The House by the Thames (32 page)

By the 1970s, when Bankside was reaching its lowest ebb, derelict, silent and largely unfrequented, the Black family were no longer at number 49.

They had flourished there for many years. Dan had suffered from asthma (one wonders if the Cement Company was partly to blame?) and spent some time in the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children, on the site of the mid-Victorian workhouse that St Saviour's parish had shared with St George's. But he remembers his childhood as happy. What would have been their nearest primary school, in Emerson Street,
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had been bombed during the war, along with St Peter's church to which it was attached, so the boys went to St Saviour's Parochial School. Now on the opposite corner of Union Street from the Cross Bones site, it was essentially the same school of which Edward Perronet Sells had been Treasurer over a hundred years before. Their mother went there too, as a teacher, for a number of years. Their father's career advanced. The Blacks were a sociable couple, in the effervescent 1960s. Once more, as in the Stevensons' day, the old house resounded with parties to which ‘everyone came. Tony Armstrong-Jones came.' But at the end of the decade the marriage was more or less over. By 1971 the whole family, including their confidant, the ‘permanent uncle' Geoffrey Davidson, had moved out of Bankside.

Davidson went to teach dancing in Turkey. Three years later Mrs Black flew out there to see him to ‘give herself the strength to get a divorce'. On the return journey the Turkish DC10 airliner stopped off at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. When it took off again it was to crash into nearby woods, killing all on board.

Dan Black, living elsewhere in south London, used to check up on his childhood home through the years. Every so often he would ring the bell, and talk to whoever answered it. But the place was to go, initially, through a very bad time.

The general abandonment of Bankside seemed to mean that even the house at Cardinal's Wharf, which had been rescued and admired, and photographed for posterity by a local antiquarian, was temporarily abandoned also. Even though GLC plans were afoot for the ‘Jubilee Walkway', which would make its way gradually along the south bank of the river from Hungerford Bridge over the next twenty-five years and would eventually be extremely popular, for the time being Bankside seemed to be off nearly everyone's mental map, disregarded and vulnerable.

Malcolm Munthe had by then impoverished himself trying to maintain his various houses around Europe, and 49 Bankside had been placed in a Trust. One letter that has finished up in the bundle of Deeds, written by a Trustee to the Town Clerk of Southwark in 1970, suggests that the lease (presumably then still in the name of Dr Black) might be given up at the end of the year. The Trustee was enquiring about the possibility of a local authority grant for ‘redecorating those parts of the house that are of historic interest'. Not only were Wren and Catherine of Aragon offered as reasons, but Henry VIII himself and also Shakespeare were added to the optimistic list of former occupants. It was also hoped that money might be forthcoming to ‘mount exhibitions' and ‘to open certain parts of the house to small parties of students and historians for whom the interior of the property would be of considerable interest … Without proper and interested care, this property might fall into an even worse state of repair than it has already.'

There is no record of a satisfactory reply to this letter. Given the attitude of mind that prevailed in Southwark Council at that period, and the fact that Rennie's London Bridge was even then being removed in favour of a pre-stressed concrete replacement, the Trust's quest probably had no chance of succeeding.

At all events, the house fell empty. It was then squatted – this was also the time of triumphalist and destructive student sit-ins – and vandalised. Some of the original panelling was destroyed, cannibalised as fuel in the house's own fireplaces, and so were most of the doors and the barley-sugar banisters. Their removal, and that of some of the stairwell panelling, left the staircase effectively floating, anchored only to the remaining newel posts. By the time the intruders had been evicted for the third time late in 1972, the Munthe family felt desperate for a solution. It was Guy Munthe, Malcolm's son and Axel's grandson, who took the place on.

