Kate Cranston, Charles Mackintosh Glasgow

Ladderback chairs designed in 1903 by architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) for  Glasgow Willow Tea-rooms came on the London market in 2014, and put me in mind of Glasgow businesswoman Kate Cranston (1849–1934).

Kate Cranston c1900

Dressed like young Queen Victoria 

National Portrait Gallery. 

I like the description of Kate Cranston in Famous Scots. Born in the Victorian age when women were expected to be limited to the family home, Kate Cranston was fortunate to grow up in an entrepreneurial Glasgow family. Her father was a tea merchant and owned the Cranston's Hotel and Dining Rooms, her brother was a tea merchant and bought three small tearooms, and a cousin managed a hotel.

Tearooms became a feature of Glasgow in the second half of the C19th but Kate Cranston was to take the concept to new heights with high standards and innovative design. Initially tearooms had been estab­lished to encourage temperance in a society where alcohol abuse was wide spread. But by the last decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, tearooms were becoming valuable places for socialising and were frequented by men, and women if they were in company.

In 1878, Kate followed in her brother's footsteps and opened her own tearoom for the first time. Soon she was operating four Glasgow est­ab­­lishments very successfully - Argyle St, Buchanan St, Ingram St and Sauchiehall St. Precision and innovation! She provided some rooms exclusively for women; there were luncheon rooms where men and women could dine together; and there were smoking rooms and billiards rooms provided exclusively for men.

Glasgow held an International Exhibition in 1888  that would prove to be incredibly inspirational to the city’s architectural and artistic development. An enormous domed building was erected in Kelvingrove Park, surrounded by beautiful smaller structures of eastern design influence.

One of Kate's great achievements was to encourage the artistic talents of the Glasgow School designers. Early in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s career (in 1896) the very experienced tearoom owner asked the young artist to design the wall murals of the new Buchanan St tearooms. The tearooms had been designed and built by one architect, with interiors and furn­ish­ings being designed by another. Mackintosh only had to design the Art Nouveau friezes. 

Cranston must have liked what she saw. In 1898 Mackintosh’s next commission was to design the furniture and interiors for the existing Argyle St tearooms. Then in 1900 Miss Cranston commiss­ioned him to redesign an entire room in her Ingram St tearooms. The Willow Tearoom in Sauchiehall St was the most famous of the Cranston-Macktinosh collaborations.

Willow Tearooms.

iconic chair design,  by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Web Gallery Art

Kate Cranston understood that good design was a vital component in her success. And an ongoing component! Mackintosh returned to Ingram St a number of times, and in 1911 created the Chinese Room in a room that had been looking a bit tatty. The elegant Victorian and Edwardian ladies, who drank tea sitting on the unique high-backed Mackintosh furniture, certainly loved her tearooms. Mackintosh continued to work for Kate Cranston until 1917, designing the layout of the building and creating the furniture and décor for 21 happy years.

Mackintosh designed an art nouveau frieze 

at the top of the tearoom wall

dezeen 

Mackintosh also designed the exterior

for the Willow Tea Rooms

Alamy  

Kate had an astute business sense but was eccentric. She dressed in old fashioned Victorian crinolines, long after they were out of fashion. In 1892 she married John Cochrane, a director of the Grahamston Foundry and Engine Works. After a very happy marriage, she naturally became very depressed when he died in 1917. There were no children. She immediately sold off her tearooms and wore black for the rest of her life. And when Kate died in 1934 at a good age, she bequeathed in her will two thirds of her estate to Glasgow’s shoeless families. Alas Charles Rennie Mackintosh had already died of cancer back in 1928, only 59 years old. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, c1893.

History Today

Many thanks to mackintoshatthewillow 

Angkor Wat: Hindu/Buddhist cult­ur­al site

                                         

aerial view of Angkor Wat

totally surrounded by wall

When the Khmer Empire came to power, Hinduism became the off­icial rel­ig­ion. Angkor in Northern Cambodia was the capital of the Kh­mer Empire and thrived from the C9th on, marking the apex of its architect­ure. Angkor stretched over 400km², home to a number of temp­les: Ang­kor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon Temple and Ta Prohm. Angkor Wat was a temp­le complex with 1000+ build­ings, one of the great cult­ur­al wonders anywhere.

