chapter 13 Pigotts

The dominant building is an L-shaped, two-story structure (once the farmhouse) that forms two sides of the quad. The shorter side Page 165 →constitutes a large family, dining, and kitchen area. It is appointed with an enormous open fireplace (once used for cooking) at one end, and modest cooking facilities and a pantry at the other. The longer side contains a woodworking shop (once a chapel) equipped with a wood-turning machine; a billiards table sits at its center. Several bedrooms are sprinkled throughout the second floor. An adjoining music room (once a stable) houses a grand piano, various musical instruments, and scores of orchestral and choral sheet music and music books. At Christmastide 1976, the music room accommodated thirty people for dinner at a table large enough to grace a three-foot, silver candelabrum. This magnificent piece of artwork was smuggled out of Russia around the time Czar Nicholas II was toppled at the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Adjoining the music room is the refectory with kitchen (once a threshing barn) with space to feed more than one hundred people. Attached to the refectory, away from the quad, is a music barn. It Page 166 →was constructed about sixty-five years ago and seats a full orchestra, choir, and audience. The refectory and music barn accommodate two summer music camps and an assortment of smaller musical events throughout the year.

The third side of the quad contains dining and additional living quarters on two levels. On the third side is an attached barn, which is used for a variety of purposes: for choral music rehearsals, as a library, and as a utility gathering room. I rehearsed with the choir in that barn at music camp in the summer of 2019.

The building that completes the quadrangle is the Long Cottage —a one-story structure that houses a series of dormitory-like rooms. At night, you can hear the “glis glis” scampering across the ceiling. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the “glis glis” is the Dormouse character, who sat between the March Hare and Hatter and is always used as their cushion. Behind this building is a shower building with several separate shower stalls.

A robust English garden in front of the old farmhouse building provides privacy for the modest nude woman bather, sculptured long ago. The symbolism of the statue is apt. It conveys the uninhibited lifestyle once lived at Pigotts. To the right of the garden is a croquet lawn bounded by an orchard of cherry and beech trees. A nondescript garden roller was used to manicure the croquet lawn (more about this later). On the other side of the garden is an arboretum, horse pasture, and jumping course.

The Pigotts buildings are surrounded on three sides by fifty acres of lush Pigotts wood. The mature beech trees once supported a bustling furniture industry in High Wycombe.

The Pigotts vicinity has a rich history. The area was a safe haven for religious dissidents in the early sixteenth century. The radicals were probably Lollards—early Protestants who worshipped independently of the Church of England. They read the Bible in the English vernacular and were influenced by the ideas of Martin Luther and others from Germany, which were all illegal at the time. Early Page 167 →records show that some were tried for heresy and burned at the stake in nearby Amersham.¹

I first visited England during the summer of 1971, one year after I graduated from Harvard Law School. I lived with Nick at 2 Coombs Street in the Borough of Islington, London. Nick was sharing a house he owned with John Hunt, a solicitor. Libations were always available since Nick brewed a robust homemade bitter. We frequented the Duke, a workingman’s pub down Coombs Street, where the Great Train Robbery was allegedly planned. I enjoyed throwing darts amid conversation in richly laced Cockney dialect.

Before embarking to London, Nick asked me to speak to the students in the sixth form at Wanstead High School, where he was assistant headmaster. He said the student interaction with a young Page 168 →American lawyer would enrich their educational experience. I agreed and decided to speak on the Pentagon Papers, a US Department of Defense top secret report on the history of US military and political involvement in Vietnam. At the time of my talk, the papers had been sensationally released without authorization by Daniel Ellsberg, a consultant for the Defense Department. An article in the New York Times concluded that the report demonstrated that President Lyndon Johnson had concealed and lied about US intentions to expand the Vietnam War. My lecture was well-received by the students.

Nick was a very generous host, introducing me to many interesting places, among them Kew Gardens, Ham House, and Henley. I especially enjoyed the trip to Lord’s Cricket Ground to watch a Test match between England and India, opened by Her Royal Majesty the Queen.

