Shirley: The Life of a Botanical Adventurer

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SHIRLEY

The Life of a Botanical Adventurer

Dr Shirley Sherwood

with Ivan Fallon

vFor my family and in loving memory of Jim, Michael,

my parents and so many friends.vi

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER 1: A Botanist is Born

CHAPTER 2: Adventures in the Himalaya

CHAPTER 3: Oxford

CHAPTER 4: Michael Cross

CHAPTER 5: The American Experience

CHAPTER 6: Starting Again

CHAPTER 7: Tagamet

CHAPTER 8: Jim

CHAPTER 9: Orient-Express

CHAPTER 10: A Dream Come True

CHAPTER 11: The Magic of Venice

CHAPTER 12: Hinton and the Boys

CHAPTER 13: The Italian Connection

CHAPTER 14: Cape to Rio

CHAPTER 15: Margaret Mee

CHAPTER 16: A Second Golden Age

CHAPTER 17: The New Generation

CHAPTER 18: Too High in the Andes

CHAPTER 19: Wine and Roses

CHAPTER 20: Mission Accomplished

CHAPTER 21: The End of the Line

CHAPTER 22: The Shirley Sherwood Gallery

Postscript

Bibliography

The Shirley Sherwood Collection exhibitions and venues

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

1

Introduction

In my lifetime I have published more than a dozen books, given countless interviews, delivered many lectures, and curated dozens of art exhibitions in countries around the world. Most of them have focused on my activities as a collector of modern botanical art and my mission to re-establish its status as a mainstream art form, accepted as such by the critics and art establishment. For more than thirty years I have argued that what we are seeing now is a renaissance of botanical art, or the second Golden Age, more than two centuries after the first (1740–1840) when its popularity and importance was at its height. My efforts have attracted widespread publicity, to the point where a whole generation knows me only as a collector and ardent admirer of botanical art – which, of course, I am.

But I have had a rich and eventful existence outside the world of art, and my purpose in writing this book is to describe the many dimensions and stages of my life, when I have been a traveller, scientist, author, magazine editor, gardener, hotelier, and many other things, but first and foremost a mother and a grandmother.

I set out with dreams, and for the most part I have been fortunate enough to achieve them. As a young girl during the War years I dreamed of one day travelling to exotic places, of meeting all sorts of wild and wonderful people, of adventures, of romance, of a successful career, and of coming home at the end of the day to the land where I was born. And I have done most of that.

Another dream of mine was to become a scientist, and at school I set my sights on studying botany at Oxford, much to the disapproval 2 of my headmistress. This was an era when women scientists were a rare breed, and I found myself the only woman student of botany in my first year at Oxford. Later, when I worked for a big American pharmaceutical company, I was the only woman among hundreds of male scientists in the laboratories.

For twelve years I was a senior member of the team that developed one of the most successful drugs ever produced and earned a Nobel Prize for Jim Black, the head of the project. Michael Cross, my first husband and father of my children, was seen by his contemporaries as a potential Nobel laureate for his pioneering work on human blood until he was tragically killed in an air crash at the age of thirty-six. At the high point of my scientific life I was regarded as the leading authority on the distribution of radioactively labelled drugs within the body, and the methods I developed are still widely in use today.

I entered a very different world when I married Jim Sherwood and found myself immediately involved with the fascinating project of recreating the fabled Orient-Express train, as seen in the Agatha Christie movie. We started in 1977 with two battered old sleeping cars and ended up four years later with two beautiful vintage trains of up to twenty carriages, carrying passengers in unparalleled luxury from London to Paris and on to Venice on routes I was partly responsible for pioneering. I wrote the history of the train’s revival, my first non-scientific book, which sold over 400,000 copies, and for years I edited the Orient-Express Magazine.

When Jim and I got married the Orient-Express Group had one hotel, the Cipriani in Venice. Over the next thirty years it grew into one of the biggest five-star hotel companies in the world. We pioneered tourist travel on the Irrawaddy in Myanmar on a boat we called Road to Mandalay; we acquired and ran all the old railways in Peru; we started an exotic new train operating in the jungles of Southeast Asia; and we built a business that was eventually sold for $3.2 billion. 3

I bought my first work of botanical art in 1990, and since then I have built a collection of contemporary botanical art which now numbers over a thousand paintings from all over the world. In that time I tried to acquire only the best works by the best artists, and I have shown them in exhibitions I have curated, many of them in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens, the first purpose-built gallery devoted to modern botanical art. In my determination to see plants in their natural habitat I have ventured into Amazonia and the Atlantic Rainforest, trekked across the Namib desert in search of the welwitschia, a very special plant which only lives there, explored the fynbos on the slopes of Table Mountain, and seen some rare species high in the Andes during a helicopter adventure.

