Alphabet associations - I

[Anna]

I'm just wondering if Cali is to continue his Bank Holiday Celeb-Fest by attending the Concert at the Palace today .....?
I can get a linking V (a character) but is the Herbert a Howells or another Herbert?

[cloughie]

I'm just wondering if Cali is to continue his Bank Holiday Celeb-Fest by attending the Concert at the Palace today .....?
I can get a linking V (a character) but is the Herbert a Howells or another Herbert?

a winner!

[Nick Armstrong]

Or even RCA!

huh?!

[Nick Armstrong]

Caliban - I don't know if you know of a good lawyer but ... CCTV footage of you at the pageant yesterday has just been released on youtube ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6gp21rntoI

Those gels seemed to enjoy it, so that's alright

Yes that was us, right at the end, as the LPO played the Sea Shanties!

The title of that clip suggests you're on to the double-barrelled cove in the question...

[Nick Armstrong]

I'm just wondering if Cali is to continue his Bank Holiday Celeb-Fest by attending the Concert at the Palace today .....?
I can get a linking V (a character) but is the Herbert a Howells or another Herbert?

No flippin' fear!!

The Herbert is another Herbert... It's a surname

[Anna]

The Herbert is another Herbert... It's a surname

Victor Herbert: The Viceroy?

[Nick Armstrong]

Victor Herbert: The Viceroy?

Bull's-eye!



Bang on the money, Anna!

Now... the last two elements?

[Anna]

Tyrwhitt-Wilson and Offenbach both set Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement, the latter calling it Perichole in which there is the character of a Viceroy. I think that's correct.
Incidentally, reading up about Lord Berners - He was a strange individual in many ways! Throwing dogs out of windows to see if they could fly and painting pigeons!

[Nick Armstrong]

Tyrwhitt-Wilson and Offenbach both set Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement, the latter calling it Perichole in which there is the character of a Viceroy. I think that's correct.
Incidentally, reading up about Lord Berners - He was a strange individual in many ways! Throwing dogs out of windows to see if they could fly and painting pigeons!

An awesome clean sweep from Anna!!

Yes... V for Viceroy

1. The operetta of that name by Victor Herbert

2 & 3. Leading character in operas based on Merimée's 'La Carosse du Saint-Sacrement', namely

- La Perichole by Offenbach
- La C du S-S by Lord Berners aka Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners

Yes, Berners was a total nutter! He had a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. Thinking of which, I'm getting a little bored of the ocelot...

Would you very kindly, Annakins?

[amateur51]

YAY Anna! Marvissimo! orkpie:

[Anna]

I think this is quite straightfoward (unlike Lord Berners!) and shouldn't take too long

A W linking:
Radio 3
The first to electrify London?
Terribly English, but a parody?

As it's very quiet I'll look in around 3.30

[Nick Armstrong]

I think this is quite straightfoward (unlike Lord Berners!) and shouldn't take too long

A W linking:
Radio 3
The first to electrify London?
Terribly English, but a parody?

As it's very quiet I'll look in around 3.30

I've been ferreting away, without success so far...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think this is quite straightfoward (unlike Lord Berners!) and shouldn't take too long

A W linking:
Radio 3
The first to electrify London?
Terribly English, but a parody?

W(h)at(t)?

"What's this rubbish on R3?"
Watt.
"I say, what ho!"

?

[vinteuil]

I think this is quite straightfoward (unlike Lord Berners!)

