Work by world-famous artist, Pablo Picasso, is on display at Cheltenham s The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum as part of a new exhibition this March 2024 and you can view it for free!
All good friends and jolly good company: life with the Crichel Boys spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Holed up in a freezing Army camp in the far north of Scotland in 1941, the shivering and lonely young music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor dreamed up the idea of living down South with like-minded friends after the war.
He envisaged a pretty house with a piano, books, gramophone records, shabby armchairs, pictures and sparkling conversation round the dinner table.
It came to pass, just as he had hoped. In spring 1945, he and two friends music critic Eddy Sackville-West, cousin of Vita, and art dealer Eardley Knollys snapped up an old rectory in Long Crichel, Dorset for £7,500. They were joined in 1949 by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer, who bought a quarter share.
Mitford, Garbo and a dodgy septic tank: inside England s last great literary salon
Why did everyone from Graham Greene to Benjamin Britten flock to rural Dorset? To meet the Crichel Boys
14 February 2021 • 12:00pm
‘Prose factory’: the rectory at Long Crichel, Dorset
Credit: David Grandorge
Nancy Mitford, a regular visitor to Long Crichel, a Queen Anne rectory in Dorset, called the house “a prose factory” and its owners “the Brontës”. For Rosamond Lehmann, a visit was one of her “treats and pleasures”. Ben Nicolson, the elder son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, said that “Crichel is almost too good to be true… it seems to me the ideal house.” It was the last of the great English literary salons.