One of the 5 central towers

Because the temple complex was built in the Khmer Emp­ire capital, all of the original religious motifs were derived from Hind­uism, and were dedic­ated to the gods Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu. Note that Ang­kor Wat faced west, ded­icated to the Hindu god Vishnu.     

Angkor served as the royal centre from which the Khmer dyn­as­ty­ ruled one of the largest, most prosperous and most soph­is­ticated king­doms in S.E Asia. Many building pro­jects were und­er­taken, built by King Sury­avarman II (r1113–c1150) as a vast memorial temple in which his remains would be placed. Shortly after he took the throne in 1113, construction of the Angkor Wat complex took c3 decades. Ro­y­al success­ion in the Kh­mer empire was often a violent aff­air; Sury­av­arman killed his great-uncle in bat­t­le to seize the throne. But apparently he creat­ed stab­il­ity. He continued the tradition of the previous kings, build­ing a new royal temple comp­lex, but did not design the temple’s design. Probably his chief priest did.

The 5 cent­ral towers of Angkor Wat symbolised the 5 peaks of Mt Meru, wh­ich the Hindu faith saw as the dwell­ing place of the gods. The 15’ high walls signified the surrounding mountain ranges and the moat rep­resented the sea, both structures protecting the comp­l­ex. A 188-metre bridge allowed access to the site, then visitors rea­ch­ed the temple by passing through 3 galleries, each separated by a paved path.

        

To further emphasise the Hindu symbolism, the temple walls were lined with c2,000 square ms of beautiful bas-relief sculpture carved into the sandstone. Plus there were extens­ively carved lintels, friezes and pedi­m­ents, 2,000 cel­estial dancers entertaining the gods on the walls, and depictions of the Ang­korian king and his court. Most sculptures de­picted the Hindu epics Ramayana and Ma­hab­harata.

Examine the architecture. A wide rectangular moat surrounded the com­plex, and just inside the moat an outer wall de­fined an area c1,500 ms E-W, and 1,300 ms N-S. Some archaeol­ogists suggested that 90% of this area was orig­inally sur­rounded by a city ar­ound the formal temple prec­inct, in­cluding the royal palace, all built of wood. Only the temple’s interior structures, built in sandstone and laterite

clay, remain today.

 

cel­estial dancers on the middle terrace

yatrikaone

Angkor Wat statues

Westend61

From the western gateway of the outer wall, a long causeway led to the main temple precinct. Two small stone buildings, called libraries/ shrines, flanked the causeway near the midpoint.

The temple itself consisted of the primary elements of Khmer arch­itect­ure: 1] pyramids and 2] concentric galleries. Each pyramid took the form of 3 stepped terraces, with the steps bordered on all sides by cov­ered galleries. At each level gateways in the galleries indicated the pathway to the central shrine, and towers punctuated the corners. The pyramid culminated in 5 towers, marking the central shrine.

The whole complex symbolised the Hindu beliefs enshrined within, a mic­rocosm of the Hindu universe. The moat represented the mythical oceans surr­oun­ding the earth and the succession of concentric galleries repr­es­ent the moun­tain ranges that surround Mt Meru. The towers represented the mountain’s peaks, and the experience of the ascent to the central shrine seemed like climbing a real moun­t­ain. Dedication to the Hindu god Vishnu only ended in the C13th.

After the Cham people sacked Angkor in 1177, King Jayavarman VII (reign­ed 1181–c1220) decided that the Hindu gods had deserted him. When he built a new capital nearby, Angkor Thom, he dedic­at­ed it to Budd­hism. There­af­ter Angkor Wat became a Buddhist shrine, and many of its carvings and statues of Hindu deities were replaced by Buddhist art. Note that Buddhist tolerance for Hinduism meant that the iconography of its great reliefs was not totally replaced; some of the intric­ate sandstone bas-relief scul­p­tures were still showing Khmer artist­ry.

In the decades after Suryavarman II’s death and his cousin’s dismal reign, King Jayavarman VII converted many of the temples to Budd­hist use. The temples at Angkor were often depicted as the ruins of a failed society, but actually the rise of Theravada Bud­dhism led to the const­ruct­ion of wooden temples that didn’t survive. Angkor Wat had repres­ented the best building trad­ition over 5 centuries. In the early C15th Angkor DID come to a standstill, yet Buddhist monks maintain­ed Angkor Wat for pilgrims.

