Geoffrey Houghton-Brown
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Geoffrey Houghton-Brown
Geoffrey Alban Michael Houghton Brown (12 April 1903 - 3 February 1993) was an artist and connoisseur. Biography Geoffrey Alban Michael Houghton Brown was born in Wimbledon on 12 April 1903. During World War II, considered unfit for service, he volunteered to extinguish fires following the bombings on the roof of Westminster Abbey. In 1947 he bought Winslow Hall, a Grade I building that was under threat of demolition. It became an antiques showroom, and was sold again in 1959. Other than Winslow Hall, he owned Clouds House, Oving Hall, and Felix Hall Felix Hall was a man from Alabama who, at age 19, was lynched Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a con .... Other than collector of 18th century furniture, Houghton Brown was a painter of religious pictures in the Byzantine- Cubist style and had a studio in Tottenham Court Road. He was ...
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World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ...
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Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey, formally titled the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster, is an historic, mainly Gothic church in the City of Westminster, London, England, just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is one of the United Kingdom's most notable religious buildings and since Edward the Confessor, a burial site for English and, later, British monarchs. Since the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066, all coronations of English and British monarchs have occurred in Westminster Abbey. Sixteen royal weddings have occurred at the abbey since 1100. According to a tradition first reported by Sulcard in about 1080, a church was founded at the site (then known as Thorney Island) in the seventh century, at the time of Mellitus, Bishop of London. Construction of the present church began in 1245 on the orders of Henry III. The church was originally part of a Catholic Benedictine abbey, which was dissolved in 1539. It then served as the cathedral of the Dioce ...
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Winslow Hall
Winslow Hall is a country house, now in the centre of the small town of Winslow, Buckinghamshire, England. Built in 1700, it was sited in the centre of the town, with a public front facing the highway and a garden front that still commanded in 2007, due to William Lowndes' gradual purchase of a block of adjacent houses and gardens from 1693 onwards. The architect of the mansion has been a matter of prolonged architectural debate; the present candidates are Sir Christopher Wren or a draughtsman, whether in the Board of Works, which Wren oversaw, or a talented provincial architect. Architect ''"Winslow Hall was built in 1700 by Secretary Lowndes"'', claims Kip and Knyff's ''Britannia Illustrata'' (1708), with no mention of an architect. Winslow Hall was probably designed by Sir Christopher Wren, according to Howard Colvin, who found the case not proved. George Lipscomb was less cautious: he notes the "commodious plain brick edifice with a flight of several steps to the d ...
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Country Life (magazine)
''Country Life'' is a British weekly perfect-bound glossy magazine that is published by Future plc. It was based in London at 110 Southwark Street until March 2016, when it became based in Farnborough, Hampshire. History ''Country Life'' was launched in 1897, incorporating ''Racing Illustrated''. At this time it was owned by Edward Hudson, the owner of Lindisfarne Castle and various Lutyens-designed houses including The Deanery in Sonning; in partnership with George Newnes Ltd (in 1905 Hudson bought out Newnes). At that time golf and racing served as its main content, as well as the property coverage, initially of manorial estates, which is still such a large part of the magazine. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother, used to appear frequently on its front cover. Now the magazine covers a range of subjects in depth, from gardens and gardening to country house architecture, fine art and books, and property to rural issues, luxury products and interiors. The fr ...
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Clouds House
Clouds House, also known simply as Clouds, is a Grade II* listed building at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, England. Designed by Arts and Crafts movement, Arts and Crafts architect Philip Webb for Percy Wyndham (1835–1911), Percy Wyndham and his wife Madeline, it was first completed in 1886, but an 1889 fire necessitated its rebuilding, finished in 1891. Clouds was Webb's grandest design. It became a centre of social activity for the intellectual group known as The Souls,Kirk (2005), pp. 141–142. and was frequented by artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and politicians like Arthur Balfour. Since 1983 the house has been a drug rehabilitation, treatment centre for drug dependence and alcohol dependence, under the name Clouds House. In 2007 the Clouds House treatment centre merged with two other organisations to form the charity Action on Addiction, which is headquartered at East Knoyle. Construction Wyndham bought the Worsley (2002), p. 85. Clouds estate in 1876,Kirk (2005), p. 132. ...
