Thursday and Friday, January 6 and 7, 1972 — I left Cleveland at 4:45 PM with neighbors Digby and Bill Hubbard for London, England.  Jim just wasn’t feeling up to a long trip so he said he’d stay home and guard the house and prevent wandering strangers from diving into the frozen swimming pool.  From Cleveland Hopkins airport, our little travelling party hopscotched across Ontario via Toronto and Ottawa, and finally arrived in Montreal.  From there we flew across the Atlantic to London on B.O.A.C.  Once over the Pond, we installed ourselves at the London International Hotel in Canary Wharf.  As I looked around and asked myself where the canaries were, Digby explained that the name is connected to the Canary Islands.  The evening featured drinks at a pub and dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.  Once we had recovered from jet lag and a lost day of travel, our agenda for this trip focused heavily on shopping and theatre. 

Saturday, January 8 — After breakfast, Digby and I took the Tube to Regent Street for a rendezvous at the Aquascutum store to meet her sister Duse Nelson and Duse’s husband Jim.  This was my first visit to the famous luxury clothing retailer and one of the sales staff explained that Aquascutum means “water shield” in Latin.  Their iconic trench coats, favored by generations of British royalty and nobility, were on prominent display.  Our objective, in fact, had been to purchase just such coats and so we browsed and considered at length, but in the end, after staring in disbelief at the prices, we didn’t buy anything.  To console ourselves and to get our theatre-going groove established, we went to a matinee performance of John Osborne’s “West of Suez”, starring Ralph Richardson and featuring a storyline about a fictional British colonial possession.  Although the Cambridge Theatre itself was lovely and Osborne is highly regarded for works such as “Look back in Anger”, that afternoon’s offering got very low marks on my personal scorecard and I considered it the worst play I had ever seen.  I set that disappointment aside, however, and reminded myself that London is perhaps the world’s greatest center for the stage (not to mention shopping!) and I still had almost two weeks in this target-rich environment.  I’m not an Agatha Christie fan, but I noted with special interest that the stage adaptation of her radio crime thriller, “The Mousetrap”, has been playing at the Ambassadors Theatre for nearly twenty years and still looks to have a continued long run ahead of it in the West End.

Sunday, January 9 — Once we got our day going, we were joined by Duse and her friends, the Garretsons, for lunch at a pub.  Thus fortified, we made a quick dash through the British Museum to see the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone.  I’m sure the British government is actively considering returning those Parthenon marbles back to their rightful home in Greece.  There’s so much to see in this museum that a follow-up visit is a must.  Jim Nelson opened his wallet and treated us to dinner at Quo Vadis, a legendary Soho eatery known as the Great Dame of Dean Street.  Before an Italian named Peppino Leoni founded the restaurant in 1926 at 28 Dean Street, the building already had a fairly colorful history.  It had been a brothel and, in the 1850s, was home for a time to Karl Marx and his family, giving Herr Marx an early but important exposure to British capitalism.  Although this may seem like a contradiction in terms, Quo Vadis served good British food.  The warm, clubby atmosphere is enhanced by lovely stained glass windows.  Sunday is traditionally a slow theatre day, with most productions not offering a performance, so we lingered quite a while over dinner and digestifs before retiring for a good night’s sleep.

Monday, January 10 — The masses returned to work today and it was our duty – as a form of labor – to go shopping, so we “minded the gap” and took the Bakerloo line back to Regent Street.  We were tempted to unfurl and sign a wad of travelers checks at Penhaligon’s, the court perfumers to Queen Victoria, but we already smelled good enough, so we refrained.  From there it was a short stroll over to Savile Row where the bespoke men’s suits are elegant beyond words but cost more than some people make in a year.  As a reward for showing budgetary restraint, after dinner we headed to the Roundhouse Theatre (a former railway station) in the Chalk Farm district for the evening performance of “Godspell”, a musical version of the gospel of Matthew.  It was very good, with Jacquie-Ann Carr, Julie Covington and Jeremy Irons as headliners.

Tuesday, January 11 — On our way to breakfast, I saw a newspaper headline that today East Pakistan separates from West Pakistan to become the independent nation of Bangladesh, the latest evolutionary stage of those former territories of the British Empire, which was at its peak during the long and prosperous reign of Queen Victoria and her hubby-consort Prince Albert.  Those two left quite a legacy, including numerous buildings and institutions named after them – and we were headed for one of them.  The Victoria and Albert museum is the world’s largest collection of applied and decorative arts and it so happened that they were putting on an exhibit of costumes designed by Cecil Beaton.  It was a delight.  That high society brat could not only take striking photos of beautiful women in gorgeous dresses, but he could design the outfits as well.  For our evening entertainment, we made the transition from high society to hippie low society.  “Hair” was playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre and its loud, colorful mix of rock music, nudity and profanity really gave us a full dose of counterculture.  Is that how our kids really behave?

