Confessions of a Tour Guide
Lettice and Lovage by Peter Shaffer
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1997
Did the young Shakespeare really get caught poaching deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote? Did Nell Gwynn actually dangle Charles II’s baby son out of an upstairs window, threatening to drop him unless the king made him a duke? Are Boudicca’s remains truly buried beneath platform nine of King’s Cross Station? The academics may be sceptical, but if you’re a tour guide this kind of thing is meat and drink, because introducing visitors to this country’s glorious heritage is basically a branch of show business: give the public what they want, and always leave them wanting more.
Lettice Douffet’s desire to embellish the truth a little about Fustian House may be mischievous, but it isn’t surprising. There’s nothing more soul-destroying than saying the same thing a dozen times a day to similar groups of people, distinguishable from each other only by the names on the baseball caps and the patterns on the Bermuda shorts. “And just behind this panel is the priest’s hole. Why do we call it a priest’s hole? Well, it all goes back to the days of Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries…” You might as well be selling double glazing.
I once escorted a coachload of American visitors on a whistlestop tour of the country, taking in fourteen major historical sites in nine days. They told me they expected every castle we saw to be a romantic ruin with brimming moats stuffed with fire-breathing dragons. I don’t know to this day whether they were pulling my leg, but I soon realised it was far more fun to play up to them. For instance, in York: “Guy Fawkes was born in that house over there in 1570.” (Fact. Big yawn.) “And over here are the stocks they put him in.” (Complete fabrication. Big tip.)
So what about artefacts? Surely there is something so mysterious and intriguing about real objects which have actually been touched, fondled and utilised by the great names of the past that they don’t need to be heightened by hype? Well, in the Great Hall, at Longleat you will find the actual waistcoat Charles I wore to his execution, complete with a pattern of ever-so-discreet light brown stains around the collar. But the mere fact of the thing being there sets one wondering. Why, to begin with, Longleat? If someone at the time thought it was worth saving his waistcoat, then what about his other garments? Where now are the two shirts he is said to have worn against the chill on that fateful morning? Who, if anyone, went off with his trousers? Not to mention his stockings. And since we’re being cynical, how are we to be certain those rust stains on the collar (so few and so small!) really are the only remaining splashes of DNA of the melancholy monarch still above the sod? Couldn’t they as easily be boring old bits of rust from the Whitehall Palace Whirlpool?
(But real artefacts from the past, however ignoble or impoverished, are at least more inspiring than a modern reconstruction. I do object to the falseness of trying to recapture the look and feel of history on the cheap in the manner of the Medieval Banquet, for instance, with its overworked out-of-work actresses bringing in the courses, naff sword fights, and plaster of Paris boar’s heads stuffed with plastic apples. I was present at one where the bloke pretending to be Henry VIII happened to have played a milkman in the previous night’s episode of Inspector Morse and, slap his padding as he might, the illusion was scuppered before it started.)
The trouble is – and this is how Lettice seeks to get away with it – there is a gap in our knowledge which the wily professional can exploit. No one can know for certain that this is a genuine garment belonging to a long-dead king, or that that is Shakespeare’s ‘second-best bed’ as famously bequeathed to his wife, or that here is Christopher Wren’s hat, over there Geoffrey Chaucer’s quill, and somewhere else Harry Hotspur’s still warm spur. Search hard enough and sooner or later you will probably be able to run to earth Wellington’s boots, Lord Cardigan’s original jumper, or the Earl of Sandwich’s first BLT. (Just don’t get too excited if someone shows you an actual faggot used at the burning of Joan of Arc. Logic eventually imposes its own limits on credulity.)
The stuff of history is simply too multifarious to catalogue with any consistency. Local tradition, family pride and wishful thinking all play their part in the preservation and promulgation of popular myth, and who’s to say where the truth ends and the far-more-fulfilling fantasy begins? One is reminded of the joke about the axe Washington used to cut down the cherry tree. Faithfully preserved in some museum, the accompanying card states that this is the original implement; the handle has only been replaced twice and the blade three times.
The point is, it really isn’t necessary to knock yourself out making up stories when the truth is so engrossing. On the deck of the Victory you can stand on the very spot where Nelson fell (“I’m not surprised, I nearly tripped over that plaque myself”). In Stratford you can place your feet in the same position, inhabit however briefly the very space in air that Sir Walter Scott must have occupied in order to scratch his signature into the window pane of the bard’s bedroom. In London your eyes can rest on the very same stones, the actual physical material things, that William the Conqueror saw being raised in his honour 900 years ago while 900 years before that, you could have stood at Hadrian’s Wall and loitered in the steam while Roman soldiers doffed their loricae segmentatae and took a bath. I don’t know about you, but for me that beats any two-dimensional video game you care to mention.
It’s in the living, breathing people who left their mark, big or small, on the land that history resides. The grand gestures and romantic inventions are for the history books; the true warp and woof of time’s fabric is made out of the banal insignificant details that went to make up everyday people’s lives. So, not the romantic mythical knight on a fabulous white charger, but the kitchen boy sweating over a roasting spit down in the kitchens; not the mad duchess wailing in the attic, but the peasant girl driving geese through the village beyond the castle walls; not King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, but the bard who first set his legend to music and all the generations since who have glimpsed a better way of living in his fabled example.
Accept no substitutes, say I. Our heritage is something to be proud of and deserves to be honoured for what it is, not for what it wasn’t… unless, of course, you’re a tour guide with a vested interest in it being otherwise!
PS
We usually stole the pictures to accompany our articles from library books – not like Joe Orton, we didn’t physically tear the things out, but we scanned them back at the office, probably in contravention of any number of copyright or publishing laws. I rather enjoyed writing the captions. It was a good exercise in being as witty and pithy as possible in a minimum of words.
A Roman ruin in York. The third coffin from the left is said to have once housed Dracula.
Was the toddler William Shakespeare really incarcerated in this primitive ‘baby minder’ at the Birthplace in Henley Street? (If the plays ever do turn out to have been written by Francis Bacon, who cares?)
Charles I’s waistcoat. They went in style in those days…
Not Wellington’s boots, but his vanity case, still on show at Apsley House.