
Lord Berners, by Peter Dickinson
Lord Berners spent his life with his reputation preceding him. Lovingly fictionalised as ‘Lord Merlin’, he of the multicolour dyed pigeons in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, less sympathetically rendered as ‘Titty’ in Harold Nicolson’s Some People, Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), suffered forever from a status imposed from outside.
As a composer, painter, novelist, poet and parodist, Berners’s dilemma was diagnosed accurately by Harold Acton: ‘Had he been less versatile he would have been less charming but more profound’. Berners himself blamed his social life, claiming his music would have been taken more seriously had he accepted fewer invitations to lunch (one of which came from Adolf Hitler). The fact that Berners wore a mask when riding in his Rolls Royce, blew bubbles in restaurants and would affect a bout of scarlet fever to keep a railway carriage to himself hardly helped.
In this new compendium of Berners’ work, Peter Dickinson, himself a composer and writer, capitalises on the material he has gathered on his one-man mission to revive Berners’s reputation. There are revealing interviews with friends and family — from Frederick Ashton to Diana Mosley via William Crack, Berners’s long-suffering chauffeur — and a wealth of appendices and catalogues, together with a glorious colour-plate section of Berners’s charmingly unachieved sub-Corot landscapes. There are nice cameo roles, too, for the modern composer, Gavin Bryars (another Berners aficionado), here glimpsed skinny-dipping in a glass-domed garden pool with Edward James; and for John Betjeman, complaining about his status as national poet (‘It’s this f***ing laureateship, I’m getting six hundred letters a week.’)
As a musician, Dickinson is at pains to reclaim his subject’s reputation as a composer.

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