Letter

     Apologies that there was no Fortnightly Letter two weeks ago: I was in the Cotswolds while Rosie, in London, was besieged with orders for Miss Pettigrew.  We were in Ebrington near Chipping Camden, from where we went to Hidcote and other wonderful Cotswolds villages. And in our very nice cottage (rented from Rural Retreats) we had local vegetables – sweet corn, spinach, new potatoes, onions, plums, blackberries; and read two biographies of CR Ashbee, who moved his Guild and School of Handicraft to Chipping Campden in 1902. The Guild specialised in metalwork, jewellery, enamelling and furniture and later produced books. Its aim was ‘to set a higher standard of craftsmanship, but at the same time, and in so doing, to protect the status of the craftsman. To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist — which is individualistic and often parasitical — and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage.’ In Chipping Camden, at the Court Barn Museum there is an exhibition of the work of Margaret Calkin James, which includes lengths of the fabrics we have used for The Runaway and Gardener’s Nightcap.

    We have been filmed three times this month, once for BBC1, once for Monocle (click on the link and then allow the film to load) and once for Channel 4. That seems quite enough excitement for one month but in fact there have been all the reviews of Miss Pettigrew and I got a thrill last night when I went past our local cinema and the film was on there (and the book was for sale in the bookshop next door). We have a huge poster for the film in the shop window, as well as the poster on which the cover of the Classic edition is based.

   Other things of interest: people often ask where we buy the posters we have in the shop: here is a forthcoming sale at Christie’s with many wonderful things; here is a piece about the suffragette play at the National, which should have been so magnificent but alas didn’t really work, for the reasons enumerated in this article; and do read this article by Zadie Smith about EM Forster. Finally, here is an excellent piece by Adele Geras about the blessed Dorothy Whipple.

Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
WC1N 3NB