In the early 1990s, when I started my collection, there were probably fewer than fifty good botanical artists in the world, and modern botanical art was generally viewed as a ‘back-of-the-herbarium’ hobby for amateur painters or art teachers who had failed to make it into the mainstream. Today there are thousands of botanical artists, the best of whom compare favourably with the great masters of the past. I have found wonderful artists in Brazil (where there has been a thriving school for years) and in South Africa, Japan, Thailand, Australia, America, and, of course, Britain, traditionally seen as the centre of it all.

Every year the talent grows and the popularity of botanical art grows with it. Up to 20 per cent of all visitors to Kew Gardens come to my gallery, and in a peak week up to 6,000 people will view the exhibitions.

The gallery and the collection, both of which carry my name, will, I hope, live long after me. And so will the Orient-Express trains, the gardens I have replanted and overseen at some of the world’s great hotels, and my own beautiful gardens in Oxfordshire, London and Italy.

It has been a busy life, but a rewarding one. I wouldn’t have missed a moment of it. 4

5

chapter one

A Botanist is Born

I am, by inclination and profession, a botanist. It has been my passion since I was a little girl when someone gave me a magnifying glass, the best present I ever had, and my enthusiasm has never waned. I studied botany at school; I took a botany degree at Oxford; and in later years, after careers as a research scientist and hotel garden adviser, I came back to it again as a collector of contemporary botanical art.

I was lucky in having parents, family and friends who encouraged me, and a keen botany teacher who recognised in me a kindred spirit. By the age of nine I knew the common names of most of the trees and flowers in our garden and the fields nearby, and by ten I was already building a collection of botanical books and pressed plants.

My mother was an artist, and I loved to watch her paint in her studio or outside in the summer when everything was in bloom. Although I did not realise it until much later, my passion for botanical art probably dates from that time.

My father was more interested in birds and wildlife, which I also loved. From an early age I would go birdwatching with him, carrying his battered old telescope which was awkward to use but, he insisted, had much better definition than binoculars. We had a bird-list which we ticked off, of which the most exotic was the great crested grebe, which had been hunted almost to extinction for its brilliant plumage, widely used in ladies’ hats in Victorian times. To our great delight we discovered a nesting pair on the banks of a nearby reservoir. 6

Our home was on the outskirts of St Albans in Hertfordshire, thirty miles northwest of London, an area not generally regarded as a great area of flora and fauna. But in the 1930s it was still rural, and there were large expanses of woodland and meadows around us. We lived in a house on Marshal’s Drive designed by my father, with a large garden and ancient chestnut trees. I have very happy memories of that house; I went back to see it a few years ago and found it as pretty as I remembered it. Sadly, the majestic Wellingtonia, part of my childhood, had gone from the front drive, probably because of old age.

All four of my grandparents – Briggs on my father’s side, Bailey on my mother’s, were born in Yorkshire – as were both my parents. My father, Geoffrey Masser Briggs, was a qualified valuer and auctioneer with a string of initials after his name. He served as chairman of the Royal Society of Valuers, often travelling up to London for black-tie dinners or committee meetings in the Society’s iconic building on the corner of Parliament Square.

My mother, Norah Kathleen Bailey, came from just outside Leeds on the River Aire. She was the daughter of George and Rosa Bailey, whom in their later years I knew well and loved dearly. My grandfather George, an insurance agent, had been run over by a horse and carriage in his youth, leaving him with a bad limp, but he had the most lovely face topped with curly white hair. I remember my grandmother Rosa as a tiny, fearless bundle of energy. She had been the first woman in Yorkshire to ride a bike. She played bridge with my grandfather, something that my mother always cautioned me against: ‘husbands and wives playing bridge together is a recipe for disaster’, she said with feeling. In later life my husband Jim, a very serious bridge player from his university and Navy days, tried to teach me, but I never learnt properly. Remembering all the pleasure Jim got from it, I regret that now.

My mother went to the Leeds School of Art, famous as the alma mater of two of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century sculptors, 7Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who by an extraordinary coincidence were in Leeds at the same time. They had both won scholarships to the Royal College of Art and had only recently left for London when my eighteen-year-old mother arrived in 1923.