Gerald’s childhood was not a happy one. He had no friends, and his father, being in the navy, spent a lot of time away from home. To the boy his father came across as worldly, reserved and cynical. Even so, says Amory, Gerald admired his elegant clothes sense and his wit.
He recounts with admiration how a boring neighbour told his father that someone had kicked his wife, adding, “and in public, too! It’s not cricket, is it?”
“No,” said my father, stifling a yawn, “It sounds more like football.”
While he loved his mother dearly and provided well for her in her later years, Gerald viewed her as conventional and lacking imagination. The idea that he should become an artist or writer, or even worse, a musician, filled her with revulsion. At the age of 17 he wrote a play under the influence of Ibsen. His mother condemned it as morbid, asking why he couldn’t write a play like Charley’s Aunt.
As a little boy he had been occasionally too much for her. For instance, having heard that a dog when thrown into water will swim instinctively, he once threw her spaniel out a first-floor window — his scientific experiment being to see if thrown into the air a dog will instinctively fly. (He would later claim that he had felt free to do so because its face reminded him of George Eliot.)
Sent first to Cheam and later to Eton, Gerald seems to have suffered a bored and miserable education, enlivened socially only by his infatuations with a couple of other schoolboys. One of his teachers at Eton was AC Benson, the author of the words to Land of Hope and Glory (written to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII, incidentally).
More memorable for Gerald Tyrwhitt, however, than his teachers or his crushes was the part music began to play in his lonely life. According to Amory, “Music . . . was to be his escape from his uncongenial surroundings”. It began when as a young boy he heard a visitor to the Tyrwhitt home playing Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. Then while he was at Eton he happened by chance upon a book called A Synopsis of Wagner’s Nibelungen Ring.
He hadn't heard a note of the music, but he became obsessed by the world of gods and dwarves, and when he discovered a vocal score of Das Rheingold,
. . . [h]e frightened the shopkeeper by the violence with which he burst in, but he was allowed to handle it, and his excitement and longing . . . were vivid. (Amory)
Later his father shelled out the money for it, and it was not long before he was he was staging Wagner productions at home — in a doll’s house.
After completing his time at Eton, in 1900, aged 16, he went on to study languages, history and geography on the Continent, with a view to a career in diplomacy. He also studied art, sketched a little, and took a course in harmony. During this period he gradually lost his passion for Wagner, and began to pay serious attention to other composers, such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss and Debussy, and to further his interest in literature, particularly drama.
Totally dependent on his mother for funds, Gerald crisscrossed the Continent for the next decade, hardly ever remaining in the same place for more than four months, attempting the Foreign Office exams in 1905 and again 1907 — and failing both times. Even so, by 1910 he had obtained an appointment as honorary attaché to the embassy at Constantinople. Such insignificant positions were given to suitable young men of independent means who were willing to file and type and do a bit of deciphering for no pay. While in Constantinople, however, Gerald took little interest in either local customs or foreign politics. Instead, he spent a lot of his desk time writing nonsense verse. Here’s one of the less smutty ones:
A thing that Uncle George detests
Is finding mouse shit in his vests
But what he even more abhors
Is seeing Auntie in her drawers.
In 1911 he was posted to Rome, a city and culture much more to his liking. It was in Italy that he was drawn to the new art movements Futurism and Surrealism.
Then, in 1918, his Uncle Raymond died, and Gerald Tyrwhitt found himself a Baron and the owner of a Berkshire country manor called Faringdon, situated about 24 km south-west of Oxford. According to architecture lover John Betjeman, who visited several times, Faringdon House is one of the finest buildings in the county.
Of course, for our already idiosyncratic thirty-five-year-old a simple and factual explanation of how he inherited was not good enough, so as time went on he concocted various more exciting versions to tell at parties. To me, they sound a bit like previews of scenes in the 1949 movie Kind Hearts and Coronets. In one, a whole row of uncles fell off a bridge; in another, a procession of Tyrwhitts on their mournful way to a funeral got mowed down by a bus.
The process of Berners’ succession to the title was complicated by a little tradition instituted by his grandmother Lady Emma Berners (née Wilson), who wanted her heirs to take her maiden name before they inherited. Gerald had not thought through his own succession well enough in advance, and when his uncle died only a year after becoming the 13th Lord Berners, had not yet changed his name. As Amory puts it, he “only became Tyrwhitt-Wilson by royal licence in 1919, by which time his surname was cloaked by his title”.
Despite his elevation to the Quality, Lord Berners stayed on at the Rome embassy (now acting private secretary to the Ambassador) for another two years. One of his last acts before he left in 1920 was a perverse letter to Venice. Evidently an Australian newspaper had bemoaned the fact that the once noble city was now full of beggars. It was Berners’ job to reassure them. So he wrote, “It was all mistake — a misprint. It was supposed to read ‘buggers’”.

[amateur51]

I've been ferreting away, without success so far...

Stoatally confused me