Conversations with creative friends - meet Martin Williams

Meet historian, writer and aesthete Martin Williams. You can find him on Instagram as @disraeli81

First things first. How did we meet?

Isla:

Initially through Instagram. Then, a few years ago, I asked a mutual friend if she would introduce us. Martin, no matter how arcane, you instinctively understand my cultural references like no other.

Martin:

That’s sweet of you to say so! Social media cops a lot of flak, and much of it is deserved. But there’s gold to be found in them there hills, provided one has the energy and patience to mine for it. Speaking for myself, the friends I’ve made through Instagram have immeasurably enriched my ‘real’ life. As an intensely visual person, I’ve always gravitated towards those whose aesthetics and references mesh with my own. On that score, Isla, you’re a shoo-in.

Seven things we love:

Merchant Ivory…

Isla:

Where to begin with the Laura Ashley of cinema and the films that defined my aspirations for life and romance?

Martin:

I hear you. Our formative years coincided with what I believe was the golden age for period drama on both the large and small screens. In just eight years, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory turned out four masterpieces: A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1992), all of which were taken from the works of E. M. Forster, followed by a magnificent and moving adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1993). All are superbly written, brilliantly acted and sumptuously filmed.

Yet they’re also studies in conflict – and not just conflict between characters and social groups, but between the aspirations and fears of the characters as individuals. I love the costumes and country houses as much as the next man, but it’s those built-in tensions that see me return to Merchant Ivory’s ‘Big Four’ year after year.

​‘It’s not romantic at all’ – Merchant Ivory’s Howards End 25 years on | EM Forster | The Guardian

Laura Ashley

Isla:

One of my greatest influences aesthetically, I gobble up everything I can find out about Laura and Bernard Ashley from the entrepreneurial point of view as well. The brand is inextricably embedded in my childhood DNA.

Martin:

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I hold my hands up and confess that Laura Ashley wasn’t such a formative influence during my early years. But I vividly recall the reverence with which my mother and her friends talked about it in the Eighties and early Nineties, and the way in which the very name evoked images and associations with a force and immediacy leading brands, even today, would struggle to do. When you think about it, that was quite a feat in an era before the internet and social media. It’s fascinating to learn, through accounts such as yours, just how much Laura Ashley meant, and continues to mean, to those old enough to remember it in its prime.

​The Enduring Appeal of Laura Ashley - The New York Times (nytimes.com)​

The Edwardian Era

Isla:

Since reading your book The King is Dead, Long Live the King!, all those frills and ruffles make much more sense, knowing the historical and cultural backdrop to such an elegant but turbulent era.

Martin:

My interest in the Edwardian era, which technically ran between 1901 and 1910, but is generally considered to have started in 1900 and finished with the outbreak of the First World War, dates from childhood. The period dramas of the Eighties and Nineties clearly had a lot to answer for! So, when the opportunity arose to write a full-length book, it seemed obvious what it should be about. Into The King is Dead, Long Live the King!, I poured my enthusiasm for one of the most image-conscious and intriguing periods in British history.

On the one hand, there was the glamour and optimism. In the early twentieth century, Britain was a global superpower, London was booming and technology was surging. For the middle and upper classes, it was, in some ways, a halcyon age of privilege, prosperity and self-confidence. On the other hand, it was a time of unsettling, and even alarming, ferment. The European outlook was fraught, poverty was rife, there was crisis in Parliament, women were becoming ever more confrontational in their fight for the vote, and modernism was about to rock the cultural establishment to its foundations. In 1910, the year of the death of King Edward VII, who had for many of his subjects personified the age, the two sides of Edwardian Britain clashed as never before. That’s the story I set out to tell in my book. I only hope my readers find it as interesting as I do!

Our favourite Instagram account, @knee_deep_in_the_90s…​

Isla:

A must-follow Instagram account that serves all the Body Shop bath pearl and River Island carrier bag nostalgia one never knew one needed!

Martin:

Isla, I blame you entirely for making me miss the deadline for the submission of the manuscript of my book! When you introduced me to Knee Deep, I immediately fell down a rabbit hole from which it took me days to extricate myself. The rush of nostalgia was that intense.