Wednesday, January 12 —  We were a fair sized traveling group – the Hubbards, the Nelsons, the Garretsons and myself – and it was a little cumbersome for all of us to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.  We held a tea time war council over Earl Grey and a plate of scones with the classic Cornish treatment of jam and cream.  Our consensus was that we could do more sightseeing damage to the cultural landscape if we divided up into small raiding parties, the way the Vikings trashed Britain’s coastline in the eighth century.  So today the couples scattered for various destinations around London and moi, the “single” gal, headed off to see something peculiar I had read about in my guide book. To be precise, I was going to look at Westminster Abbey, a Church of England “Royal Peculiar” which is responsible directly to the Queen herself.  It’s hard to find a place more densely packed with history.  Starting with William the Conqueror, the coronations of all English and British monarchs have taken place there, and anyone who’s anybody gets buried in Westminster: tons of royalty including the first Elizabeth, as well as Geoffrey Chaucer, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.  I’m sure there will be room for the Cralls.  Big Ben was impressive, as were the Houses of Parliament, but since they had declined my offer to address the combined houses on urgent matters of state, I moved on to a more important issue, namely the state of my stomach, which was empty since I had skipped lunch.  To remedy this, I teamed up with the Nelsons and the Garretsons and got our fix of pasta at Giovanni’s of Covent Garden.
After that brief Mediterranean interlude, we directed ourselves, for our evening diversion, to the Royal Court theatre to see the Royal Ballet present Kenneth McMillin’s production of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”.  I was really looking forward to this event and, although I managed an air of jaded and worldly indifference as curtain time approached, my insides were a whirlwind of nervous anticipation.  Prior to leaving Cleveland, I had gotten the juicy and controversial backstory.  Before this ballet premiered on February 9, 1965, the original lead dancers, Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable, had been replaced – for marketing reasons – by Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn (who was 19 years Nureyev’s senior) at the insistence of American impresario Sol Hurok.  There were hurt feelings all around, but opening night turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime event.  An extraordinary chemistry between the two leads let them dance as one body and one soul.  The effect on the audience was electrifying.  The standing ovation with thunderous and unending applause led to forty three curtain calls.  Anyone lucky enough to have a ticket that evening knew that they had witnessed history.  Now, by the time this midwest gal had got herself to London, Dame Fonteyn had the evening off and was very capably replaced by Merle Park as Juliet.  Nureyev, however, was still at it.  In my humble opinion, no one else can dance the part of Romeo as he did.  With leaps that seemed to leave him hanging in the air, his strength and his grace (and those tights!) all combined in a state of perfection.  For me, this was truly an unforgettable experience.

Thursday, January 13 —  My aesthetic pulse was bounding the following morning and I felt fully equal to the task I had assigned myself for the day.  Specifically, I was headed to the Tate Gallery to see the works of J. M. W. Turner, a nineteenth century artist I had always admired.  If you haven’t had your daily religious experience, his luminous, storm-swept marine landscapes can provide it.  That guy could paint, and for several pleasant hours I was transported into the lush chromatic universe that his eye and his brush created.  I rendezvoused with my fellow Vikings for lunch at Don Luigi’s, another beam of Latinate sunshine.  We were seized with that recurrent urge to spend money and this time marched to King’s Road, an established upscale shopping locale.  Naturally, Green & Stone, one of London’s top art supply stores, caught my eye.  I stepped in to browse the gorgeous selection of materials on offer.  Sadly, I wasn’t in my painting and sketching mode for this trip.  For the evening’s entertainment, we conveyed ourselves to the Wyndham Theatre to see Diana Rigg and Corin Redgrave portray the star-crossed lovers in Ronald Millar’s “Abelard and Heloise”.  An excellent production of a sad story.

Friday, January 14 — Our gang of plunderers had been considering an attack on the antique shops of Portobello Road.  I could picture myself buying an extra airplane seat home for the Louis XIV armoire I would buy there.  Over breakfast, I was informed by my guide book that Portobello Road in Kensington takes its name from the British capture in 1740 of the Spanish town of Puerto Bello in Panama.  I was very relieved to learn that.  So I went antiquing with the Hubbards and as we made our inspection rounds, I thought that most of the stores had just overpriced bric-a-brac.  One small pleasure was the Portobello Print and Map shop and I got a few small items there.  Then after dinner, the evening’s diversion was William Douglas Home’s “The Secretary Bird”, a comedy about a writer named Hugh Walford and his turbulent marriage.

Saturday, January 15 —  We got the day off to a leisurely start, as if to celebrate having completed a full week of “doing” London to the best of our ability.  We’re all glad we invested in good walking shoes.  After breakfast, Digby went into a meditative trance to commune with the shopping gods.  They recommended Beauchamp Place and we were agreeable to that.  Thus it was that the Piccadilly Line transported us to the Knightsbridge tube station, which is just a few blocks from our destination.  I would have to say that Beauchamp Place didn’t light a fire under us, although, since I had gotten into a cartographic mood, I did enjoy browsing the offerings in The Map House.  What was really on our minds was that we had walked by Harrods and committed the crime of not going in.  We escaped prosecution by returning there to spend several hours in the world’s leading luxury department store, which of course included lunch in their café.  Lunch was better than the evening’s play, “Butley”, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates.   Bates looked fat and the play was only mediocre.