There is no greater snobbery than, while wearing the distinctive Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) orange-and-yellow stripped club tie, to hail a London cabby and give the single command: “Lord’s!” Nick was a fifty-year member of the MCC. Of Lord’s, journalist and Formula One Chairman Louis Stanley has written so captivatingly:

There are few things so precious to the cricketer as the recollection of a lazy July morning at Lord’s, umpires moving slowly, white-flannelled fieldsmen, the trees at the Nursery End glistening in the sun, the rhythm of a flashing bat, and the prospect of luncheon with perhaps cold salmon . . . strawberries and cream . . . quails in aspic. Here was fare to be equaled only at Ascot.²

This description brings back wonderful memories of lavish tailgate spreads served on fine China and adorned with silver candelabrum at the Carolina Cup and Colonial Cup steeplechase races in Camden, South Carolina. I frequented those races often with a group of close friends while I taught at the USC School of Law. After my visit to Page 169 →Lord’s, I developed a fascination with cricket. Perhaps I was inspired by the manly statue of W. G. Grace, the great cricketer, at the main gate at Lord’s.

I always enjoy visiting Lord’s Cricket Ground, located in St. John Wood, London. The great thing about watching a cricket match is that, unlike baseball, you don’t have to be so attentive to the match for fear of missing the defining play of the game. When a run is scored, you politely clap for the batsman whether you saw the hit or not. Since you have hours of play to watch during a day’s match, the time is often spent making conversation with interesting people you meet. While enjoying a pint of Pedigree, I have had many unexpected conversations while sitting in the Warner section (reserved for MCC members and guests) at Lord’s. Not only is it scintillating to strike up a conversation with a stranger, but eavesdropping on another’s conversation can be equally satisfying. Nick overheard a conversation between two elderly gentlemen: “It doesn’t do well for one to get his knighthood too early.” And the words of a dignified dowager engaged in a colloquy on Hamlet: “You know if they had sat down and discussed things, none of that need to have happened.”

Cricket is a difficult game to comprehend at first glance.³ It has been compared to baseball, but it is not. Cricket is a game played by two teams each consisting of 11 players. It is played on a large grassy oval field much larger than a football field. The center of the field is called the “pitch”—a closely cropped area twenty-two yards by five yards. At both ends of the pitch stands a “wicket,” consisting of three vertical stakes (stumps) stuck in the ground, with two horizontal smaller sticks (bails) resting in grooves on top of the stumps.

As in baseball, there is a pitcher, called a “bowler,” who hurls a red leather ball (about the size of a baseball) at a batter, the batsman, who if he hits the ball without it being caught can score runs. And Page 170 →as in baseball, the bowler and batsman face each other from opposite ends of the pitch, the batsman standing in front of the wicket. The dynamics of the game differ from baseball. Rather than pitching from the mound to a catcher, the bowler takes a running start from behind the opposite wicket and delivers the ball over-arm toward the wicket. In the delivery, the bowler bounces the ball just short of the batsman’s reach. The bowler can make the ball swerve (curve) or change direction in the delivery by varying the wrist motion and the speed of the ball. To one side of the wicket is a catcher (the wicket-keeper). The batsman’s job is to hit the ball while preventing it from hitting the wicket and knocking off one of the bails, in which case he is out.

There are two batsmen at either end of the pitch at all times—the “striker” who stands ready to hit the ball and the non-striker who waits at the opposite end readying himself to run if the ball is hit. If the batsman connects with the ball without it being caught (an out), the two batsmen can run to the opposite wicket changing ends, which counts for one run. But they don’t have to run if they feel they cannot get safely to the opposite wicket before a fielder can retrieve the ball and dislodge a bail on either wicket. If they have time to change ends again before the ball is retrieved, they have scored two runs. As many as six runs can be scored on one hit. If the ball is hit to the boundary that encircles the perimeter of the field before being stopped, that’s an automatic four runs, achieved without changing ends of the pitch. If the ball is hit over the boundary (as in home run), that’s an automatic six runs.