She emerged as a more than competent artist and painted for the rest of her life, although she never had much confidence in her own ability. Looking at some of her pictures now, I think she was much better than she realised, with a wonderful ability to capture a likeness. In her later years she painted my two small boys with all the skill of a professional portrait painter.

My father’s family moved from Scotland to Leicestershire, and then settled at Wheathamstead in Hertfordshire, where my father attended the local public school, St Albans – one of the oldest school in Britain (founded in 948 in St Albans Abbey). He was living there when he met my mother. After they married in the late 1920s, they settled in St Albans and lived there for the next fifty years.

I was born Shirley Angela Masser Briggs on 1 July 1933. My brother Nigel came along three years later, completing our family of four. I remember my childhood as a happy one, with loving parents and grandparents and a little brother to play with. In later years, after I went up to Oxford, I discovered I was just about the only person I knew who hadn’t clashed with their parents in their teenage years.

I was six when war broke out in 1939, dominating our lives for the next six years. My father was in his thirties, too old to be called up, but he was determined to play his part – which he did, although not as a soldier. He was put into a ‘reserved occupation’ category, and his professional skills were used to value land requisitioned by the armed forces for military bases and airfields. When the Blitz started in the summer of 1940, he travelled into London by train to tackle the overwhelming task of valuing the thousands of properties destroyed, particularly in the East End where the docks were. It was a dangerous and difficult job: the Luftwaffe bombed 8London day and night for fifty-seven days, and there must have been hundreds of unexploded bombs and buildings on the verge of collapse. He was an energetic, lively man who took his duties seriously; he complained to my mother that, whereas he could do five or six valuations in a day, the government officials told him to slow down and limit himself to just one – which was all they managed. I sometimes wonder how we won the war.

My father joined the local Auxiliary Fire Service, where his main responsibility was to watch over St Albans Cathedral and Abbey, a magnificent building whose architecture dates from Norman times. When war broke out, the cathedral’s bell was taken down and a fire watch was established, of which I think my father must have taken charge. I was always anxious about him because I knew he liked to explore the secret passageways in the ancient cathedral’s roof and its maze of underground tunnels, which dated from the building’s days as a monastery, and I had visions of him trapped in there. Fortunately, unlike some of the other great churches – Coventry Cathedral in particular – St Albans Cathedral survived intact, although sixty bombs were dropped on St Albans and ten people were killed.

We were never a priority target for the Germans, but stray bombers, mostly damaged or lost, sometimes jettisoned their bombs over the countryside as they limped home. Mostly these fell harmlessly in the fields, but there were also casualties, and it was a danger of which we were always aware. At school we had regular air-raid drills. We would hurry to the shelters when the sirens went off, clutching the gas masks we carried with us at all times. I spent many hours in the damp school shelter, in half-light too dim for reading, and would emerge smelling of mould and thoroughly chilled when the all-clears finally sounded.

My only experience of a real live bomb was in June 1944 when my father took my brother Nigel and me to stay overnight with a friend who had a barge on the Thames near Henley. Petrol was strictly rationed, so we bicycled to the railway station, about a mile 9away, took the train to St Pancras, crossed London by Underground to Paddington, and caught another train to Henley. Other than short distances on our bicycles, my brother and I had not been anywhere since the war started, so this was a real treat for us. We were sitting on the deck of the barge on our first evening when we heard the noise of an engine that didn’t sound like that of a plane approaching rapidly. Then a big, black tube-like object flew low over us, flames trailing behind it. Its engine cut out, and a few seconds later there was an enormous explosion a mile upstream. The resulting shockwave rocked the barge. My father, who must have known what it was, made us pack up immediately, and we spent the rest of the night in a concrete boat shelter downstream.

Henley the next morning was a shambles, with broken glass everywhere and people hurriedly sweeping up. My father went off to report what we had seen and came back a few minutes later with a policeman, who solemnly warned my brother and me not to say anything to anyone for at least three weeks, which we didn’t, not even at school. It was only later that my father explained that we had witnessed one of the very first flying bombs, the V1, or ‘doodlebug’, Hitler’s secret weapon which he boasted would bring Britain to its knees within weeks. The need for secrecy was to prevent the Germans from establishing where their rockets were falling; Henley was a long way from London, their intended target. A few days later another errant doodlebug hit Watford, about ten miles away from St Albans, killing and injuring more than forty people – the biggest bombing disaster of the war in our area. But it wasn’t long before the Germans found their range and the doodle-bugs began falling on London in earnest.