Sunday, January 16 — This was the Lord’s Day and the best we all could do in the way of doing the Lord’s work was to hunt down a church to visit.  St Bartholomew-the-Great, located conveniently in Smithfield in the City of London, appeared on our radar.  It was founded in the twelfth century when a fellow named Rahere had a dream in which he was told to build a church, no questions asked.  He brought King Henry the First on board as patron.  The style is Norman with Gothic flourishes and other stylistic additions over the centuries.  Like many of London’s historic buildings, it’s tightly packed amongst newer structures, with no grand vistas or sightlines because of the crowded placement.  There was a service in progress so we sat down to appreciate the ceremony.  The stately hymnal music rose from the church’s mighty organ and drifted like a prayer through the ancient nave of stone blocks and carved wood.  We felt almost Anglican afterwards.  The rest of the day was secular, highlighted by a visit to the National Gallery.  We were especially interested to see Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, which, at the time of our visit, was the subject of a genteel ownership struggle between the Getty Museum and the British government.  We were famished after all these cultural hijinx, and, with dinner at the intimate Terrazza, we maintained our loyalty to Italy.  The various pasta entrees were excellent and the velvety Ruffino Chianti transported us to Tuscany.  We all had an open dance card after dinner since this was our second theatre-free Sunday evening.

Monday, January 17 — This was the start of our second week in Londinium, and wouldn’t the Romans be surprised to see how their muddy little settlement had grown.  Over breakfast, we took stock of our financial resources and, even though our sightseeing had made heavy inroads, we vowed to continue.  The morning’s touristic priority was the London Silver Vaults on Chancery Lane – an exclusive underground warren housing dozens of silver merchants, whose glittering display cases dazzle the eye and leave the visitor gobsmacked.  Even if I made some purchases there, I’d still keep my eye open for any loose, unclaimed silver items lying around on the floor.  As it turned out, darn it, the floor was swept clean, but I made a few small acquisitions anyway.  Digby got one up on me for lunch by suggesting oysters at Sweetings, a place I had never heard of.  It’s one of the oldest restaurants in London, specializes in seafood and is only open weekdays for lunch.  I passed on the oysters but tucked into a divine Cornish brill.  The evening’s diversion, “No Sex Please, We’re British” at the Strand, was designed to be a farce, and so it was, hilariously highlighting the dangers of foreign mail order.

Tuesday, January 18 — Today involved some real work, as I had promised Jim to hunt down some Old World billiard cloth.  He seemed to think it would be better than anything he could get in the States.  Although the top maker of billiards felt is the Iwan Simonis company in Belgium, I did what I could from London and ultimately spent three frustrating hours on the phone trying to locate a local source.  No luck.  It took me most of the day to recover from that exertion.  The day ended with quite a bit of star-studded excitement.  We went to see “Voyages Round My Father” at the Haymarket Theatre. The cast starred Alec Guiness and Jeremy Brett.  We sat in the front row, practically touching the actors.  On the way out of the theater we saw James Stewart and his wife leaving the same show.  Mrs. Stewart was wearing a full length mink coat.  Quite the elegant and distinguished couple.

Wednesday, January 19 — We’re starting to wind down, with a plan to fly home tomorrow.  I started my day mid-morning with a solo jaunt to Harrods where I spent some time in their perfume department considering an assortment of very expensive custom-mixed fragrances but, in the end, settling for some nice off-the-shelf selections.  Smelling as good as I now did, I felt confident visiting the Tower of London, which has a pretty stinky history.  It was a resented symbol of oppression when William the Conqueror built it in 1078 and later served as a prison for Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh.  Is it just my own silly notion, or is British history mostly a tale of royals behaving badly?  I had dinner with the Hubbards but we split up afterwards.  They went to the ballet and I went to see Anthony Shaffer’s “The Sleuth” at St. Martin’s Theatre.  It starred Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter.  A real thriller that kept you on the edge of your seat.  No late hour partying afterwards, though.  It was straight back to the hotel to pack and get some rest.

Thursday, January 20 — I got a good night’s sleep and I’ll need it since today is jet lag day.  We all took the Piccadilly line out to Heathrow and got there with a little time to spare.  Our BOAC 747 – more an enormous flying auditorium than an airplane – lifted off at 2:00 PM.  Because of some labor unrest and strikes at Air Canada, we flew to Detroit before making the short hop to Cleveland.  That made our total travel time twelve hours and I was pretty tired.  I was very glad to see Jim when he met us at the airport.  What an experience this was for all of us.  London is easily one of the greatest cities in the world.  I wrote Digby a note:  “This was really a good time!  Thanks for letting me go with you.  -Betty”.