All the arts and science that we used in war are standing by us now ready to help us in peace … Never did science offer such fairy gifts to man. Never did their knowledge and organisation stand so high. Repair the waste. Rebuild the ruins. Heal the wounds. Crown the victors. Comfort the broken and broken-hearted. There is the battle we have now to fight.
Winston Churchill, speech in Dundee, 26 November 1918
Philip Sassoon’s Avro 504K aeroplane charged back across the English Channel towards home.1 In bright sunlight and with low cloud, it was hard to distinguish between the sea below and the sky above. With the landscape barely changing there was almost no sense of movement, as if despite the noise of the engines you were floating suspended between heaven and earth. As the pilot brought the plane down towards the airfield at Lympne the clouds cleared; below were the elegant Edwardian buildings on the clifftops at Folkestone and the steamers chugging into the harbour; ahead Hythe Bay curved away from them to the point at Dungeness. From the air at least the scars of the war at home were barely visible.
Philip’s growing passion for flying led him to purchase his own aircraft in 1919,fn1 the same year in which the world’s first commercial air passenger service started. According to the London society column in the Evening Standard, Philip was the first man in England ‘to venture on buying and keeping an aeroplane as other people buy and keep a motor car’.2
His aeroplanes carried his adopted symbol of the cobra. A bronze statue of a coiled cobra, rising to strike, also decorated the bonnet of his Rolls-Royce motor cars, in place of the flying lady known as the Spirit of Ecstasy. In ancient Egypt the cobra offered protection to the pharaohs, and in eastern mythology symbolized good fortune, new life and regeneration – the serpent could change its skin and each time emerge new and whole. Now that he was out of his khaki uniform, 1919 would be a year of regeneration for Philip Sassoon; he had just turned thirty, with seemingly limitless funds at his disposal, no personal ties and a seat in the House of Commons.
Harold Macmillan, another Eton and Oxford survivor of the war, remembered, ‘To a young man … with all the quick mental and moral recovery of which youth is capable, life at the end of 1918 seemed to offer an attractive, not to say exciting, prospect.’3 Looking back on this period, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘Everyone was agog for youth – young bishops, young headmasters, young professors, young poets, young advertising managers. It was all very nice and of course they deserved it.’4
As a surviving member of the lost generation, Philip Sassoon was also determined to make the most of the life given to him but denied to so many of his friends by the war. The strictures of Edwardian society had been replaced by new social freedoms. People had grown used to mixing freely with people of all ranks and stations in life during the war, and women in particular now had much more independence. Philip would not subscribe to the view first expressed by the American writer Gertrude Stein that the lost generation were not the young men who had been killed in the war, but those who had returned to a life of drink, drugs and directionlessness.5 Philip’s life was driven by energy and purpose, and he would become one of those singular young men who suddenly rose to prominence both as a society host and as a politician.
In March and April 1919, Philip marked his new freedom from the army with a holiday in Spain and Morocco, accompanied by a fellow staff officer from GHQ named Jack. Together they experienced the cultural treasures of these two countries and Philip was particularly moved by the works of Velázquezfn2 at the Prado museum in Madrid. In his travel journal he declared Velázquez to be ‘the most wonderful artist in the world. Best of all is the “Las Meninas” [Maids of Honour]. If by a miracle we mean an event in which the effect is beyond measure out of proportion with the seeming simplicity of the cause, then we may say that of all the great pictures of the world this may most precisely be called miraculous.’6
Philip Sassoon was not alone in his regard for Las Meninas. His friend William Orpen later wrote, ‘It is hard to conceive of a more beautiful piece of painting than this – so free and yet firm and so revealing … Like all of the great artists Velázquez takes something out of life and sets it free.’7 Las Meninas had also been an inspiration for the composition of works by John Singer Sargent, and Sir John Lavery’s 1913 portrait of King George V and his family.
Las Meninas has been a mystery to the centuries of admirers who have stood before it. The scene is set in the Alcazar Palace in Madrid, and the central figure is the five-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, the ‘Infanta’ Margaret Theresa. She is accompanied by her two maids of honour, her dog, and two court dwarfs, Maribarbola and Nicolasito. To the left of this group stands Velázquez himself, looking towards us as he works at a large canvas, but we cannot see what he is painting. Facing us on the far wall in the picture is a mirror reflecting back the shadowy images of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, suggesting that they might have been standing next to the viewer. Next to the mirror is an open door, and through it stands a nobleman, perhaps arriving with news for the King.
The art historian Kenneth Clark wrote of the painting that ‘Our first feeling is of being there.’8 It not only transports you back to the court of Philip IV of Spain, but invites you to look at it through his eyes. For Philip Sassoon, standing before Las Meninas in March 1919, after the fall of the Emperors of Austria, Germany and Russia, he might have considered the precarious position of rulers, and how quickly they can pass from being the centre of attention to becoming peripheral figures, like the king in the painting. Looking at the beautiful but vulnerable Infanta, Philip might have also reflected on his own gilded childhood at the Avenue de Marigny, in that lost pre-war world of Paris in the time of his parents and grandparents.
On his tour of Spain, Philip was greatly impressed with the Alhambra, the palace and fortress complex in Granada. It provided ‘a lot of ideas for Lympne … The Alhambra … must remain for all time the crowning glory, the seal, the apogee, in a word the supreme consummation of Moorish Art.’9
It was a timely inspiration, as back in England Philip Sassoon’s great project in 1919 was the completion of his house and estate in Kent. Port Lympne was more than just a building project designed to provide him with a comfortable home in his constituency; it was a work of art in its own right and a statement of Philip’s flair, style and ambition.fn3 His friend the writer Osbert Sitwell thought that Lympne captured his ‘fire and brilliance as a young man’.10 Sybil also recalled that Philip ‘loved [Lympne] very much because he had built it himself’.11
Sir Herbert Baker had designed and built the mansion before the war, but was unavailable to continue the project as he was working with Sir Edwin Lutyens in India on the construction of New Delhi. Instead Philip brought in the fashionable young architect Philip Tilden to complete the interior and external works on the estate. Tilden is now better known for his work for Winston Churchill at Chartwell, but Philip Sassoon was his main patron in the early 1920s; and it was he who introduced Churchill to Tilden when Winston was in the process of purchasing his Kent estate. Sassoon and Tilden were kindred spirits – dynamic and creative, of similar age and shared artistic tastes. There was also a strong mutual respect: Tilden thought that no more ‘brilliant man existed for this age than Philip. I do not mean necessarily brilliant in scholarship, but in effect; intensely amusing and amused, full of knowledge concerning many things that others care not two pence for; imaginative, curious and above all intelligent to the last degree.’12
Tilden