The team that scores more runs by the end of the match wins—well maybe. If the opposing team is not out within the time limits of the match, the match is a draw. Therefore, strategy comes into play. A side with a high score may declare its innings closed before all of its players are out. Then its bowlers try to dismiss opposing batsmen, allowing as few runs as possible, before the match ends.

Nick felt that my education of London would not be complete without an introduction to his vivacious stepsister, Tatiana Orloff, who lived at a fashionable address in the Chelsea district. At an all-night gathering at her house, filled with intellectual banter, she introduced me to some of the more interesting people of London society—writers, philosophers, and other bons vivants. Early the next morning, we took a trip to Covent Garden for breakfast. That morning, Covent Garden was a kaleidoscope of produce and flowers unequaled in visual experience. Its richness has been described as a “vivid canvas of Van Gogh.”⁴

At Tatiana’s house, I met Alicia, an elegant Brazilian woman who lived in Greece. After our excursion to Covent Garden, the three of us drove to Pigotts. This was my first visit to Pigotts. There, I met Nick’s father, Bernard Wheeler-Robinson, and his wife, Tatiana’s mother, Elizabeth. Bernard and Elizabeth purchased Pigotts in 1963 after Tatiana noticed an advertisement in The Times that read “Eric Gill’s old home for sale.” My first impression of Pigotts was feeling connected to the place. I was consumed by the surroundings. It felt like Tatiana, Alicia, and I were characters in a Manet painting as we spent the afternoon walking through Pigotts wood. The rolling hills of Buckinghamshire, sprinkled with flint stone houses with thatched roofs, are spectacular. On this junket, I discovered the Gate, an earthy pub down the hill from Pigotts at Bryant’s Bottom. I have frequented the Gate on every successive trip that I’ve made to England, always downing a pint of bitter while there.

Tatiana can always be counted on to provide interesting experiences during my visits to London. During the summer of 2018, we left her house at Camberwell Grove in southwest London headed in the direction of Paddington Station in the Marylebone district. I had no idea how the evening would unfold at a music soirée at Phillip Page 172 →and Minkey’s house. Taking the scenic route across London, we meandered past Tatiana’s old haunt in Chelsea, through Hyde Park, and eventually arrived at a mews off the beaten path. The setting provided a welcomed refuge from the commotion of the city.

On the ride over, we talked about the garden entryway to Phillip and Minkey’s house. When my eyes set sight on the flora, the garden did not disappoint. It was planted in several oversized pots, some with soil three feet deep. The design of the garden was dictated by the cobblestone courtyard of the mews. Although there was no natural soil to work with, Minkey’s green thumb managed to achieve plant growth of appropriate thickness and height to scale the stone façade of the house up to the second floor.

Emerging from the greenery encasing the archway, a charming house unfolded from within. We paused briefly in the foyer exchanging pleasantries with Minkey and ascended the staircase to meet Phillip at the top of the landing. He showered us with a hearty hello and a glass of champagne to start the evening.

The living room off to the left was adorned with paintings and sculptures. Tatiana informed me that the bronze sculptures of Phillip and Minkey’s children were molded and cast by her. She has two art studios—a potting wheel in her home studio at Camberwell Grove and another around the corner at an art mews populated by a community of painters, sculptors, and stain glass workers. Minkey is also an artist, painting many of the modern-art canvasses that hung on the walls throughout the house.

Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Tatiana is a woman of many talents. When I first met her during our younger years, I fancied her. Her natural beauty—accentuated by darken complexion, high cheekbone, and intense eyes—was mesmerizing. She had many suitors. Tatiana had an aristocratic upbringing. Her father’s family, close to relatives of Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, fled Russia when the Bolshevik Revolution began.

Page 173 →About fifteen people were gathered in the living room engaged in small group conversations. Tatiana said she could only manage a few introductions because most were strangers to her. Her limited introductions proved to be adequate. I was especially taken with the cellist, who discussed the Brahms pieces he would later perform with Phillip at the piano.

