Page 11 - July 2013 Kettle published 2

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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Bray has half of the UK’s Michelin Three Star
restaurants, both of them! Yes, we’ve only got four
and two are here at Bray. Michel Roux’s Waterside
Inn where the Royal grandchildren took their grandpa
for his 90
th
birthday and the experimental Heston
Blumenthal’s Fat Duck where Moneypenny is forever
threatening to part with £195 (per person) for the
famous Tasting Menu which includes the infamous
snail porridge. Bray has really become a gastronomes
dream now that Blumenthal also runs the Crown and
Hinds Head pubs in the village. Bray was also, of
course, home to the infamous Vicar of Bray who
clung to his Benefice twice as a Catholic and twice
as a Protestant during the reigns of Henry VIII and
his three children.
The river slips under the M4 to emerge by Monkey
Island, a discreet luxury retreat where Edward VII
and Queen Alexandra once took tea on the lawns with
their family including three future monarchs, George
V, Edward VIII and George VI. HG Wells would row
up from his uncle’s pub at Windsor to visit with the
writer Rebecca West and Nellie Melba sometimes
sang for the guests. Opposite Monkey Island on the
Bray side a banker bought a retreat for creative types,
which he called The Hut. Creatives who stayed here
included George Bernard Shaw, Gabriel Faure and
Sir Edward Elgar who composed his Violin Concerto
here in 1910. The banker, Frank Schuster, later let his
protégé, chauffeur and companion live in the hut, a
handsome young New Zealand officer “Anzy” who
had lost a leg at Gallipoli and who Shuster had met
when he was recuperating at Lady Astor’s hospital at
Cliveden. But in 1927 he borrowed The Hut back to
host a 70
th
birthday celebration for Elgar. But the
composer’s music, which was played that day, was
out of fashion and the new set of Bright Young
Things invited by Schuster were unimpressed by the
old man and his circle of Victorian and Edwardian
fuddie duddies.
Odd
Young Thing Osbert Sitwell
later described the occasion in his autobiographical
work Laughter in The Next Room:
"I seem to recall that we saw from the edge of the
river, on a smooth green lawn opposite, above an
embankment, and through the hallucinatory mist born
of the rain that had now ceased, the plump wraith of
Sir Edward Elgar, who with his grey moustache, grey
hair, grey top hat and frock-coat looked every inch
a personification of Colonel Bogey, walking with
Frank Schuster.
"The music room was so crowded that, with Arnold
Bennett, we sat just outside the doors in the open
air….. It is true that these surviving early adherents
of Elgar's genius seemed to be endowed with an
unusual longevity, but even allowing for this, it was
plain looking round, that in the ordinary course of
nature their lives must be drawing to an end….
One could almost hear, through the music, the whirr
of the wings of the Angel of Death: he hovered very
surely in the air that day, among the floccose herds
of good-time Edwardian ghosts, with trousers thus
beautifully pressed and suits of the best material,
carrying panama hats or glossy bowlers, or decked
and loaded with fur and feather …”