Around the World in 80 Days – Part V

By Temple Ligon
February 21, 2014

Before Passepartout #3 and I parted ways on Saturday afternoon, March 24, we took our letter of introduction to the Reform Club on Pall Mall, something awfully hard to come by for us provincials in the American Southern Crescent. A Columbia friend was a member of a substantive Washington club that had a reciprocal agreement with the Reform Club, so he put together the necessary language for us to gain admission for a short tour. The Reform Club’s location, #104 Pall Mall, next to where Pall Mall and Regent Street met just down from the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, was about as prestigious as any address in London. Pall Mall was already known as Club Row when the Reform Club began there in the late 1830s.

The Reform Club was where Phileas Fogg accepted the challenge and placed the wager to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. The club was formed as a social extension for the backers of the Reform Bill of 1832, liberal for its time. The MPs who supported the Reform Bill wanted to maintain the pressure for further advancements in Britain, and the Reform Club was the place to do it. Already in operation was the Tory Party’s Carlton Club, which meant the members of the Liberal Party could react to the Carlton Club and manage some symmetry with their Reform Club.
 
Home to players in the Liberal Party, it’s hard to agree with movie producer Mike Todd’s portrayal of the place as staid, stagnant and chronically culturally conservative – dominated by the kind of old-line people Fogg would approve in 1872. Members of the Liberal Party who were also members of the Reform Club were the social progressives for their time, not the contemptuous antiques complaining about new developments such as ice in cocktails and fluid conversations among the members. But by 1920 the Reform Club had dropped most of its liberal political orientation and had developed into a singularly social standing of the highest order. By 1981 women were admitted; it was the first London club to break the barrier.
 
Since we were dropping in on a Saturday afternoon, we picked possibly the most opportune time for a visit. Saturday afternoons at clubs above a certain standing are usually pretty slow. Clubs don’t see much Saturday action because most members live a commuter’s difficult distance away and most members have weekend travel, to include escapes to second homes. Unless there’s a big wedding reception set for Saturday night, the place can be almost empty on Saturday afternoons.
 
We were told no photographs before we left Columbia, and we were told no photographs at the door before we stepped inside the club. Passepartout took photographs, but she pulled it off without my seeing it. I didn’t know she had cased the joint with her camera until after I returned to Columbia on the 80th day. I must say, I’m glad she flouted the rules. The shots recorded great memories, even if they were illicit.
 
Mike Todd could have used Passepartout’s talents. He was refused after several requests to film scenes inside the Reform Club. They told him, too, no photographs and certainly no film crews and no lights and no actors. After all, was anybody in Todd’s retinue a member of the Reform Club?
 
Much later, by the way, sometime in the past 20 years, a film crew was allowed in to shoot scenes for a Bond movie – a sword fight, I was told. Still, for the rest of us, no photographs.
 
It was nightfall when Passepartout and I picked up our bags at the Hilton. She took the first taxi, and I told my taxi driver I had no train ticket, so there was no mad rush to the station. The train took me close to where I needed to be, Broadway in the Cotswolds, but I still had to go several miles by taxi. I had reserved a room in the Lygon Arms, named for my family but not in family hands until around 1820. My family home, Madresfield Court, was begun in the 11C next to Malvern Hills, now the town of Great Malvern, another 20 miles away from Broadway and the Lygon Arms. Lygon’s timing was awfully good, and he learned it paid well to come over with the winning team. Lygon was a Norman under William I; and to the victors go the spoils, they must have said in 1066.
 
The moat and its bridge are the only two pieces of Madresfield Court that can be dated 11C. For the most part, the place is a massive 19C restoration following a major fire.
 
Evelyn Waugh used Madresfield Court, where he was a regular visitor in the 1930s, and the Lygon family as the basis for his novel Brideshead Revisited, probably his best work.
 
Waugh wrote about the patriarch who took his lady friend to Venice, leaving his wife and children behind at Brideshead. In reality, Lygon came out of the closet in 1931 and took his valet to Europe. Had to. In those days to come out gay in Britain was to break the law. Or as the king said when told of Lygon’s predicament, I hear those people always shoot themselves.
 
Instead of staying at Madresfield Court, his wife tended to keep house in London at #13 Belgrave Square, near where Upstairs/Downstairs was filmed. Today #13 is the embassy building for Ghana.
 
Since she stayed in the townhouse on Belgrave Square, her children had Madresfield Court all to themselves, which is how Waugh visited so often. There was no one there to say no.
 
The Lygon Arms began in 1460 as a way station, a place to change horses on the road to London. By automobile today Broadway is about two hours to the northwest from London, but at the speed of a horse-drawn wagon or a coach-and-four, London was a whole lot farther away. With such distances a tavern was developed at the way station in 1532. So go back; it’s much nicer now. Old joke.
 
When the tavern developed, the name of the place was the White Hart Inn and stayed the White Hart Inn through the English Civil War and beyond. King Charles I stayed at the White Hart Inn in 1642 on the night before the Battle of Edge Hill, the beginning of the end of his reign. His successful challenger, Oliver Cromwell, also stayed at the White Hart Inn near the end of the Civil War. Their rooms have been preserved as the King Charles I Suite and the Oliver Cromwell Suite, probably the priciest in the place.
 