As I struggled to follow the discussion about the technical aspects of the Brahms pieces, my eye caught sight of an attractive, cheeky woman engaged in conversation with another woman a few feet away. Before long, we were summoned to the first floor to experience a little night music. Phillip has a tradition of organizing music gatherings. He was described to me as a music genius. He played piano professionally for years but was compelled to stop when a hearing disability affected his playing. He taught philosophy during the intervening years before returning to music. His playing was sublime and stole my attention throughout the evening as he performed Bach and Brahms selections.

Sitting next to Emma during the performance, I learned that she was casting discrete glances at me. She expressed approval of my blue jacket and Harvard-emblazoned crimson bowtie and told me, “You are smartly dressed.” Although others were casually dress owing to the unusually oppressive heat of London, I was spiffily attired, because earlier I had attended a Test match between England and Australia at Lord’s Cricket Ground. I returned the compliment fixating on the breast-sized silver necklace and stylish black outfit: “Your necklace suits you.” Together we critiqued the various musical pieces as they were performed. “You know, I studied the cello,” she volunteered, but had not played for many years, which reminded me of my neglect of the violin. As our conversation grew old with the evening, she enlivened it: “I plan to take a trip to Spain to see the bullfights.” Surprised, my quick retort was: “Do you plan to root for the matador or the bull?” She smiled. The only thing I could think Page 174 →of as she talked was Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Gertrude Stein’s lost generation. After dinner, the evening drew to a close rather quickly. Such was an expected pleasurable evening planned by Tatiana.

Tatiana’s mother, the former Countess Elizabeth Orloff-Davidoff, was married to Nick’s father, Bernard Wheeler-Robinson in 1959. Elizabeth was from a distinguished and wealthy family. She was born a Scott-Ellis, a daughter of the 8th Lord Howard de Walden.⁵ She was the widow of a Russian count, Serge Orloff-Davidoff. Serge was a descendant of the powerful five Orlov (sometimes spelled Orloff) brothers in Russia. One of the brothers, Count Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov, gained fame as the lover of Catherine the Great. He and a brother, Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov, put Catherine on the throne after dispatching her husband, Peter III. Tatiana has visited the family estate, Otrada (which translates as Home), which was eventually taken over by the KGB. Grigory gave the magnificently large Orlov diamond to Catherine. The diamond is displayed in Moscow’s Kremlin Armoury. The Orlov family had a good reputation; it built hospitals and railways, looked after their estates properly, and freed their serfs long before it was done by decree. Count Serge Orloff-Davidoff died near the end of World War II and left Elizabeth with two daughters, Tatiana and Marina.

Bernard Wheeler-Robinson was a physicist who, during the 1920s, worked on Ernest Rutherford’s nuclear team at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Later, he worked with Sir William Bragg on x-ray crystallography at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. In 1915, Sir William and his son won a Nobel Prize for establishing the field of x-ray crystallography. Bernard was the son of a distinguished Baptist theologian, Henry Wheeler-Robinson, who was instrumental in moving Regent’s Park College from London to Oxford University in 1927. He was a reader in biblical criticism and Page 175 →was recognized as the most learned British Old Testament scholar of his day. I was privileged to have been given permission to view his portrait that hangs in the refectory at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

Nick’s father and stepmother purchased Pigotts from Eric Gill’s descendants in 1963. They were attracted to the Pigotts buildings and thought of using them for a music camp. Both Bernard and Elizabeth were very fine amateur musicians—he a violinist and conductor and she the lead cellist at Music Camp. Elizabeth played a Hieronymus Amati cello given to her by her parents as a birthday gift because she showed great promise.