One of the first modern Western visitors was a Portuguese friar who visited in 1586. Angkor Wat was later “re-discover­ed” by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot in the 1840s. Mouhot’s notes, published in 1863, aroused Western interest in Angkor and the Ecole Francaise d’ Extreme-Orient began leading conservation efforts.

map of Cambodia

Siem Reap-Angkor Wat marked in blue 

The Cambodian flag

The French, who ruled Cambodia for much of the C20th, restored the site for tourism purposes. Cambodia won indep­end­ence from France in 1953 and has controlled Angkor Wat ever since. However rest­or­ation work was lat­er disrupted by the Cambodian Civil War (1967-75) and the rule of the Khmer Rouge in 1975-79. Angkor Wat avoided destruction, but bull­et hol­es on its outer walls remained from the Khmer Rouge regime. Ang­kor bec­ame a UNESCO World Her­itage Site in 1992 and was immediately added to the list of World Heritage in Danger.  Preservation work contin­ues. It is now a very popular attraction for 2 million tourists yearly.

Today the blue and red national flag depicts the main building of Angkor Wat, the ancient temple complex.

Oliver Sacks: neurologist, pianist, scholar

Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933-2015) was born in London, youngest of four sons of two Lithuanian Jewish doctors. Oliver spent most of his childhood in London, though his GP father and surgeon moth­er sent him to a rural boarding school for 4 years in WW2 to es­c­ape the horr­ific air raids. Sacks hated bullying and cruelty and 4 years later, back home, he hid in his base­ment chem­istry lab. Uncle Tung­sten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) discussed how growing up in a home of poly­maths fostered his investigative skills.

Dr Sacks favourite activities:
playing the piano and writing books

He got a bachelor’s degree in physiol­ogy (1954) & medicine (1958) from Queens College Oxford. He did his house-year at Mid­dlesex Hospital London in 1959 and was house-surgeon at Queen Elizabeth, Birm­ing­ham in 1960. Dr Sacks moved to the US to work at Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco (1961–62), then a neurology residency at Uni of Calif.

Sacks moved to NY in 1965 for a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, becoming a cl­inical Prof of Neurology (1966–75). He also joined the charitable Bet Abraham Hosp­ital NY as a staff neurologist (1966–2007), meeting patients who’d contract­ed a sl­eeping sickness, encephalitis lethar­g­ica, during a much earlier ep­id­emic (1917-27). These patients had survived sleeping sickness only to develop a Parkinson’s that caused immob­ility, depression, speechlessness or catatonia! Dr Sacks gave them the drug L-dopa, emerging as a treat­ment for similar symptoms in Parkins­on’s. His clinical work at Bet Abraham led to his book Awakenings (1973). This book, about a group of patients with atypical enceph­alitis, won widespread attention.

Sacks was led by Russia's neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902–77). Luria's vital research was in linguistic aphasia, ant­erior lobe pathology, speech dysfunction and child neuro­psychology. The two men never met, but they maintained a 5-year corresp­ondence and in 1977, Sacks wrote his mentor’s obituary for The London Times.

Explore strange brain pathways in famous case histories like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986), using his pat­ients’ disord­ers to discuss the human condition i.e he carefully ill­um­inated pat­ients’ exist­en­tial AND pathological condit­ions. Some critics called his blend of medicine & phil­osophy ins­ight­ful eg The Independent of London called him the “presiding genius of neuro­logical drama”. Reviewers praised his graceful prose.

Some critics found him infuriat­ing, accusing Sacks of expl­oit­ing his subjects. Scientists said that his clinical stories over-emphasised the stories and under-emphasised the clinical. A London neuro­­scientist doubted whether Sacks had provided any scientific in­sights into the neurolog­ical con­ditions he had written about in his many books (Guardian 2005).

A million copies of Sack’s books were printed in the U.S and his acc­ounts of neur­ol­ogical oddities were soon adapted for Hol­lywood, opera, theatre and literature. An opera based on The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat premiered in London in 1986 and in the Lin­coln Centre NY in 1988. Robin Wil­liams portrayed a Sacks-like doctor in the film ver­s­ion of Aw­ak­enings (1990), along with Robert De Niro. Rich­ard Powers based a central character on him in his novel The Echo Maker (2006). The Girl in the Letter (2018) and The Missing Daughter (2019) by Emily Gunnis did very well.

