A new home rich in history

With its move into 22 Old Queen Street, The Spectator will occupy a house full of friendly ghosts and memories of grand occasions in the world of the arts in the first quarter of the 20th century. For this elegant mansion in Westminster was for over 30 years the London home of Leo Frank Schuster, known to all his circle as Frankie, a patron of the arts and friend of the composers Edward Elgar and Gabriel Fauré and of the conductor Adrian Boult and the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He was homosexual and very rich. Born in 1852, as a youth he had worked for a spell in his father’s bank in the City but decided that his share of the family inheritance was all he needed and he could not waste his life making any more money. ‘He wanted to create artistic history,’ Sassoon wrote of him in his Diaries, ‘but could only do so by entertaining gifted people …He was something more than a patron of music because he loved music as much as it is humanly possible to do so.’ And entertain them he did, not only at 22 Old Queen Street, but at his house on the Thames at Bray, near Maidenhead, known as The Hut, although anything less like a hut it would be hard to imagine.

He does not seem to have been much interested in politics, but he knew politicians — who did he not know? — and among those you might meet around his dinner-table were Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, at one time Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet, who was alleged to have a tattoo on his back showing the Waterford hunt in full cry; Sir Claude Phillips, art critic of the Daily Telegraph and later first keeper of the Wallace Collection; the artists Walter Sickert and John Singer Sargent; and the Sheffield MP Charles Stuart Wortley and his wife Alice, who as ‘Windflower’ became Elgar’s muse.