Free Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd Page B

than on a tea plantation. René Lalique, then in his mid-sixties, had become recognised as a pioneer in this Age of Glass. He was an astonishingly versatile artist who exploited its texture and colour, using motifs from nature (flowers, fish, birds, animals) in the jewellery, sculpture and ornamental tableware he designed in his Paris studio. Fraser gazed at this glass as if it were a magic crystal. He looked about him – there were hunger marches, miners’ strikes, lengthening dole queues and street demonstrations protesting against unemployment throughout Britain; there was the Wall Street Crash in the United States, civil disobedience in India, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, revolution in Argentina, revolt in Peru, the rise of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, and throughout the world an economic crisis – Fraser looked and saw, reflected in his glass, that all was well. The omens were good, he decided, for further business expansion.
    The Basil Street offices were converted with a Chinese-style background into glittering showrooms by 1928. A gallery, with beige carpets, walnut veneers to the showcases, and brown walls paling into ivory at the ceiling, was prepared during the early nineteen-thirties in New Bond Street. A special lighting division was set up in Newman Street, off the Tottenham Court Road. There was also a smart office in Brown’s Arcade near Oxford Circus and an apartment in Carlyle Square in Chelsea, where orders were dispatched and drinking glasses, salad dishes, scent bottles, flower vases, car mascots, glass sparrows, fish, cocks, horses, eagles and other amazing objets d’art sent out on approval. The Breves Lalique catalogues during the late nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties show the wonderful range of goblets, bowls and plates, jugs and decanters, statuettes, paperweights, ashtrays that became available, decorated with leaves, dragonflies, peacocks, beetles, swallows, sunflowers, cupids, water-nymphs – a witty, decadent array.
    My grandfather gave a magnificent fancy-dress party in Knightsbridge for everyone associated with ‘Breves Lalique Galleries’. It was opening time in the West End. The lights were switched on, and all stood dazzled and ready for the boom which my grandfather sensed would sweep through the business world, bringing prosperity to the nineteen-thirties and a well-earned peace into which he could retire in the nineteen-forties.
    This was to be my father’s future. Meanwhile, the School Clerk’s records at Eton have him going up to University College, Oxford, in the summer of 1925. But if that was his intention he did not carry it out. Instead (and to my surprise since he never referred to it) he turns up as a pensioner (that is, an ordinary student without financial assistance from the college) at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the Michaelmas term of 1926, having passed one paper in mathematics for the ordinary Bachelor of Arts degree in Easter that year. The examination he took was called ‘The sun, the stars, and the universe’. But as he studied only one subsidiary course, ‘I do not think that your father was intending to take an ordinary B.A.,’ writes Jonathan Smith from Trinity College Library. ‘Your father’s social life here is a bit of a mystery. Unfortunately he does not show in our personal names index to club and society records, nor does he make an appearance in the Trinity Review .’
    What a contrast to Kenneth at Clare College! He appears in pictures of all sorts of clubs, teams, societies with a sheen of maturity spread over his rather blasé handsome features, so resplendent in his gleaming blazer, so sophisticated with his casual cigarette. And he had worked a bit too. He is listed in the third class for parts I and II of the Architectural Diploma, and in the second class for part III. It is not a bad record for someone who had entered the lowly Third Form at Eton.
    My father stayed only four terms at Trinity and ‘left