Recording personal experiences in volumes written for popular aud­iences did well. Having injured a leg in a moun­t­aineering accident, he learned first hand how a physician’s dismissal of ­a patient’s condition hinder­ed rec­uperation, as he told in A Leg to Stand On (1984).

Still recording the amazing circumstances of the pat­ients he met and their remarkable adaptations, Sacks wrote See­ing Voices (1989). He exp­lored the ways in which sign language provided the deaf with commun­ic­ation AND served as a discrete culture. In An Anth­rop­ol­ogist on Mars (1995), he documented the lives of 7 pat­ients living with difficult conditions including autism, and how they created functional lives.

Trips abroad were important. On his journey to Micronesia Sacks studied a population with a high incidence of colour blindness and to Guam to study a mysterious form of paralysis in The Island of the Col­ourblind (1997). He presented further case stud­ies in The Mind Travel­ler (1998), a programme produced for tv. The Mind’s Eye (2010) in­vestigated the compensatory mechanisms employed by people with sensory disorders. Hal­lucin­at­ions (2012) recorded con­ditions from epilep­sy and drug use, to sens­ory depriv­at­ion that caused hallucin­at­ions.

In 1989 Sacks won a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of the influence of culture on the abnormal neurological processes underlying the rare inherited disease, Tourette Syndrome. Sacks also introduced Asperger Syndrome to lay audiences, humanising his patients.

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, 2007

The relationship between music and the mind

This skilled pianist analysed the relationship between music and the mind, and of patients with conditions relating to music in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). He pointed to mus­ic’s ability to reach dementia patients, showing that music app­rec­iat­ion is hard-wired into the brain. Sacks believed Mozart made him a better neurologist!

Though Sacks remained in the U.S, he never gave up Brit­ish citizenship and he was made Commander British Empire in 2008. Other awards incl­uded honours from Guggenheim Foundation, Americ­an Acad­emy of Arts & Letters, National Sc­ience Foundation and Royal College of Physicians.

He wrote up his adventures On The Move (2015). And he also discussed his sexual identity for the first time, since realising he was gay in his teens. He settled into a LONG period of celibacy that lasted 35 years before he met and fell in love with writer Bill Hayes in 2008.

Dr Sacks remained active with age. In 2007, at 74, he accepted an int­er­­disciplinary teaching position at Columbia. From 2012–15 he returned again to the New York Uni School of Medicine in Neurol­ogy. And despite the enormous success of his books, he never gave up his “unglam­orous” medical practice, because it prov­ided him with data and because he loved working with patients.

In Feb 2015 he announced his own terminal can­cer. The ocular mel­an­oma had spread to his liver, and he died at 82. His essays were pub­lished posthumously as The River of Consc­ious­ness (2017). The document­ary Oliv­er Sacks: His Own Life was published in 2019.

For a slightly new angle, read Fenella Souter 2015 who wrote that this doctor was famous for his books about people with bizarre neurological disorders. But Dr Sacks had some very impressive mental quirks of his own.

capital city of spies: Berlin's Spy Museum

Today’s German capital, Berlin, was the Capital of Spies in the Cold War. The situation of the divided city, which developed after WW2, was unique. The historical heritage provided for excit­ing tours through the city, but many places said that Berlin was still a real esp­ionage hotspot today, due to the 150+ embassies from which espionage still takes place.

Front entrance to the Spy Museum Berlin

The Glienicker Bridge at the border between Potsdam and Berlin wit­nessed some spect­ac­ular spy swaps during the Cold War. Having given much thought to spying since his run-ins with the East Ger­man Stasi under Communism, tv journalist Franz-Michael Gün­ther wanted a museum dedicated to the history of espionage. Berlin is not only regarded as an important historical site during the Cold War, but also as the former  capital city of spies.  Curator Günther opened the museum after starting his coll­ect­ion in 2004, sourcing objects and information from former secret ser­­vice workers, double agents and contemporary wit­nesses. 

A number of locations for the Spy Museum Berlin were consid­er­ed. In 2014 the final choice was made for a site on Leip­­ziger Platz, the ideal loc­­ation for a museum foc­ussing on esp­ion­age. The site of the form­er death­-strip i.e no-man’s land between the inner and outer perim­eter of the Berlin Wall that separated East and West Berlin, was located in the city’s his­toric division. This site feat­ured one of the few openings in the Wall and was the scene of many dramatic spy swaps in the Cold War. It was also close to the important Brand­en­burg Gate, Pots­damer Platz, Bund­es­rat, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Topo­graphie des Terrors and Kultur­for­um with the Philharmonie and Neuer Nationalgalerie.

