England: The Russell-Cotes museum; Bournemouth

Merton Russell-Cotes (1835-1921) was a rich and successful hotelier. In 1876 he and his wife Annie moved to Bournemouth, the seaside resort on the Dorset coast, and developed the Royal Bath Hotel as the most luxurious hotel in the town. As well as their business work and their charitable and political activities (he served as Mayor of Bournemouth in 1894-5, and was knighted in 1909), the couple were indefaticable travellers, voyaging all over the world, collecting wherever they went; being particularly keen on Oriental and Islamic art and artifacts. 

   In 1896 Russell-Cotes commissioned a local architect, John Frederick Fogarty, to design them a new house, to be named East Cliff Hall, in a position high above the beach with a garden in front and large windows and balconies opening to a beautiful view westwards to Poole Bay. Special fireplaces, stained glass and light fittings were ordered, but the house was also to have the most up-to-date electricity, plumbing and central heating, plus a telephone. The house was completed in 1901, but in 1916-19 new galleries were added to house the family's burgeoning art collection.

  They had always intended to open their house to public view, and after their deaths it was established in 1922 as the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. 

   This is the house and its view today.

This can hardly be bettered, but the contents of the house, while undoubtedly splendidly opulent, verge on the surreal, for they embody everything that the next generation of artists and designers were in revolt against. Walls are heavily panelled, every surface and niche is full of objects or pictures,

and what is one to make of the pictures, such as this enormous late-Victorian potrayal of nudes entirely devoid of any erotic appeal, 

or of religious scenes, such as this one by Edwin Longsden Lang of the Holy Family arriving in Egypt (approximately 18 feet by 6, in a style that, fifty years later and in another country, would be termed "Socialist realism"?

   If you are ever in Bournemouth, you must go and see it!

Musings: Shakespeare

 In these violent times, my thoughts have turned to a scene in Shakespeare's early play, "Henry VI, part 3", set in the blodstained turmoil of the Wars of the Roses. The teenage son of the Duke of York has been captured by Lord Clifford: the boy pleads for his life, but Clifford is implacable. "Thy father killed mine, therefore die!" he tells him. 

I find these words truly terrifying. An endless cycle of revenge can so easily continue for generation after generation, and differences of religion, ideology or race count for little by comparison. 

   

American Gangsters Footnotes: Al Capone's Welsh henchman

 Bryan Humphreys and his wife Ann Wigley left the village of Carno, near Newtown in Powyss, to seek a new life in America, eventually settling in Chicago. But they did not find properity, for Bryan was a feckless character, too fond of drink and gambling, and the family was reduced to poverty when in 1906 he lost his job through drunkenness. Their son, born in 1899 and christened Llewellyn Morris Humphreys, had to leave school to work as a newsboy. The youth, like many others in his position, became involved in petty crime, and was arrested on many occasions for theft, but was spared any long prison sentence. 

   With the coming of Prohibition after the First World War, unbounded new horizons opened up for criminals in the smuggling of bootleg alcohol. In 1922 Humphreys, who by this time had given himself the name of Murray, attempted to muscle in on the racket by hijacking a liquor truck belonging to Al Capone. He was soon caught and brought before the great man himself, but Capone was impressed by his impudent courage, and instead of shooting Humphreys, recruited him for his organisation!

  Murray Humphreys was soon reognised as one of the superior brains of the gang, and his rise up the hierarchy was rapid. He may have had a hand in organising the famous St Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, but he never acquired the reputation of being a man of violence: instead his role was mostly financial. No major gang could hope to survive without paying a substantial proportion of its takings to local police, politicians and officials, and Humphreys seems to played had a key part in this chain of corruption. He became a specialist in the laundering of "dirty money", working with a fellow-Welshman; an accountant called Fred Evans. He also gained the unusual nickname of  "The Camel", presumably through the obvious link of "Murray the Hump".

   After Capone was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment in Alcatraz, his organisation continued more or less intact. Humphreys himself was officially branded as "Public Enemy No. 1" after his boss's fall, but all that happened to him was that he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment in 1933 after pleading guilty to income tax evasion, and was released after just 13 months. It was the longest term of imprisonment he would ever suffer. Instead he continued his activities of bribery and corruption, infiltrating trades unions and laundering the profits of crime.

  New possibilities opened in California, where the gangsters found they could extort money from Hollywood by infiltrating the Scenery Erectors' Union and paralyse the movie industry by threatening to call strikes. Humphreys was involved in this, and also in the bribery of state officials in Nevada to permit the building of the first casinos in Las Vegas. It has been suggested that the character of Tom Hagen in the "Godfather" films is based on Humphreys. 

   Like many other senior gangsters, Humphreys experienced difficulties when summoned to testify before the Kefauver Committee on organised crime in the early 1950s. Many of the gangsters, advised by their clever lawyers, attempted to "plead the Fifth Amendment", to avoid answering questions, on the grounds that, in the immortal words of Capone's old business manager, the splendidly-nicknamed Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, "I might discriminate myself". Nevertheless, they were all made to look extremely uncomfortable before the nation's television cameras.

Humphreys now faced further investigation of his tax affairs but avoided arrest by dying of a heart attack in 1965 while vacuuming his apartment. He was one of the last survivors of the riotous days of the criminal 1920s. This was perhaps the only way the career of a gangster could be held to have ended successfully: to perish of natural causes, never having served a lengthy term in prison. 

                                                           (Humphreys in 1965)