Seriously, though, Knee Deep’s posts connect me with my childhood and adolescence like little else. Not the ‘serious’ stuff, like the Gulf War or the death of Princess Diana, but the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, from carrier bags and Christmas decorations to adverts and sitcoms. In short, all those things that resonated with a youngster growing up in Britain during a decade that feels so close in some ways and so incredibly remote in others.

I’ve been trying to work out exactly why I’ve surrendered myself so completely to nostalgia for the Nineties. The reasons, I think, are three-fold. Firstly, every generation starts to look backwards as well as forwards when it closes in on middle age. I remember the rush of nostalgia for the pop culture of the Seventies and Eighties that occurred around the Millennium. That would have been driven by people who were as old then as we are now.

Secondly, we were members of the last generation that learned to navigate the world without the internet or social media. Ironically, it’s the latter that has enabled us Nineties kids to realise just how much we experienced and enjoyed in common, and the extent to which those things soaked into our collective subconscious.

Lastly, and most importantly, the Nineties seem like a less complicated and more carefree period than the troubled and troubling one we’re living through now. I suspect most generations believe that about their childhoods. In the case of children and teenagers growing up between 1990 and 2001, it was actually true.

Past Times

Isla…

Growing up in Bath, my go to shop. From the Victorian-inspired nighties to the miniature dressing table perfume bottles, I loved all the merchandise. In my former career, a design director asked me, ‘Do you want to be Prada or Past Times?’ I fell about with laughter, but nobody got the reference apart from me. Were you a super fan too?

Martin…

You have no idea. For a period in my early adolescence, I practically lived in Past Times. If I close my eyes, I can visualise the layout of my local store in Worcester, and recall its distinctive and delicious aroma, instantly.

Comments from a recent Knee Deep IG post

For the benefit of your overseas followers, or those too young to remember it, Past Times was a nationwide chain of gift shops that sold a range of items, from greetings cards, novelties and CDs at one end of the price spectrum to jewellery, accessories and small items of furniture at the other. All were inspired by the successive phases of British history, starting with the Romans, Celts and Saxons, moving through the Medieval, Elizabethan, Regency and Victorian eras, and culminating in the Second World War and Fifties. You could spend as little as five pounds or as much as five hundred pounds and always leave with something that felt interesting, original and altogether special. When I wasn’t in the actual shop, I was poring over Past Times catalogues. I used to go through every page, circling the things I would buy if only my pocket money would stretch that far.

​Past Times magazine Special Edition Christmas 1995 England | eBay​

Knee Deep IG Post on Past Times

A friend of mine who works in retail assures me that it’s impossible to imagine such a concept being taken at all seriously today. Nevertheless, for a spell, it flourished. Between 1993 and 1996, no Christmas went by without there being something from Past Times in my stocking. Now, it strikes me as poignant that a chain predicated on nostalgia should have become a source of nostalgia itself.

It's worth thinking about why Past Times was taken seriously, and why it ultimately folded. It was established at the height of the Eighties, which we know is your go to decade, Isla. At that time, old things were widely considered to be better things – and at a cultural moment that was defined by its aspirations, the style and trappings of bygone eras were incredibly appealing. As a brand, Past Times was coming from the same place and tapping into the same zeitgeist as Merchant Ivory and Laura Ashley.

comments from a Knee Deep IG post on Past Times

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We tend to think that each decade ends when the next one begins, but it’s seldom as neat as that. Moods and aesthetics linger, often for some time. I’d say that elements of the Eighties persisted well into the Nineties (for example, Four Weddings and a Funeral, which came out in 1994, reads to me as a film from the late Eighties). Then, in 1996, IKEA told us to ‘chuck out our chintz’ in a notorious but brilliant and epoch-defining ad campaign. It was played out against the backdrop of New Labour, Girl Power and Cool Britannia. Suddenly, primary colours, clean lines and brushed metal were in; flowers, frills and nostalgia were out. Past Times didn’t fold overnight but the writing was on the wall for what it represented.

The House of Eliott (1991-1994)…

Isla…

I wanted to be Evangeline (one of the designer heroines) while dating the photographer-cinematographer Jack Maddox. And I wanted to wear everything the Eliott sisters wore. Having rewatched the series recently, I realised I still feel the same way.

