We have arrived in London.

A few days with Cousins in Finchley, North London. Highgate on the great north road is quite nearby. In the olden days Highgate was the first stop on a journey to the North with a coach and horses. Change the horses and so on. An important feature of Highgate is Kenwood house built in the 1776. Remember the 2013 movie “Belle” with Tom Wilkinson? The film represents, with some cinematic licence, life in Kenwood house in the late 18th century. “Britons never never never shall be slaves” so the anthem goes. However, Britons of the time were not averse to using other peoples as slaves.

William Murray, Lord Mansfield of the movie was the Lord Chief Justice of England. He owned the Kenwood estate and lived there in style and grace. Happens that his nephew Sir John Lindsay in a liaison with the black slave Maria Belle in the British West Indies, produced the beautiful illegitimate black baby Dido Belle. Although she was born into slavery, Mansfield adopted Dido Belle and brought her up as an aristocratic sister to his own daughter Elizabeth on the Kenwood estate.

Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray

The Murray family retained Kenwood till 1910 when the 6th Earl Mansfield fell on hard times, sold at auction the exquisite contents and offered the property for sale. Years earlier Edward Cecil Guinness, on the sale of his share in the Guinness brewery had used the very substantial fortune, thus generated, to pursue the collection of fine art, in particular, rare and valuable old masters. At the time the Murrays offered Kenwood for sale, Guinness was still enthusiastically collecting but was running out of gallery display space to display the growing collection. So he bought Kenwood not to live in, but as a venue for display of some of the collection. Shortly before his death in 1927 he gifted the estate to the state to be administered by the national trust on the condition that it would be open every day and that entry would be free. A couple of hundred enthusiastic volunteers enable this situation to continue. Such is the experience that most of the horde of visitors are happy to make the suggested 5 (where is the pound sign on this iPad?) donation. In the grounds there are a couple of restaurant/cafes, one that welcomes dogs on a lead and one that doesn’t. Also some choice sculptures.

Barbara Hepworth. . / Henry Moore Bronze

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Sweetie Pie has this thing about Vermeers. Not particularly owning them, just going to look at the actual paintings. So far she has collected “The girl with the pearl ear ring”, “The milk maid”, “The love letter” in the Rijksmuseum and a couple of others. Guinness was also keen on Vermeer, but he was in a position to own the real thing. In this case The Guitar player. As you see, it is presented without any particular reverence alongside a whole lot of old masters.

Back to Britons and slaves – Also at Kenwood is this Gainsborough portrait of the wealthy noblewoman Caroline Lady Brisco, painted in the year she married. Her wealth was derived largely from the trans Atlantic slave trade. She inherited several sugar plantations in the Caribbean from her father and husband. Kenwood is neither grand, pretentious nor majestic. It was simply a very comfortable house that is now an interesting art gallery.

Back home in Finchley the accommodation may not be quite so expansive, but its quintessential Englishness is expressed in this humble Stair basket. We set sail for the Baltic Sea tomorrow, but more of that later.