Many years later, Guy was described by a journalist writing an article about the house as ‘sometime merchant banker, waiter, poet, actor, film director and Afghan
mujahidin
'. The last term apparently referred to a fleeting role, in disguise, as an Afghan war-correspondent. Guy always claimed to have received a ‘war wound' there which had damaged his health, though those who knew him well thought that his declining health was due to a quite other cause. An eventual obituarist wrote: ‘He was a frequent escort of Princess Margaret and sex-change model April Ashley, as well as being the lover of gay mass-murderer Michael Lupo … A virtuoso on the musical saw, Munthe occasionally dressed as a tramp and made £40 or so a day, with his renditions of Vivaldi, Chopin and the Beatles … [He used] to be found circumnavigating Chelsea on his ancient motor cycle with pet parrot Augusta gripping the handle bars …'
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But it is clear from the skill with which he rescued the house (its third rescue in forty years) that he had a core of taste and determination not apparent from the above description. It was, he recollected later, ‘in a ghastly condition … the curtains were so revolting I had to take them down with tongs'. His first action was ‘to clear the decks, paint everything French grey, and then start piecing the house together again'. He scoured London for replacement doors and for old pine packing cases he could use ‘faked up' to replace the missing panelling. He salvaged some suitable banisters from another old house. By and by he hung hand-blocked wall-paper and reassembled a collection of fine furniture. Over the years he installed another bathroom, in the first-floor closet beside the lavatory; and re-organised the attic to create a separate flat there which eventually harboured a man-servant. He extended the back of the house slightly, putting in new ‘Queen Anne' windows in the first- floor back room. He barred the old door into the alley and removed the corridor partition, restoring to its full dimensions the front room that had been the Blacks' kitchen, which he opened up to the lobby by the stairs through an archway. He tackled the cellars, moving the kitchen down there as it had been in the nineteenth century. The part that had been the Pooles' hidden sitting room in the Stevensons' time became a display place for his collection of skulls. This included a begging bowl made out of the cranium of a Tibetan monk (according to him) and also some Maori shrunken heads. In the same idiom, he had the ground-floor dining room (which had in any case had to be largely rebuilt after the war) re-decorated by a French painter, André Dubreuil. Flaking Father Thames disappeared: instead were
trompe I'oeil
effects of ruined, vaguely Pompeian walls, broken pediments, urns, a guttering candle or two, creepers, and a very realistic key on a hook. Guy's own comment on all this was “
I'm
not real. At least, not in everyday terms.”

A good many visitors, chiefly male, passed through the house during Guy's time there. Dan Black called once, when he happened to be on Bankside, and was hospitably invited to stay the night, an invitation he declined.

Guy left some time in the 1980s. It is not quite clear when, since for a while he seems to have alternated between London and Italy, where he wanted to breed Welsh ponies. He said that he was sick of London, which now had ‘no society … [just] millions of bloody people'. He told a journalist then that a house was ‘like a self-portrait; when you've finished it, you can hang it on the wall and look at it, or you can flog it and get on with the next'. He also claimed that he'd ‘never achieved a thing in life'.

On the contrary, the repair and preservation of 49 Bankside after the ravages it had suffered was a considerable achievement, and monument enough. When he finally succumbed to his ‘war wound', in Italy, the obituarist quoted above remarked, ‘Society will be the poorer for his passing.' The obituary appeared under the title ‘The Death of the Good Guy'.

While Guy Munthe was living in his self-created world, things were at last stirring on Bankside.

The Jubilee Walkway was being constructed bit by bit. A replica of the
Golden Hind
, the dauntingly small ship in which Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world, was installed as a tourist attraction in Mary Overie's Dock. But a much bigger initiative was the plan to rebuild a ‘Globe' theatre on Bankside. The idea had long been cherished by the actor and director Sam Wanamaker. An American, who left the United States in the repressive McCarthy era, he became passionately attached to things British. The artist Geoffrey Fletcher, who was publishing books in the 1960s with drawings of buildings and corners that were soon to be extinguished (an invaluable record), was dismissive of Wanamaker's dream. ‘I had a fear,' he wrote in 1966, ‘that someone would build a replica of the Globe to mark the Shakespeare celebrations of 1964, a fear fortunately not realised.'

