This view of the house later known as ‘Fishers’ from the west, across the pond on Layer Heath/Malting Green and onto what later became known as ‘Potash Field’ beyond was painted by Mrs Mary B. Cottingham, a local painter and member of the Parish Council, in the 1920s. Note the smaller size of the newer, northerly cottage, to the left of the image from the viewer’s perspective, with only one window, rather than two as on the south side.

An image of the changed house from the same viewpoint in the 1950s, artist unknown

Fishers from the same view, the last time it was visible beyond the foliage, sometime in the 1980s, with pony and trap in the foreground. Photographed by my late brother Jules William Fiske Harrison, 1969-1988, who was, according to The Times, “a famously skilled and fearless skier” and who is buried in Layer-de-la-Haye church

The front of Fishers is invisible from the green today

‘Fishers’, Malting Green, Layer de la Haye: The History Of The House On The Heath

There is an amateur history of the house that became known as ‘Fishers’, published by the Layer-de-la-Haye Women’s Institute in 1965, which says that the house began as a woodman’s cottage in about 1550. However, the carpentry is far older – perhaps even a couple of centuries older – than that.

From the publication produced by the Layer-de-la-Haye Women’s Institute in 1965 for the Golden Jubilee. The view from the east. 

The same view in 2006

What survives inside the later house is an ancient timber building: a smaller framed structure, originally perhaps one or two rooms below and one above, no more than twenty-two feet by twelve on the ground. It was subsequently doubled into two cottages, side-by-side and eventually absorbed into the present house.

The oak frame of the original house survives with remarkable completeness. The ceiling is carried on sixteen massive, irregular joists, reduced at their ends to simple central tenons and pegged into a great binding beam. Two former external walls retain long diagonal braces trenched into the uprights; one passing brace runs for a dozen feet through successive members of the frame. The principal timbers were assembled green and have since split spectacularly as they dried around their fixed joints, some seasoning fissures now exceeding an inch in width. There are redundant mortices where earlier braces or other members have disappeared, while later generations have reinforced the old frame rather than replacing it.

The closest Essex parallels for that combination of central-tenoned flooring and trenched or passing wall bracing lie chiefly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are examples of the underlying carpentry vocabulary by about 1300, so there is no technological barrier to an early date; what pulls the balance later is simply the distribution of the closest dated analogues.

My present working probabilities would put its earliest origin mid-14^th century, perhaps the narrow interval between the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and the arrival of the Black Death in 1348–49, continuing with high possibility through the Battle of Agincourt and the rest of the Hundred Years’ War, with probability declining to near zero as we reach the early Tudor period.

That early possibility becomes rather less extravagant once one stops assuming that the first inhabitants were as poor as the agricultural labourers who occupied the building five centuries later. The later history of the house known as Fishers on its acre of land associates it with an enclosed portion of Layer Heath that became known as ‘Potash Field’, roughly nine further acres, separate from the vast “waste-land” of woods and pasture and the great farms around it.

That cannot simply be projected backwards into the fourteenth century; but neither need the medieval occupant be imagined as a peasant. A woodman, forester or other rural specialist with an acrage in the double figures is perfectly compatible with a small house, especially one who may have returned from service to the King against the French with saved pay and earned loot, the soldier’s due at that time.

So is the carpentry. The trees were selected economically — crooked trunks, knots and natural deviations were accepted — but there is an enormous quantity of oak in the floor and the joists are closely set. The work more than competent. It is heavily built, technically assured, parsimonious but definitely not makeshift.

Before The House

Christopher Saxton’s 1576, Map of Essex

The village is older than the house. A church certainly existed by 1128, and part of the present chancel is twelfth-century. By 1189 Richard I was confirming the church of Layer and its revenues to the Augustinian Priory of St Botolph in Colchester. For centuries the parish was supplied ecclesiastically from the great religious houses of Colchester, first St John’s Abbey and then St Botolph’s Priory. (Source: Layer Churches)

It was a tiny and dispersed rural community. The Domesday Book combines the three Layers – de-la-Haye, Marney and Breton – that exist today into one. The word itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon word legra, meaning look out, and from the tower of church, which is built on the highest point of the village, one can see the coastline five miles east, where the Vikings regularly raided, and, according to Burke’s, my own family’s Fiske ancestors arrived at the Battle of Maldon in 991 A.D. ten miles further southward along the coast.

Layer-de-la-Haye remained very small. The 1327 lay subsidy raised only 19 shillings 7 pence from the village, whereas the assessment in 1524 was £8, 18 shiullings and a penny, more than nine times as much. (Source: ERA)

I would picture the Layer of the 1340s not as a modern village in miniature but as perhaps a dozen scattered households: manor, church, mill, small holdings and cottages dispersed across forest and woods, fields and heath.

