On the journey of making my new documentary film “Quintessentially British,” I encountered some quirky lords, charming knights, irrepressible dames and Shakespeare-quoting taxi drivers. I grew up in Ireland, but London has been my home since leaving university. Being an Irish filmmaker allowed me an outsider’s perspective to explore Britishness in the year of the late Queen’s platinum jubilee.
The first day of filming was in the House of Lords with the eccentric pro-smoking hereditary peer, Lord Palmer, or to give him his full title, Adrian Bailie Nottage Palmer the 4th Baron of Reading. He lives in the beautiful 109-room Edwardian mansion Manderston in the Scottish borders. But don’t be jealous, as Lord Palmer freely admits that it has 100 rooms too many.
Next up was the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, in his equally opulent home in the Palace of Westminster. His director of communications stands guard checking that I am only asking the pre-approved questions. I sneak in an unauthorized one about his home life and discover he has a veritable menagerie of pets, named after various politicians: a parrot called Boris (Johnson) who shouts, “Point of order;” a tortoise called Maggie (Thatcher), as she is not for turning and a rottweiler named Gordon (Brown). How does he get any sleep with such a noisy household?
We strove to find new angles to familiar storylines. Highclere Castle will be recognizable to viewers of “Downton Abbey.” Situated in the rolling hills of Hampshire, it is home to the eighth Earl of Carnarvon and his wife, Lady Carnarvon. They tell me that their ancestor, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, funded Howard Carter’s expedition to unearth Tutankhamun’s tomb only for the earl to die in mysterious circumstances weeks after its discovery, leading to the myth of the “Curse of King Tut.” Luckily, no such fate has yet befallen “Downton Abbey” hero Lord Grantham.
The story of Launer handbags demonstrates that the U.K. is, at its core, a flourishing land of immigrants. Gerald Bodmer, the youthful 90-year-old CEO of the queen’s fashion accessory, was born in Germany, then fled the Nazis, arriving in London as a refugee. Now fluent in English, he has transformed Launer into an iconic British brand. Both the queen and Margaret Thatcher were lifelong customers. The queen famously used her Launer handbag as a secret signal to courtiers at royal receptions — if she crossed her handbag from one hand to the other, it was a sign to rescue her!
Lock & Co Hatters is run by Roger Stephenson, a proud descendant of James Benning, the real-life inspiration for the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Locks created the Bond baddie Oddjob’s famous head-slicing Coke hat in “Goldfinger” and Harrison Ford’s fedora for the Indiana Jones series. When World War II was taking a turn for the worse, Winston Churchill would pop into Locks “for a new hat, because it was a way of him lifting his spirits when the chips were down.” Who would have thought retail therapy was how Churchill cheered himself up”
We managed to gain access to The Athenaeum on Pall Mall, known as “the brainiest private members club in the world.” Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Albert Einstein were members. While the Athenaeum boasts 51 Nobel laureates, Cambridge University can claim over 100 Nobel Prize winners, including the Irish scientist Ernest Walton (who first split the atom). At the Goldie Boathouse on the banks of the river Cam, we interviewed the elite sportsman Callum Sullivan, the Captain of the Cambridge University Boat Club, who twice triumphed over Oxford in the famous Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. The winning formula for defeating their archrivals? A weekly burrito on a half-price student deal at the local Mexican take-away.
Speaking of sportsmen, the former England footballer Jermaine Jenas was shocked to learn from us that the English flag, the George’s Cross, was “stolen” from the Italians, specifically the powerful Maritime Republic of Genoa. The current mayor of Genoa, Marco Bucci, explains that English ships flew the Genoese flag to deter pirates during the Crusades and eventually appropriated it as their own. So English World Cup fans in Qatar were actually flying an Italian flag!
Last month’s census revealed that the number of Irish-born people living in the U.K. has dwindled by 20% in the last decade and is less than half of the peak of the 1960s. The Irish are now only the fifth largest immigrant group, behind the likes of India and Romania. Despite those statistics, the influence of the Irish diaspora is still evident. An example is Dame Judi Dench, who spoke to me at the Chelsea Flower Show and credits the influence of her Irish mother for her love of words. Her parents met when her father was studying medicine at Trinity College Dublin. Given her Irish (and newly discovered Danish) lineage, she jokingly admits that the mix makes her “a bit of a fruitcake.”
The highlight of the film was interviewing Sir Ian McKellen in his magnificent riverfront home. His living room is filled with mementos from his distinguished career, including a Magneto helmet from “X-Men” lying casually on his desk. As we ended the interview, he proclaimed that there is nothing more quintessentially British than a British sausage, “superior to any sausage I’ve ever had anywhere else in the world.” I am compelled to disagree with him and insist that nothing beats an Irish sausage! After over 20 years of living in London, I remain quintessentially Irish….