One understands what he meant. The term ‘heritage industry' had not then been invented, but he had sensed, rightly, that something of the kind was coming – had to come, to fill the emptiness left by the retreat of real industry. Fletcher, with his acute eye for genuine, overlooked remains of old London, was wary of the bogus. But the Globe vision was more durable than he supposed, and the architect who became principally concerned in the project, Theo Crosby, did much to redeem the fantasy element in the reconstructed theatre by his meticulous concern for authentic building methods. When you look at the poor-quality modern blocks, bearing no relation to site, that were by then spotting London, and at the later wave of over-sized private developments that now crowd Bankside, the Globe scheme seems an unqualified achievement.

A money-raising Trust was established. It appeared that Southwark Council would look favourably on the scheme, and agreement was reached that in due course the Trust should be able to buy a riverside site – which happened to be almost next door to 49 Bankside, where the Royal Windsor Wharf and Sutton, Sail Maker had once been. A development company was involved, and money was invested in the drawing up of plans. However, in 1982, the Old Left councillors who had seemed a fixture were replaced by a younger generation with a keener vision. Under their auspices, a body called the North Southwark Community Development Group took the view that building a new Globe would be contrary to the needs of ‘the traditional working-class community of North Southwark'. Phrases such as ‘elitist tosh' and ‘Shakespeare is overrated' were also bandied about. They had apparently failed to notice that two-thirds of the working population had already moved out to places further south such as Eltham, Penge and Merton, and that any further threat to the borough would not come from history-lovers but from private property developers with their eyes on waterfront sites. They could not, they said, give planning permission for the new Globe after all, because the space was currently in use as a Council yard and store where street sweepers kept their barrows and brooms.

The Globe Trust and their development company took the Council to Court for reneging on their previous agreement. Very substantial claims for compensation were now being made, including one from a property company with whom the Council had made a separate agreement. Eventually, in June 1986, the matter reached the High Court, who found in favour of the Globe Trust. The Council talked of a further appeal, but then backed down. They had to spend some millions of rate-payers' money on the cost of the case and on appeasing the various claimants. They also presumably realised that their belief that they were acting in the interests of ‘the traditional working-class community' was fatally undermined when a local poll revealed substantial support for rebuilding the Globe.

Three years later, the foundations of the original Globe were verified as being on the ex-Anchor brewery land, and those of the Rose were revealed beside Southwark Bridge. All those who supported Wanamaker made the most of these discoveries, which were one happy consequence of the wholesale destruction of the Southwark townscape that had got under way by then. Wanamaker and Crosby both died in the early 1990s, but they knew that their dream was going to be realised. The Globe, which had further extended its site over that of the warehouse standing right up against number 49, was triumphantly opened in 1997. The reformed Council were by then assuring everyone that their ‘commitment to heritage was ongoing'.

The transformation of the Power Station into the Tate Modern gallery was not a simple matter either. Up to the early 1990s, it looked as if the site would be sold off for development. But what development? Through the '80s various ideas were suggested, including an opera house. Theo Crosby (again) produced a splendidly operatic design, reminiscent of a
schloss
overlooking the river Rhine. His scheme also resurrected the endlessly postponed St Paul's Bridge, but this time as a slim pedestrian link with the other shore.

But the conservation movement was now well under way and many voices were raised against the demolition of Gilbert Scott's building. The Twentieth Century Society was campaigning to get the place listed, and a BBC programme was being filmed there with this intention, when it was visited by Nicholas Serota, the Curator of the Tate Gallery. The site had been suggested to him as a suitable place for a new gallery of modern art, but after his visit he became a fervent convert to the idea of turning the existing building into a gallery – which, after a great deal of effort and money-raising, was what eventually happened.

As late as 1993 some sections of Southwark local authority were opposed to this. In the November of that year, the director of the Southwark Environment Trust was writing to
The Independent:
‘It [the Power Station] presents a vertical acre of the ugliest ever bricks to the City and to the river, unredeemed by any masterful detailing … the building still casts a miasma of depression … Its construction was a disaster in urban planning, which its retention perpetuates … How backward-looking, how necrophiliac.'
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