While he was a student at Cambridge University in 1927, Bernard and some friends enjoyed a holiday at Poynders End near Hitchin in Hertfordshire playing music in the village hall and camping in a nearby field. It was so successful that the music gathering became an annual event. There were soon two summer music camps each year for an orchestra and choir. The music camp moved over the years from Poynders End to various sites in Sussex and Essex to Bothamstead (near Newbury in Berkshire), where it rooted itself for thirty years, and finally rested at Pigotts. Music Camp became a powerhouse of amateur music-making whose output eclipsed all but the largest music festivals.⁶

Bernard was a violinist of no mean ability. He was also an accomplished and inspiring conductor, who many described as autocratic, though none would deny his impressive knowledge of the scores. The roster of musicians who performed under his baton is long and distinguished. Under Bernard’s leadership, Pigotts became a challenging, exciting, and all-consuming musical environment. Sir Colin Davis, famed conductor for the London Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor at Pigotts, wrote in 1977, “There are few places where you can, in the course of days, sing music by Josquin Desprez, take part in a Strauss tone poem, grapple with the last act of Meistersinger and at the same time become acquainted with masterpieces of chamber music.”⁷

Page 176 →In 1966, Bernard wrote that the mission of Music Camp was “the serious rehearsal of the major works of music, by a competent team of friends, close-knit, self-sufficient, and free from other distractions.”⁸ Those who attended Music Camp were expected to make music their priority. Camp conditions were kept basic, which had the effect of stressing music and communing with friends. Music campers brought their own sleeping facilities; tents were pitched and caravans were parked on the lawn of the horse pasture. All work was to be shared equally, including chores like cleaning, carpentry, and brick laying. This communal effort fostered a sense of belonging rarely found in large musical organizations. Whether in music or work, Bernard was not so much interested in how good an individual was, as what he or she brought to it or got out of the experience. Bernard’s modesty and unpretentiousness won him many devoted friends.

Bernard’s first wife, the former Alice Dodds (a gifted pianist), said that he had a “genius for making good use of other people’s spare time.” Recognizing that there was no building large enough to house a large orchestra and choir, Bernard elicited the help of volunteer labor and designed and built the music barn (65' × 40'). Bernard put me to work planting trees in the arboretum during my holiday there during the winter of 1976.

I have fond memories of and much affection for Bernard Wheeler-Robinson. He was purposeful in everything he undertook. I remember the little things: playing billiards, talking about woodworking, and planting trees. I’ll never forget the Christmas gift of Cuban cigars with the accompanying Byron quote: “Yet thy true lovers more admire by far; thy naked beauties—give me a cigar.” In one respect, Bernard was larger than life, presiding over any group with his fatherly demeanor. He appeared to be all-knowing, and he was very comfortable to be around. Yet there was sadness in him. I suspect the years had taken a toll with the loss of two devoted wives. Page 177 →While I often wondered what was going through his mind during the quiet moments, one thing I was always certain of—he was at peace with Pigotts.

Bernard died in July 1997. He has left a lasting mark on Pigotts, making it synonymous with music during his thirty-five years there. He created a new approach to amateur music through building a community of dedicated and disciplined musicians inspired under his leadership to tackle increasingly difficult scores. It is fair to say that he created a new definition, respectability, and awareness of the amateur musician.

Pigotts’s famous resident was Eric Gill, an artist-craftsman of considerable ability and notoriety. He exhibited tremendous innovation as a sculptor, letter cutter, wood engraver, and typographer. Gill was eccentric, self-centered, and uncompromising in his view about structure and order. He was constantly preoccupied with sex and eroticism, themes that are visible throughout his work. He spent the latter phase of his life, from 1928 to 1940, at Pigotts. His legend still lives at Pigotts, where people still speak with verve of his penchant for naughty living.

Throughout Gill’s life, he aspired to integrate “life and art and work and worship”—“‘to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world.’”⁹ Although often thwarted, Gill repeatedly tried to create a self-contained and integrated artist-craftsman colony at Ditchling in Sussex, at Capel-y-ffin in the Welsh mountains, and finally at Pigotts.

In all these places Gill himself, in the familiar stonemason’s smock (belted, worn with woolen stockings, never trousers), presided genially over a large household—wife, daughters and a whole extended family of craftsmen, priests and Page 178 →passers-through. His aura of holy domesticity invited comparisons with the household of St. Thomas More in Chelsea.¹⁰

Although Gill tried to ground his colony in domesticity, his “cell of good living” had major cracks in it. Gill’s household bore the scourge of incest. His diary describes in vivid detail sexual encounters with both his sisters and daughters.

