Nicholas Coleridge - The glossy years : magazines, museums and selective memoirs

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First published 2019

Copyright Nicholas Coleridge, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-98352-2

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Nicholas Coleridge has been Managing Director of British Cond Nast and President of Cond Nast International, publisher of 130 magazines around the world, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. Journalist, editor, magazine executive, author, environmental campaigner, and Chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Fashion Council, he has for three decades been a prevalent figure in the publishing and fashion industries. Nicholas Coleridge and his wife live in London and Worcestershire. They have four children.

NON-FICTION

Tunnel Vision

Around the World in 78 Days

The Fashion Conspiracy

Paper Tigers

FICTION

Shooting Stars

How I Met My Wife and Other Stories

With Friends Like These

Streetsmart

Godchildren

A Much Married Man

Deadly Sins

The Adventuress

I was born in London on 4 March 1957 at Queen Charlottes Hospital, Hammersmith, at ten past ten p.m. inexplicably late at night for the morning person I turned out to be.

My parents, David and Susan, had met at a London drinks party in Hamilton Terrace when my mother was sixteen and my father had recently left Eton. My mother was alert, pretty and had led a largely cloistered life at my grandparents London house, No. 2 Egerton Place. She was supervised by a sharp-tongued governess, named Miss Lynch, who taught my Aunt Deirdre. My father was considered handsome and, in those days, was broomstick thin. He had been a conspicuously successful Eton schoolboy with a razor-sharp mind, which he concealed very effectively all his life underneath a carapace of charm and warmth.

He was intended to go into the Green Jackets, but at the eleventh hour he was discovered at his army medical to have flat feet, which was then a bar to a commission. He tried instead for a last-minute scholarship to read History at Christ Church, and was driven over to Oxford by his Eton tutor, Giles St Aubyn, to sit the entrance exam. They stopped for lunch in a pub on the way, somewhere outside Maidenhead, lost track of time, and arrived when the exam was already three-quarters over. No place was offered. Instead he joined Lloyds of London as a junior insurance underwriter, straight from school, and courted my mother. They married at St Margarets, Westminster, two years later.

I appeared two years after that, followed by my younger brother, Timothy. We lived in a noisy end-of-terrace house, 32 Chelsea Park Gardens, on the corner of Beaufort Street, with a strip of communal garden in front and a small paved yard behind. When the newly-weds bought the house, my maternal grandmother (who lived scarcely a mile away in Knightsbridge) declared, Well, I cannot prevent you from buying it. But you must not expect anyone to come and see you there, it is much too far out of London.

Photographs of the Coleridge boys from this period show a conspicuously well-dressed pair, borderline effeminate, in matching shorts or tweed coats and caps from a shop named Rowes of Bond Street. By todays standards, we might be identified as disgracefully privileged or even entitled, as we were wheeled about the better London parks in a double-ended navy pram by our nanny, Dorothy Little. Nanny Little had looked after my father as a child in Bombay and been lured back from retirement from her thatched cottage in Hethe, Oxfordshire.

She was rather deaf (or hard of hearing, as she preferred). At night, when we should have been asleep, Timmy and I would creep into the nursery where she sat in front of a blaring television eating supper on a tray, and watch The Black and White Minstrel Show over her shoulder, undetected. With its cavorting blacked-up singers and dancers wearing straw hats, this was Nanny Littles favourite show; it was still regarded in those days as a cheerful piece of end-of-the-pier vaudeville, and not yet identified as an insulting travesty of cultural appropriation.

Our early childhood was a near-perfect exemplar of happy routine, with young and involved parents, and structured, repetitive days. We went to gym classes with Mr Sturges, dancing classes at Madame Vacani, and a delightful Chelsea nursery school named Mrs Russells in The Vale. On Saturdays, we walked up the Kings Road to Mr Laffertys toy shop. For holidays, we were taken to Frinton and Westgate-on-Sea.

I had a complete set of four grandparents, all of whom (I can now see) had some impact upon my development and character. They were very different. My paternal grandfather, Guy Coleridge, had signed up for the First World War aged seventeen, and lost the use of the lower part of his left leg on the second day of the Battle of the Somme; he consequently wore a wooden splint which was removed at night and had to be strapped back on again each morning, a complicated procedure undertaken by his elderly maid, Lottie Kersey, who arrived at dawn at their mansion flat in Welbeck Street.

Lottie! Lottie! Bring me my splint! he would bellow down the corridor after breakfast.

Coming, Mr Coleridge. Im coming, sir, she would meekly reply, entering with the wood-and-metal contraption, which was then laboriously buckled onto my grandfathers wounded leg.

Six feet four inches tall with a bristly moustache, he walked at speed with the aid of two mahogany walking sticks, and he made light of his injury, for which he had been awarded a Military Cross as the first man out of the trench. He had worked on the Cotton Exchange in Bombay, owned racehorses, and later became a partner in Knight Frank & Rutley, the estate agents (back then also auctioneers). His favourite museum was The Wallace Collection, round the corner in Manchester Square, and he would take me there on visits, powering down Welbeck Street on his sticks and urging me to admire Svres porcelain fruit bowls and Fragonards The Swing, which I then considered ugly.

My grandmother, Cicely, was his second wife (his first wife having run off one afternoon in India with Jack Meyer, the man who was later to found Millfield School). Guy and Cicely lived in a large, gloomy, high-ceilinged flat in the heart of the dentist district near Harley Street, filled with brown furniture and Dutch paintings.