Hugh Massingberd

On the Wight track

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space). I came to dread the phrase ‘he was a convivial member of the Bembridge Sailing Club’ and developed an unhealthy prejudice against the Isle of Wight, fortified by the facts that both my ex-mother-in-law and indeed my own prep school headmaster were islanders.

As far as I was concerned, the Isle of Wight could remain a boil on the bottom of Hampshire — as it was in the original Buildings of England volume, published in 1967. The effect was then to present the island as the poor relation to the mainland county. The 50 pages devoted to the Isle of Wight did not make a particularly good case for its architecture. Now, nearly 40 years on, the island is given proper treatment as the first volume in what will be a mini-series of three (the mainland will be covered in North Hampshire and South Hampshire), and it is a pleasure to congratulate David W. Lloyd, a town planner and conservationist who helped to save the interior of the Royal Victoria Arcade in Ryde from destruction in the 1970s, on opening my eyes to the architectural attractions of the Isle of Wight.

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