The church itself gives some sense of what happened next. Historic England dates the surviving chancel principally to the twelfth century, but the nave and west tower to the fourteenth. Local church history records the reason: after the Black Death the church became utterly derelict, and the canons of St Botolph’s rebuilt the nave and tower after the recovery from that catasrpohe after the 1350s. (Source:Historic England) The old chancel is therefore the physical residue of the pre-plague church; the larger building which one sees today began to rise out of a near apocalypse that killed half of England and an even higher percentage of this region.

That is the landscape into which the earliest version of this house fits. If it was raised in the late 1340s, then its first occupants watched a community collapse around them within a year or two. If it was built after 1350, it belongs instead to the reconstruction: a countryside with land but too few people, changing tenures, higher wages and opportunities for survivors. Either is historically plausible.

A Plantagenet House

An article from ¡Hola! magazine in 2014 about my visit to the house of my cousins, the Gosnolds, and their house in Suffolk. Martha’s Vineyard in the USA is named after Martha Gosnold, and they are descendants of Margaret Plantagenet, last born of that name, Countess of Salisbury and richest woman in England who was executed for her religion by her cousin the King Henry VIII. Her brother was a cardinal and she was made a martyr of the Catholic Church.

Another probable period is the mid-fifteenth century. In that case ‘Fishers’ arose while Henry VI was king, perhaps at almost exactly the time he founded Eton, my old school, in 1440.

Fishers would still have stood far outside anything we would recognise as the centre of a village. Layer was not laid out around streets. It was a scattering of holdings separated by cultivated land, woodland and extensive “waste”.

Nor should the house be imagined in its present proportions. The oldest coherent structural cell appears to have been small. Later work extended it longitudinally; another framed section was eventually attached, and the building became the pair of cottages recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The original roof has gone and the roof-line was later raised, depriving us of some of the most diagnostic medieval carpentry.

Layer Heath

For the later history we cease having to reason principally from carpentry, because the maps arrive.

The house that became ‘Fishers’ and the enclosure that became ‘Potash Field’, circled in blue, on a detail of Chapman & André, A Map of the County of Essex (1777).

John Chapman and Peter André’s A Map of the County of Essex from an Actual Survey taken in 1772, 1773 and 1774, published in 1777, was exceptionally detailed for its date: roughly two inches to the mile, showing individual rural houses, roads and many tracks. Fishers is already there. (Source: Essex Archives Online.)

The setting is much more revealing than the building symbol. What is now Malting Green formed part of the enormous Layer Heath, an irregular expanse which the Colchester Historic Environment Record calculates at about 300 acres in 1777. (Source Colchester Heritage Explorer.) Fishers and the field stood as an island squarely within its boundaries. There was no road or even track close to the property. The house related directly to the heath.

That landscape was already changing rapidly by the end of the century. The 1799 Ordnance Surveyor’s Drawing of Witham, OSD 140-2, the manuscript survey from which the later one-inch mapping was produced, shows new fields biting into the heath and Potash Field itself divided more intricately. (Source: Wikidata.)

Two Cottages

The two semi-detached cottages later called ‘Fishers’ are marked as lot 169, which is clearly divided within the building and outside, with two entrances onto the green to the west, and footpaths running around the house, rejoining either side of a fence to the east of the house which incorporates both the well and out door facilities.

By the first large-scale Ordnance Survey the building can be read almost as an archaeological plan. Essex County Series, First Edition, sheet XXXVI.7, surveyed 1874 and published about 1876, shows the divided cottages, the well, the small service building behind them, and a network of narrow paths. Two entrances lead from Malting Green, one to either side of the divided building; paths pass around the cottages, meet at the well and continue towards the little ‘outbuilding’ – or privy – and Potash Field. A physical boundary — fence, hedge or similar — also appears to have separated parts of the domestic plot.

Most remarkably, much of this minor landscape survives. The well is still there, complete with its later cast-iron hand pump. The gazebo occupying the position of the nineteenth-century outbuilding is still there, although rebuilt but still with tell tale hole in the middle of its floor.

Fishers on Google Maps

Walter Fisher

In 1921 the great Berechurch Hall manorial estate was broken up. Essex Record Office preserves the enormous sale catalogue: the estate ran to thousands of acres across Berechurch and Layer-de-la-Haye, including farms, cottages and the Manor of Blind Knights. (Sourcew: Cat UK.) Among the properties sold were the pair of tiny cottages which would later become known as Fishers.

The sale particulars give the northern cottage to Walter Fisher as occupant and the southern to Joseph Cooke. The 1921 census supplies the human scale. Fisher, a ploughman aged fifty, lived there with his wife Ada, fifty-one, and six children. Cooke, an agricultural labourer aged fifty-one, lived next door with his wife Elizabeth, forty-eight, and two children.