The essential character of Pigotts was defined by both Bernard Wheeler-Robinson and Eric Gill. Each man shared the strong belief that music and art can only reach its highest form of expression in a community of people dedicated to musical or artistic excellence. It was not merely music or art for its own sake, but in the larger context of its meaning in a person’s life. Both believed that music or art should make the quality of a person’s life measurably better.

Bernard would demand the best that one could contribute musically, for the joy and satisfaction of the person exerting the effort. He elevated the self-esteem of the “amateur” musician. In a larger sense he broke down the distinction between the “amateur” and “professional” musician and enabled each to share with the other. The most technically gifted and the average player both studied at the feet of Bernard without bias and distinction, and both walked away the better for the experience.

Likewise, believing that art should not merely imitate life, Gill believed that the great sculptures reflected not so much what the artist saw but what the artist believed in his heart. Art is a creation made by human hands as an answer to some inner vision that the artist had of life and the world.¹¹ To Gill, there was no perfect form. He brought to sculpture and drawing the structure and simplicity of a letter cutter. Unlike most twentieth century sculptors who modelled their figures in clay, cast them in plaster, and finally reproduced the model in stone, Gill carved directly into a block of stone based on his Page 179 →concept of the figure in his mind. Direct carving prevailed in medieval times. Gill never tried to package his art for his patrons. Instead, he would try to express the beauty and vulgarity of the world as he perceived it. His art was intellectually androgynous, expressing the idea that spirit and matter, the sacred and the mundane, are not antithetical but intimately intertwined.¹² He was trying to capture life in the raw with all its passion, appetite, and holiness.

Gill was not unique in this regard. Over the centuries, many sculptors have explored the relationship, indeed tension, between sexuality and spirituality in their work. Nude sculptures were used to express the attributes of the gods during Greek and Roman times. Spirituality in eastern religions was also expressed in nude (and sometimes erotic) sculptures. The Judeo-Christian tradition is replete with naked sculptures depicting Adam and Eve, David, Christ, and other religious figures. During those early times, the tension was expressed in requirements that genitalia be covered up with fig leaves, loin clothes, or girdles. To the sculptor, though, not to include genitals in a creation of art would be to leave out an essential element of manhood or womanhood.¹³

Pigotts has been an artistic passage for me. Pigotts introduced me to Eric Gill, which has helped me to define and cultivate an interest in sculpture of the human body. Studying Gill’s sculpture has enabled me to grasp a deeper meaning of the human form. It has enabled me to break down inhibitions of expression about naked beauty. It has taught me that only those who dare look, probe, study and ponder can gain insight into the spirituality of the human body. We need to be able to lay bare our vulnerabilities to acquire the truth about a subject. A very perceptive line in the stanza of a poem entitled “The Dream” reads: “Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.”¹⁴ To be able to acquire truth about naked beauty, one must lay bare the vulnerabilities about one’s own body. Facing one’s vulnerabilities is the experience of self-awareness one needs to define the spiritual component of reality. Gill’s “think,” born of the experience of living, Page 180 →defined his reality not the forms around him. Studying Gill has enabled me to get in touch with my “think.”

Earlier I mentioned a nondescript garden roller that was used to manicure the croquet lawn. The roller was left behind as an item of little consequence when the heirs of Eric Gill sold the estate to Bernard and Elizabeth Wheeler-Robinson. When I saw the roller on my successive trips to Pigotts, it did not strike me as having any value beyond its intended use. However, the roller would later be sold to the Leeds City Art Gallery in 1990, and the proceeds would be used to purchase a large part of the wood that surrounds Pigotts. The roller is titled Adam and Eve because of the male and female acrobatic nudes carved onto either side. This vignette is illustrative of the link between the two successive occupants of Pigotts that will benefit future generations who dwell in this place.