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Felix Hall
Felix Hall was a man from Alabama who, at age 19, was lynched Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate people. It can also be an ex ..., probably by fellow soldiers in Fort Benning, Georgia. A black man from Alabama, he had volunteered to join an African-American unit being trained in Fort Benning. He was last seen alive on February 12, 1941, in one of the fort's white neighborhoods. His body was found six weeks later, on March 28, hanging by a noose tied to a tree in a ravine near the Chattahoochee River. The killers were never found, and evidence suggests that no serious efforts were made at the time by the Army or the FBI to discover the cause of Hall's death. Investigators first called the death a suicide, despite Hall's hands being tied, and later called it a sex crime. In 2021, a plaque in Hall's ...
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Roy De Maistre
Roy De Maistre CBE (27 March 18941 March 1968) was an Australian artist of international fame. He is renowned in Australian art for his early experimentation with "colour-music", and is recognised as the first Australian artist to use pure abstraction. His later works were painted in a figurative style generally influenced by Cubism. His ''Stations of the Cross'' series hangs in Westminster Cathedral and works of his are hung in the Tate Gallery, London and in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Early life Roy went by the name of Leroy Leveson Laurent Joseph De Maistre, but had been born as Leroy Livingstone de Mestre at Bowral, New South Wales on 27 March 1894 into a home of high social standing in the then Colony of New South Wales. He was the youngest son of Etienne Livingstone de Mestre (1832–1916), the thoroughbred racehorse trainer of the first two Melbourne Cup winners; and the grandson of Prosper de Mestre (1789–1844) a prominent Sydney businessman from 1818 ...
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Nostradamus
Michel de Nostredame (December 1503 – July 1566), usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book ''Les Prophéties'' (published in 1555), a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. Nostradamus's father's family had originally been Jewish, but had converted to Catholic Christianity a generation before Nostradamus was born. He studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague. He worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary (a manual trade forbidden by university statutes) was discovered. He first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak. He fought alongside doctors against the p ...
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Martin D'Arcy
Martin Cyril D'Arcy (15 June 1888 – 20 November 1976) was a Roman Catholic priest, philosopher of love, and a correspondent, friend, and adviser of a range of literary and artistic figures including Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers, W. H. Auden, Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens. He has been described as "perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death". Background and education Born at Bath, Somerset, the youngest of four sons of Northern Circuit barrister Martin Valentine D'Arcy and Madoline Mary (née Keegan), D'Arcy was educated at Stonyhurst, at Oxford (M.A.), and at the Gregorian University in Rome. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1907 and was ordained priest in 1921. He was Provincial of the English Province of the Society of Jesus from 1945 to 1950. Career and legacy He spent much of his working life at the English Jesuit house in Oxford, Campion Hall, but also spent periods in residence at American universities, including George ...
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Oliver Messel
Oliver Hilary Sambourne Messel (13 January 1904 – 13 July 1978) was an English artist and one of the foremost stage designers of the 20th century. Early life Messel was born in London, the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Messel and Maud, the only daughter of Linley Sambourne, the eminent illustrator and contributor to ''Punch'' magazine. He was educated at Hawtreys, a boarding preparatory school then in Kent, Westminster School and Eton — where his classmates included Harold Acton, Eric Blair, Brian Howard, and Robert Byron— and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College. Painting, stage design After completing his studies, he became a portrait painter and commissions for theatre work soon followed, beginning with his designing the masks for a London production of Serge Diaghilev's ballet '' Zephyr et Flore'' (1925). Subsequently, he created masks, costumes, and sets – many of which have been preserved by the Theatre Museum, London – for vario ...
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James Lees-Milne
(George) James Henry Lees-Milne (6 August 1908 – 28 December 1997) was an English writer and expert on country houses, who worked for the National Trust from 1936 to 1973. He was an architectural historian, novelist and biographer. His extensive diaries remain in print. Early life Lees-Milne was born on 6 August 1908 at Wickhamford Manor, Worcestershire. His biographer Michael Bloch observed that in ''Another Self'', Lees-Milne "conveys the impression that he hailed from an old county family and that Wickhamford was their native seat. This was not quite the case.... His father... had bought Wickhamford, and moved from Lancashire to Worcestershire, only two years before Jim's birth." He was the second of three children and the elder son of a prosperous cotton manufacturer and farmer, George Crompton Lees-Milne (1880–1949), and his wife Helen Christina (1884–1962), a daughter of Henry Bailey, JP and Deputy Lieutenant of Coates, Gloucestershire. Lees-Milne's maternal grandfa ...
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