The entire pair of cottages measured only about 36 feet by 12 feet on the ground, roughly 432 square feet per floor and about 864 square feet over both floors together. Each cottage consisted essentially of a tiny kitchen, living room and one bedroom. Twelve people occupied the pair. Eight of them — Walter, Ada and six children — had only one bedroom between them. Water still came from the well outside; sanitation remained outside the house.

What makes those facts vivid is the date. In April 1919, while Parliament was debating the housing crisis which produced the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919, MPs cited an Oxfordshire survey of about 1,000 rural cottages, more than seventy of which contained more than a married couple in a single bedroom. “Very often,” the House was told, there were five and six children living in a bedroom; one recorded family had teenage boys and girls sleeping in the same room as their parents. “That sort of thing cannot be tolerated any longer.” (Source: Hansard.)

Later that year the Government stated its minimum proper family accommodation as one living room and three bedrooms: one for the parents, one for boys and one for girls. (Source: Parliament API.) At the same time, Walter Fisher was living with his wife and six children in a cottage with one bedroom.

The building may therefore have been not only the oldest domestic structure in Layer de la Haye, but the poorest: a house whose extreme economy of space survived from the medieval rural world into the age of motor cars, telephones and the first council housing. 1921 was the year F. Scott Fitzgerlad set the opulence of The Great Gastby and Evelyn Waugh that of Bridehead Revisited.

The building’s present name comes from that period. In the 1921 sale it is simply a pair of cottages. Later deeds identify the property by its former occupiers, W. Fisher and J. Cook. By 1950 the name has hardened: the probate record for Katharine Pennington Leeston-Smith gives her address simply as Fishers, Layer-de-la-Haye. The name is therefore not ancient. It is Walter Fisher fossilised in the postal address.

From Labourers To Gentry

The social transition after 1921 is abrupt.

The cottages were purchased from the Berechurch Hall manorial estate by the Thorburn family of Berkshire who had made their fortune in British India and intermarried with the Leeston-Smith family who own the 19^th century Grade II* listed house across the road from Fishers.

In 1939 they were transferred within the family to their in-laws, the Leeston-Smiths. The conveyance still describes the cottages as “recently in the occupation of W. Fisher and J. Cook”: both labouring households had therefore gone by then.

In 1941 the two elderly Leeston-Smith ladies formalised their interests in the property between themselves. Walter Fisher died in the Colchester district that same year.

The physical transformation of the cottages belongs to this period. Two elderly ladies accustomed to the substantial house across the Green were not likely to move into a pair of labourers’ cottages while continuing to carry water from a pump and use an earth privy in the garden. The most economical explanation is that the first serious plumbing and sanitation were installed around 1939–41 and the conversion of two labourers’ households into one genteel residence. The old well and out-house that remain today were simply left behind.

Muriel Margaret Leeston-Smith died in 1946. Katharine Pennington Leeston-Smith died at Fishers on 1 May 1950; her probate estate was £13,968 14s. 4d., substantial money at the time.(See footnote [1] below.) Her probate address proves that by then the house had acquired the name it still bears.

Her brother-in-law, Colonel John Frederick Pennington Thorburn, M.C., was left the house in her will, and moved in with his wife.(See footnote [2] below.) His younger brother Brigadier Thorburn lived across the road at Malting Green House and that was the period during which the greatest changes were effected on the house, not only unifying it, but going on to more than double the newly single house’s size while preserving and maintaining the ancient structure within, constructing a tennis court and an automobile garage that stands to this day accessible across the middle of what is now Malting Green.

Colonel Thorburn died in 1958, and the house was purchased by an even more senior army officer and war hero, Brigadier Ord Henderson Tidbury, M.C., who did works of his own, including building at second double doored garage opening on to the green from the other side of the house. He died in 1961.

From him it went to Lieutenant-Commander Kenneth Binfield Brown, D.S.C, of the Royal Navy, and later a director of Tate & Lyle, who completed the modern additions, building a large car port as well. and from him to his widow.

(During that period Malting Green House passed from the Thorburn family to that stockbroker, partner of Cazenove & Co, and descendant of the author of King Solomon’s Mines, Rae Haggard Lister, who lives there to this day.)

1972

My parents bought Fishers from Mrs Brown in 1972, together with over half of Potash Field which she divided with a fence, accessing her portion via the historic access over Malting Green in order to tend her herd of a dozen or more Holstein Friesian cattle. Meanwhile our larger portion, accessed via a gateway on Fields Farm Road, variously had sheep, horses, grew corn brielfly, then hay and then wild flowers. They built a swimming pool but other changes have been cosmetic and negligible.

