Free Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd Page A

question of whether I returned to Eton or not. My mother, still convinced that I was ailing, opted for a Swiss education. She found the story of my fight for life very tellable at her weekly bridge parties. So I was sent to Chillon College.’
    There my father’s narrative stops. The difference between Chillon and Eton ‘was immense’, he wrote. ‘I had spent most of my time loathing Eton.’ Yet he would have preferred to return there than remain a prisoner of Chillon. Kenneth had now left for Clare College, Cambridge; so Basil had survived the bad years, and happier times lay ahead. I never heard my father speak of Chillon College which must have been near Geneva but which no longer exists (neither the Municipalité de Leysin nor the Fédération Suisse des Ecoles Privées has any knowledge of it). It was evidently one of those private boarding schools that specialise in educating American, British, French, German and Italian nationals, some of whose parents work in Switzerland, others of whom are sent abroad to be ‘finished’. For my father it represented exile, under the shadow of failure at Eton.
    He remained in Chillon for the best part of two years. But now that people could travel abroad again in the early nineteen-twenties, his family was able to visit him, starting their holidays in Switzerland and travelling leisurely back through France. It was at Dinard, the fashionable watering-place in Brittany, my father remembered, that during one of these journeys Fraser first saw a display of Lalique glass. Later, in about 1926, he went to a Lalique exhibition mounted at showrooms in Great Portland Street. It had been brought over to London by the Curzon family following a grand exposition of decorative art in Paris. Though the glass did not attract great attention in the British newspapers, it impressed my grandfather who went over to Paris the following year, saw René Lalique and tried to get himself appointed sole agent for the glass in ‘Britain and the Empire’. He was just too late, the agency having been acquired by ‘a likeable rogue’ called Keir. But Fraser managed to pull off a deal with Mr Keir. He now had the magical ingredient, like the earlier ‘Breves Process’, necessary for success.
    Between the mid-nineteen-twenties and the mid-nineteen-thirties my grandfather pursued an extraordinary strategy. He sold for cash, or lodged with Barclays Bank as a means of raising loans, all his Rajmai Tea shares – indeed he got rid of ninety more shares than he actually possessed (these ninety shares were ‘sold’ to his friend ‘Nipper’ Anderson and must have been part of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’). He then acquired another 1,000 shares and used them to get more loans. By these means he raised the equivalent today of almost one million pounds. What was so strange about this programme is that it went against everything in which he believed. He disapproved of selling shares, most especially Rajmai shares, because it struck him as an act of disloyalty. It was this rapid buying and selling, this playing of the market, that he had disliked in Lowenfelt. Also, tea was doing rather well in the nineteen-twenties before the government placed a fourpenny tax on it. The Industrial Fatigue Research Board had come up with the finding that ‘a cup of tea aids efficiency and curbs industrial discontent’. It was patriotic to drink Indian tea in Britain. You drank it for prosperity as you would later dig vegetables for victory. A survey in 1927 showed that the British were drinking more tea and less beer – and also that birth rate figures were falling.
    But Lalique glass dazzled Fraser and, though they did not guess why he had taken this dramatic change of direction, it seems to have been uniformly popular in his family. Adeline liked having it around the house; Yolande thought it beautiful; and the two boys, Kenneth and Basil, saw a future for themselves in this new family business – a far brighter future