The V1 was replaced by the much more sinister V2, against which, unlike the slower doodlebug, there was no effective defence. My father was in a restaurant in London having lunch one day when a V2 exploded nearby. He returned home shaken and bloody, and that evening I heard him telling my mother that he had 10watched the restaurant mirrors wrenched off the walls by the blast before smashing to the floor in little pieces. I remember him lying in bed while my mother picked bits of glass out of his forehead and scalp. Luckily, nothing had got into his eyes.

My father had a good voice and a love of music – both of which I inherited from him – and he often sang in concerts or performed with local operatic societies. In his later years he was much in demand as an expert witness in contested valuation cases because of his commanding presence in court.

The war finally ended in the summer of 1945, and we began to look forward to the end of rationing and a return to normal family life. But family life never did return to normal in our household. About a year later, my brother Nigel, then aged ten, was attacked by a gang of local bullies in a field nearby and staggered home, bleeding from a wound on his temple where he had been struck by a rock. I had spent the day at a friend’s house and returned in the evening to be told that my brother had complained he was feeling strange and had gone to bed. In the night he began having convulsions; my parents rushed him to hospital where he died a few hours later.

The effect on the family was devastating, particularly on my mother, who entered a period of prolonged grief and depression from which I don’t think she ever fully recovered. I know she tried to have another child, but by then she was in her forties, old for childbearing in those days, and she never managed it. Possibly as a result of the shock, she developed rheumatoid arthritis, the progress of which was horrible to witness; she had been a beautiful woman, active, graceful and outgoing, and suddenly she was in terrible pain and basically became a semi-cripple. She lost the use of those lovely hands I had seen so many times holding a paintbrush with such skill and confidence, and they had to be heavily bandaged to stop the fingers from distorting. The disease was progressive, and during one awful period, she could do nothing for herself; 11my father or I had to help her get dressed and undressed, as well as feed her. My father did his best, but he was busy and basically it was left to me, still just a teenager, to manage the house, do most of the cooking, and look after my mother. She spent a long time in hospital trying to get mobile again, but she eventually recovered sufficiently to hold a paintbrush – albeit very awkwardly – and even drive her car with the help of a heavily padded steering wheel. We hired a carer, which helped, but there was still a lot to do, and there was never enough time to do everything properly.

By that stage I was at St Albans High School for Girls, one of the best schools in the country, where I was among the brighter girls in my class, and from early on, encouraged by both my teachers and my parents, I set my sights on going to university, something few girls did in those days. And I wanted it to be Oxford, where I would study science – or, more specifically, botany.

Well before that, however, I had the adventure of a lifetime. In the spring of 1948, when I was fourteen, my godparents Ambrose and Mary Dundas asked me to accompany their daughter Anstice to Pakistan for the summer, a trip that left an indelible mark on my life. 12

13

chapter two

Adventures in the Himalaya

My godfather Ambrose Dundas had been in the Indian Civil Service since 1922. Like most children of colonial officials, Anstice was sent to school back in Britain and only saw her parents in the holidays when she went out to India or they came home. She and I were best friends and later went up to Oxford together, she to read engineering at Lady Margaret Hall, me to read botany at St Anne’s.

In 1948–49 my godfather was the last Governor of the North-West Frontier Province, by then in Pakistan. The plan in the summer of 1948 was that Anstice and I would fly to Karachi on an RAF York transport plane (a cousin of the Lancaster bomber), stay in the Governor’s residence for a week or so, and then move up to the hill station where the British officials and their families spent the summer months when Karachi and Delhi became unbearable. It was my first time on a plane and I was very excited about it.

We set off in June 1948, landing first in Tripoli to refuel and give the pilots a rest before flying on over the desert. Anstice and I were more and more intrigued by our fellow traveller, a King’s Messenger, who carried his confidential papers chained to his wrist and barely talked to us.

We continued on to Cairo on a flight so bumpy that by the time we touched down Anstice and I were airsick and very tired. We stayed overnight in the wonderful old Shepheard’s Hotel, the legendary haunt of British colonial officials and army officers in 14Egypt before the war (it features in the film Lawrence of Arabia), and we flew on again the next day to Basra, where we were put up in an old RAF camp for officers.

We were delayed there for a couple of days because one of the crew went down with laryngitis and a replacement pilot had to be flown out from England. That gave me time to wander into the desert for the first time. Everything was new to me, including the sparse plant life. This was the first time I had seen a date palm, and