In command of the fusiliers under the Duke of Wellington, a much later Lygon was a colonel going into the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and a general coming out. Again, another Lygon learned how to connect with the winning side, and five years after helping to win the Battle of Waterloo, Lygon bought the White Hart Inn and changed its name to the Lygon Arms.
 
Speaking of name changes, the Lygon who left all that behind for Virginia in 1641 brought the name Lygon, the only Lygon to come over, but soon the family changed the spelling of the name to Ligon, an easy way to keep the Virginians separate from the Brits and later the Patriots from the Tories. Ligon left much behind, a whole lot, but under the prevailing laws of primogeniture as the second son he got nothing, zip, nada. He could have married money, maybe, or he could have made a career out of the military; and he might have made a good man in the church, but in the end, a run to Virginia made all the sense in the world to an aristocratic second son.
 
For most of the first half of the 20C, the Lygon Arms was famous in the United States as Henry Ford’s favorite vacation hotel. He stayed there about as often as he could.
 
Another famous guest, but one who could not stay more than a couple nights at the most, was author Salman Rushdie. In 1988 Rushdie was guilty of publishing The Satanic Verses, a novel the Muslim mind couldn’t handle.
 
Even the South African government banned The Satanic Verses. Khomeini et al. had a point and plenty of followers, but too bad free speech didn’t carry the day, like here in the USA. To quote Rushdie quoting the South Africans: The banning order disparaged the novel as a work thinly disguised as a piece of literature, criticized its foul language, and said that it was disgusting not only to Muslims but to any reader who hold clear values of decency and culture.
 
For the first two nights he was on the run with a price on his head – established by Iran’s Khomeini, made public as a fatwa on Valentine’s Day, 1989 – Rushdie needed secrecy and security.
 
But the Lygon Arms was there to help. The hotel was famous for keeping its mouths shut while some MP and Suzie Creamcheese jumped off the helicopter out back behind the tennis court and slipped into the Lygon Arms and into something more comfortable.  Kind of an English Carlyle Hotel, I guess it was, the glamorous address on Madison Avenue where JFK and his brothers kept a suite, or a countryside Savoy, where Liz Taylor insisted on being maintained in the heart of London.
 
The Lygon Arms people kept their mouths shut, and Rushdie came and went before anyone on the outside knew anything.
 
After finishing an achingly slow London Marathon in 1997, my lady friend and I took the train and a connecting hotel limo to the Lygon Arms where we did score the King Charles I Suite. I hadn’t stayed there since until my run around the world chasing Phileas Fogg. Staying by myself, I stayed out of the suite and stayed within budget.
 
The little Lygon Arms, 70+ rooms, has a restaurant worthy of a 300-room property and a health spa and indoor pool to match.
 
My real reason for going to Broadway was to tour the automobile factory in Malvern Link, about halfway between Great Malvern and Madresfield Court. That’s where the Morgan motorcar, three-wheeled and four-wheeled, had been made since 1909.
 
When I showed up at the reception desk about mid-afternoon, I was told the group tour, the last for the day, was almost through. Then I was asked if the company archivist, the house historian, could take me on a one-on-one tour at our own pace. Another famous rhetorical question, I should say. To get me started, Charles Morgan himself surfaced to say hello.
 
An unreconstructed gearhead, someone who has owned and tuned a 1960 TR-3, 1966 TR-4, 1967 Austin Healey 3000 Mark III, 1969 Alfa Romeo 1750 GTV, 1983 Mustang five-liter five-speed convertible, and even a 1954 Chevrolet panel truck with a 283 cu. in. V8 shoehorned under the hood and a manual four-in-the-floor transmission between two Dodge Charger bucket seats, I knew enough about automobiles to actually hold my half of the conversation. Needless to say, this kid had a damn ball watching the Morgans come together by hand. There was no assembly line, just designated areas where certain tasks were assigned. I think I read recently where Morgan makes less than 1,500 vehicles a year.
 
The body frame was first put together out of ash wood. Still is. A leather strap was pulled over the hood (or bonnet, as the Brits say) and buckled. Still is. It wasn’t that long ago the windshield used to fold down.
 
More recently the Morgan Plus 8 started to come with a BMW V8 approaching 400 hp, maybe the most engine for the least weight in the industry.
 
For my money, though, I would take the V6, a Ford engine with plenty of power and nowhere near so much thirst for gasoline as the V8.
 
Now, this is motoring. Ragtop down. Don’t call it driving. Call it motoring. Bring your own food. Don’t expect to pull over at a franchise. Don’t forget the coffee thermos. Put the wicker picnic basket and the glen-plaid pattern wool blanket in the trunk. Don’t look for the radio. Most Morgan types don’t care for a radio. Conversation will have to do.
 
(Sigh.) Wait till next year.
 
(To be continued…)