Over to London for a long weekend, Friday to Monday. The reason for it is a party I have organised at the Royal Over-Seas League for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Alexandra Palace Lodge No. 1541, of which I am Master this year. That comes later in the weekend. This is Friday.
We checked into the East India Club, then walked round to collect my father, who is staying at the Over-Seas League. From there the three of us went on to the Institute of Directors for lunch. Three clubs inside a couple of hours, which is not a sensible way to arrive anywhere.
On the way along Pall Mall we found a bench mark on the Reform Club.
I have been inside the Reform, once, as a guest. It had not occurred to me then that the government had left a level on the way in.
After lunch we went to Bentley and Skinner, where I was measured for a signet ring cut with my crest. Eight weeks. The grant is settled and the drawings have arrived, and the letters patent are still to come, so the ring is the last piece of the exercise and the only one I will have to remember to put on.
Then Davy’s, to sit somewhere cool for a while. It was that sort of afternoon.
The hunt
Afterwards my girlfriend and I went for a walk and tried to find some more Ordnance Survey cut marks. This is harder in London than in Douglas.
Scaffolding had swallowed the one at St James’s Palace. Elsewhere the mark was recorded but the building it was cut into had gone, replaced at some point in the early 1900s by something taller with more windows. Douglas loses its marks to garden walls coming down for parking. St James’s loses them to redevelopment. Same result.
St James’s Street was better, if you were prepared to crouch. White’s has one, more or less, behind an electric box wedged against the stone.
Brooks’s has one too, and this one is cut into brick rather than stone.
The two we most wanted were the two we did not get. Nothing at the Over-Seas League. Nothing at the East India. We had been in and out of both all day and neither would give anything up.
Near the Over-Seas League we did at least find something else.
Chopin left that house in November 1848 to play at Guildhall, at a ball in aid of Polish refugees. He was thirty-eight and dying. He never performed in public again, and he was dead within the year.
We had not gone looking for it. He is my favourite composer, and I stood in front of a plaque on a wall in the heat for rather longer than was reasonable.
Number 10
What we did find was on 10 Duke Street St James’s, which pleased me a good deal more than a chipped stone ought to.
Number 10 is the Grand East, the headquarters of the Supreme Council. I took my thirtieth degree somewhere below that stone in the magnificent lodge room concealed in the basement.
The mark is not on the building. It is on the low wall in front of it, under the railings. The house is Edwardian, put up around 1910, so if the wall went up with it then the arrow is younger than the door it sits beside. But boundary walls tend to outlast what they were built to enclose, and this one may be older than everything behind it. I do not know which.
A few doors along is the Chequers, which we also inspected, for other reasons.
Wren
The last of the day was on St James’s Piccadilly.
The plaque gives the church as Wren’s, consecrated in July 1684, damaged by enemy action in October 1940 and rededicated fourteen years later. The mark survived all of it.
Dinner
Back to the East India for a drink while the day cooled off, and then round to the Over-Seas League for dinner in the garden.
The Over-Seas League gave us nothing all day and then fed us in the shade, which I suppose settles the account. Afterwards a quick one in the American Bar, then we walked my parents back to the League and carried on to the East India.
The step count came to a little over eighteen thousand. A good number of those were spent at the bottom of walls, looking at the wrong stones.
Three clubs before lunch, and three more we only inspected from the pavement.
Charlton Krentz 