish for?
He’d been away with the Royal Scots as an Ensign, fighting for James II in Germany and Spain, rising to the rank of Captain by the end of the campaign. By the time he returned home, aged 22, he was of a mind to calm things down for a while and became Commissioner of Supply in Dumfriess, like his Granpa before him. It was never wise to cross him though, quick to a challenge as he was.
The vanquisher in several duels along the way, his swordsmanship was beyond question, albeit one survivor, nursing his wounds, put down William’s success less to the sword and more to his obviously terrifying “fierce and squintin’ e’e”.
Cross-eyed or not, he set his heart on young Annie from the moment he clapped at least one eye on her. So much so that he wrote her a song.
Known sometimes as the Maxwelton Braes, after the secret trysting place where he and Annie used to meet, the song is better known as ‘Annie Laurie’ and it goes like this:
She's backit like a Peacock,
She's breastit like a swan,
She's jimp about the middle,
Her waist ye weill may span,
Her waist ye weill may span,
And she has a rollin' eye,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'll lay down my head and die.
Not quite Robbie Burns and there is some question about who claims original authorship but there seems no question about William and Annie’s romance, especially in the eyes of her outraged and highly protective father, Sir Robert Laurie, 1st Baronet of Maxwelton.
Knighted by James VII, also confusingly King of England as James II until deposed as the last Catholic monarch in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Robert remained a devoted Royalist. This extended to the ‘vigorous’ persecution of all Jacobites and Covenanters – anyone who opposed the rule of the monarch in place for religious, dynastic or any other reasons – including young Captain William Douglas.
Unbeknownst to her father, Annie and William’s eyes had met, or tried to, across the crowded floor at a society ball in Edinburgh. A dance ensued. Her bottle-green taffeta ball-gown hissed across the floor. His white-lapelled, royal blue and scarlet dress uniform, festooned with medals, dazzled from afar. There were stars reflected in her eyes on the balcony where they’d drifted while the music played within. A dizzy scent arose from her flushed and finely-framed decolletage; his nostrils flared, her lips – well, from that moment, they were lost.
For a while they met in secret, exchanging kisses and fond endearments as their infatuation grew. Until, one fateful day, they were surprised in the throes of passion, chaste or not, and all was revealed.
When Sir Robert heard of it, his howl of rage could be heard the length and breadth of Maxwelton. Being a cunning fox, however, he set a trap to entice Captain Douglas to his home. There he would confront him as the traitorous Jacobite, squinty-eyed Lothario he was and put an end to it – one way or another.
Dressed in his finest plaid, William made his way at the appointed hour to Sir Robert’s grand abode. There, far from being greeted as the prospective son-in-law and given the blessing he had allowed himself to anticipate, he met his nemesis.
Despite frothing at the mouth at the thought of this uncouth man’s hands on his daughter’s modesty, Sir Robert held his peace at first and welcomed him at the newly-fashioned portico to his fittingly imposing residence.
Having lured William into the baronial hall with a crocodile smile, he slammed the door behind them, drew his sword and threatened to run him through unless he left Annie alone and never saw her again.
Not being one to back down, William drew his well-seasoned basket-hilted claymore in response and they set to.
No doubt chandeliers were swung from, candles split in half, and countless fine pieces of glassware smashed to smithereens as the fight progressed but – at the very moment when William might have triumphed to Robert’s mortal cost, hand to his throat, sword-arm raised – a distraught cry rang through the hall.
It was Annie.
She ran between them and, with tears streaming from her rollin’ eye down her flushed and fragrant decolletage, cried: “Nae, Wullie. Nae, my love. Ye cannae strike ma faither doon. He is ma ain daddy and ye will have to strike me first wi’ yer long, pointy thing afore I let ye kill him.”
So Willie loosed his hold and let his claymore drop while Annie, in her turn, restrained her father from taking his revenge. And with one last, lingering look to Annie, William took his leave, never to see her again.
Well, not quite. It is said they did still meet with heaving bosom and straining trews, risking all for just one fleeting glimpse under cover of darkness when there was no scudding moon to reveal them. But then came the news young William yearned for.
The Invasion was upon them. The Bonnie Prince awaited his loyal friends and followers to join him. He must away to Edinburgh without delay.
The invasion having predictably failed, the trail is now lost until, in 1706, William, true to form, eloped with another blue-eyed, bouncy-haired beauty called Betty Clerk from Glenboig. They had issue, as they say in the books, in the form of three boys, the eldest of whom, Archibald, survived to become my Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather and a pillar of the Hanoverian Establishment, no doubt to his father, William’s, disgust.
Archie had his moments of derring-do though, including having three horses shot from under him and an eyebrow clean shot away at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. With this distinctive mark, he rose otherwise unscathed to achieve the heights of Aide-de-Camp to George II in 1756, and the rank of Lieutenant-General in 1761.
Despite becoming MP for Dumfriessshire in the 1770s, he decided that the style of an English country gentleman was more his thing and bought an estate at Witham in Essex, remaining Regimental Colonel of 13th Regiment of Dragoons until his death in 1778.
Henceforth this Scottish family became more English than the English and turned, for the most part, from soldiering to preaching in a succession of country parsons. With the exception of the ‘Golden Canon’, Henry, who resided in splendour in the 1830’s and 40’s at the Bishop’s Palace in Durham, my forbears, including Henry in his more modest later years, almost all took on the ‘family living’ at the old rectory in Salwarpe, in Worcestershire, where my mother was born, eldest daughter of the fifth generation to hold that living.
There is, however, I’m glad to say, still a hint of the squinty e’e to be found, not to mention a rebellious streak, in some of their more disreputable descendants. Having been diagnosed with a ‘latent strabismus’ at an early age, I like to feel I can claim a modest place among them, even if my swordsmanship is lacking.
But I have an image of William and Archibald, father and son, at opposite ends of the long, long dining-table with its deeply-polished scars, indulging in long, long, brooding silences. Only to be broken by sudden ferocious arguments and, no doubt, more broken glassware as tempers got the better of them in their intractable opposition over so many issues, including love, I shouldn’t wonder.
Perhaps Archibald’s drive to succeed and desire to be recognised by the Establishment of the time came from a reaction to his rebellious, impulsive father, a not untypical trait. Or was it simply to recover the fortune, standing and family estates that his father lost in the tangle of battles, duels and elopements along the way? We will never know for sure.
And Annie? Well, she too married and had issue, dying shortly after William in 1764. It is said though, that she always kept a corner of her heart for him, commenting once in a letter to a friend: “I trust that he (William) has forsaken his treasonable opinions, and that he is content.” And the existing portraits of her really do show that she had the bluest of blue eyes.
Sadly, I don’t have a glass that has come down the family from that period, in the way some things do, if you believe what you hear on Antiques Roadshow. But Archibald’s sword used to hang somewhat unnervingly above my grandmother’s head in the little dining-room of her cottage in Beaminster in Dorset. At mealtimes as a small boy, I would imagine I could still see the blood on the blade where he had cut off some poor Frenchman’s head. My cousin, Philip, has it now, as head of the family, while we have the General’s mourning ring, given to mourners at his funeral, with a ghostly image of an urn on a jet black background, and his name, rank and the date of his death, aged 71, engraved into the gold on the back.
But the point is that every glass, like so many things, tells a story, the difference being only that a glass has to survive a journey more perilous than most. Thus I began my own journey into glass, travelling back home in the E-type at a more sedate pace, clutching in my hot, little hand the gift of the very first glass in my collection – a simple, collar-knopped glass, with folded foot, about 1720, worth perhaps £10 in 1963. It was, without doubt, the most beautiful thing I owned.