Spy Museum Berlin opened 10+ years after first Gunther had his idea because it required much work to transform it into a state-of-the-art mus­eum. Combining rare exhibits with high-tech multi­media install­ations, the exhibition welcomed its first vis­it­ors in Sept 2015, and was internat­ionally acclaimed. En­t­irely privately funded, the Spy Museum was an immediate hit but finan­cially problematic.

An improved financial concept was required to secure the long-term future of the museum, which was relaunched by a new operator. It re-opened in July 2016 as the German Spy Museum. With a fresh pub­lic relations strategy and reduced entry fees, the renewed museum con­centrated on its educational role and its exhibit­ions.

The Spy Museum is the only museum of its kind in Germany. The visitor can ex­pl­ore, using state-of-the-art technology, a multi-media jour­ney through the history of espionage. Walk through the Zeit­tunnel/time tunnel which leads into the 3,000m² museum. On entering, feel the sin­ister world of espionage as several cam­eras peer down. Begin with sec­ret scriptures from antiq­u­ity and ends in the present, with the recent National Security Agen­cy deb­ate. He/she gain insight into elaborate spy techniques, leg­en­dary cases and spectacular sec­ret op­erations. And hear former agents talk.

Museum gallery, in a darkish atmosphere

The collection has 1,000+ exhibits. 300 of these are on dis­play, in various themed areas with int­er­act­ive installations, inviting participation. The historic­al objects on dis­play include gloves hiding a pistol and shoes with bugging devices in the heel. There was also the poisoned umbrella used to assass­inate Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 and the infamous En­igma encryption machine.

The Museum actually linked thousands of years by displaying ob­jects like a cipher technique invented by Julius Caesar, still being used today. It depicted the fascinating secret service methods of: Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon.

The museum’s exhibition space showed many rare exhibits, as meticul­ously reproduced replicas which were presented using high-tech touchscreen displays to explain their us­age. Thanks for Mechtraveller's photos.

Camera hidden in a bra

 Cryptex from Da Vinci Code

 Enigma Machine

Pipe with bone conduction radio

 Bug in a shoe's heel

Ricky French exper­ien­ced the  romance and mystique con­jured by the apparently outdated world of espion­age. See the rows of cameras hidden in everyday household items, clunky con­trap­tions used for decoding messages, and cars with hidden smuggling comp­artments. It all seemed rather quaint since deception is lar­g­e­ly practised now online; it was difficult to imagine a museum ded­ic­ated to computer hacking having the same appeal. But the visitor can see what it took to become a top sec­ret agent and to crack codes. 

The laser maze room was just one of the many hands-on exhibits that helped spying. From encryption tech­niques to phone-bugging to code-cracking, the world of deceit and double-crossing was un­locked. The museum moved between entertain­ment and education, some of it really solemn, with commendable fin­esse. His forensic skills were tested in a laboratory where the quest was to compose and decipher secret mes­sages. And he was shown how documents that had been through a paper shredder could be painstakingly pieced together. One section was ded­­icated to the techniques used by the dreaded Stasi, who placed all East Germans under mass surveillance for years. Another explored the spying methods used in WW1, WW2 and throughout the Cold War. 

The spy museum was completed by a generous sect­ion devoted to the most famous spy in the world, 007. The chips and playing-cards used by James Bond/Daniel Craig in the 2006 adapt­at­ion of Casino Royale were on show, as was a car tyre with ice spikes from Die Another Day and M’s red telephone from Moonraker. 

The Costume Room shows a trench coat, top hat and sun-glasses where the visitor can become a dash­ing spy, posing for a photo against any back­drop eg opt for a street scene on a rainy night, the streetlight illum­inating the raindrops and the car’s head­lights giving the face a suspicious glow. 

Spies, Lies and Deception was a free exhibition at Imperial War Museum London about deception and espionage from WW1 on. Explore how deception plots have changed the course of conflict and the lives of those involved. The exhibition was showcasing objects, digitised film, photography and commissioned interviews until April 2024. Many thanks to Girl Gone London.