Martin…

Broadcast by the BBC in the early Nineties, The House of Eliott was part and parcel of the golden age of British period drama. Devised by Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, who had already had an international smash-hit with Upstairs, Downstairs, it chronicled the personal and professional highs and lows of Beatrice and Evangeline Eliott, two orphaned sisters trying to make it in the cut-throat fashion world of the Roaring Twenties. My mother and grandmother watched every episode religiously on Sunday evenings. The jazzy theme tune is incredibly evocative for me.

Looking back with more critical eyes, much about The House of Eliott doesn’t hold up. It’s my understanding that it was the last big budget period drama to be filmed on studio sets at BBC Television Centre instead of on location. Storylines had a habit of petering out, or else being too neatly and speedily wrapped up. And the series as a whole ended abruptly, without any resolution, after just three seasons. Clearly there were reasons why it could be so hilariously spoofed by French and Saunders in one of their finest parodies, the wicked but side-splitting House of Idiot.

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But the look of the thing was superb. Stella Gonet as Beatrice and Louise Lombard as Evangeline were, in their different ways, simply gorgeous. Stylistically, too, it was incredibly impressive. Like every decade, the Twenties took a while to get going. The designers did a fantastic job charting the gradual evolution from the post-Edwardian world of the very early Twenties to the high-octane glamour of the Charleston era. And, appropriately for a drama set against a couture background, the costumes were divine – indeed, some of the best and most closely observed I’ve ever seen on television. For that reason alone, it’s worth a rewatch.

The Secret Garden (1993)…

Isla:

I definitely pranced around in lacy pinafores and sailor dresses inspired by Mary’s wardrobe after watching this for the seven hundredth time!

Martin:

I remember going to see The Secret Garden when it was released at the beginning of 1994. Adapted from the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett and directed by Agnieszka Holland, it’s a film that holds up really well, mainly because of the strength of its juvenile cast, as well as the sensitivity and intelligence of its writing and the beauty of its cinematography.

But to your point, Isla, it was also a product of that golden age of period drama I keep banging on about. It was just one of any number of high-quality – and, dare I say it, very British – productions for children to be set during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. From the top of my head, I can recall The Box of Delights (1984), A Little Princess (1986), The Children of Green Knowe (1986), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1988), Moondial (1988), Tom’s Midnight Garden (1989), Five Children and It (1991), A Likely Lad (1992)…the list goes on and on. If you were a child at that time, and were at all interested in the past, your entire outlook and aesthetic sense could be profoundly affected. I know mine was.

Again, I see all this as the product of a specific cultural moment. During the Eighties and early Nineties, British television viewers had only four channels to choose from: no streaming platforms, and no form of catch-up other than VHS. Plus, there was little competition for the attention of younger viewers: no internet, no smart phones and no social media. That meant the BBC was more or less obliged to cater to a pre-teen audience that would, by the end of the Nineties, have started to drift away, disappearing more or less entirely by the late Noughties. It makes me sad that later generations won’t experience the thrill we derived from such magical and unforgettable productions. But I’m grateful that I was there for them at the time. Indeed, they’re among the happiest memories of my childhood.

Martin’s essentials…

Book: Larkrise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, and pretty much everything by Edith Wharton. On, and I’d find it impossible to overstate just how profoundly my perceptions have been shaped by Penelope Lively.

Film: Aside from Merchant Ivory? Four Weddings and a Funeral. I never tire of it.

Television: Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Pride and Prejudice, The Pallisers, Mad Men. And Fleabag is laugh-out-loud brilliant.

Artist: John Singer Sargent, William Nicholson, Francis Cadell, Ed Kluz.

Music: Handel, Vaughan Williams and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. For a good boogie, you can’t beat Seventies disco.

Building: Either the Petit Trianon or Worcester Lodge on the Badminton Estate.

City: Charleston in South Carolina is the most beautiful I’ve ever visited.

Designer or illustrator: Where to begin? Dead: Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, Etienne Drian, Glynn Boyd Harte. Living: Alec Cobbe, Clym Evernden.

Style hero: Hamish Bowles, Prince Michael of Kent.

Guilty pleasure: The novels of Rosamunde Pilcher. And, whenever I’m down, I watch footage of the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. I know you agree with me, Isla, when I say it was the greatest royal wedding of all time.

Instagram recommendations:

@crowley_vintage for vintage menswear

@jupeculotte for fashion history

@st.john.restaurant for food

@soaniclb for architecture

@sean_anthony_pritchard for flowers and gardens

@willsssss for antiques
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