By then Fishers was recognisably a comfortable country house. There is a symmetry in the family which eventually settled here. My father, Clive Fiske Harrison, was born in Colchester, was educated at nearby Felsted School and Cambridge University and, having moved to London for work, bought Fishers in 1972 to be close to his parents at Aldouron House on Mersea Island and his siblings in nearby Peldon, Abberton and Fingringhoe.

The following year he left Panmure Gordon where he worked under Ian Cameron, father of the future Prime Minister David, and founded the stockbroking firm which eventually become Fiske plc.

His coat of arms at the College of Heralds is styled Harrison of Layer-de-la-Haye and quarters by descent the arms of the East Anglian Fiske family. The Fiskes are deeply rooted in the eastern counties, noted as the landowners under the name ‘Fisc’ in Norfolk in the Domesday Book of 1085 at Wood Dalling, and then as Lords of the Manor in Stadhaugh, in the Parish of Laxfield in Suffolk by the 1200s as Ffyske.

Meanwhile, this North Essex house has passed through an extraordinary social arc. It may have begun under the Plantagenets as the compact holding of a woodman in the midst of an immense heath. It survived plague, enclosure and the disappearance of neighbouring dwellings. It became two cottages and, as late as 1921, contained twelve people in conditions Parliament had just declared intolerable. Within twenty years it crossed almost instantaneously from agricultural labourers to landed gentry. Since 1972 it has remained one family home.

The great irony is that the later house concealed the earlier one almost too successfully. Fishers was overlooked when Layer-de-la-Haye’s historic buildings were surveyed for listing in 1982. Yet inside it the medieval building remains: crooked green oak, great pegged joists, passing braces, redundant mortices and all. The later centuries did not destroy it. They simply accumulated around it.

A. R. Fiske-Harrison, Esq., M.A. (Oxon.), M.Sc. (Lond.)

My parents and family and friends under one of the great poplar trees in the summer of 2016

Footnotes

[1] For comparison, our other residence, the garden flat of 114, Eaton Square in Belgravia, London, SW1, sold for £14,000 at that time, although the Duke of Westminster only sold leases, not freeholds. When it was a unified house it had been that of Sir George Smyth Baden- Powell, brother of the founder of the Boy Scouts. When I grew up there, our upstairs neighbour was Damian Aspinall, the son of the great conservationist, gambler and friend of Lord Lucan, John Aspinall, along with Damian’s two daughters, Tansey and Freya. I had no idea at the time that my cousin-by-marriage, Hamish’s aunt, Min Musker, had been married to John Aspinall.

[2] Colonel Thorburn’s wife was born Dorothy Melville de Chair, whose first cousin was the mother of the wife of Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, MP, who was himself so often a guest at lunch in the old boardroom of Fiske & Co, incorporating Bragg, Stockdale, Hall & Co (founded in 1824, and thus the oldest independent stockbroking firm in London), when my father was still chairman in the offices at Salisbury House in the City, and where I remain a director.

Oriiginal article – with free registration – online here: https://spectator.com/article/how-the-king-can-help-save-dartmoors-ponies/

THE SPECTATOR

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

How the King can help save Dartmoor’s ponies

20 June 2026

‘Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills.’ This was how Arthur Conan Doyle described Dartmoor following his visit in June 1901, and that was what I expected to find 125 years after his research for what would become The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

In its place, I found the bright, beautiful light of Devon in summer, revealing a landscape which is almost voluptuously organic, an excess of life, great trees and stones coated in rich mosses, criss-crossed with streams and rivers rushing into rapids. Suitably, I was shown Dartmoor by a pair of hounds I was tasked with caring for, Shelka, a blond German Shepherd who resembles a pretty white wolf, and her wildling daughter, Bolero, whose father was a Carpathian wolf-dog hybrid.

My guides on Dartmoor, observe the wolf colouration on Bolero, closest

As we walked among the herds of sheep and cattle in that sunlit wilderness there was another, shyer, less civilised animal standing in small groups eyeing me and my lupo-canine companions. They intrigued both the horse-breeder in me and the former biology student. These are the semi-wild Dartmoor Hill Ponies.* These creatures have lived here for thousands of years, but they are facing an existential threat thanks to Natural England, a quango that could consign these animals to history.

[*Note: The truth is that there is only one truly wild horses – ponies being horses under 4ft 9in at the shoulder – left in the world, Przewalski’s horse, which is its own species – Equus ferus rather than the domesticated Equus caballus– and thus the ponies of Dartmoor are classified by biologists as feral, like the Brumby and the Dingo in Australia or the Mustang and the Carolina Dog in the US.]

Those who live with Dartmoor Hill Ponies call them semi-wild, but the reality is more interesting: they arrived from 2,500 BC onwards with the Britons of the Bronze Age. Just as these Celts almost entirely replaced the Neolithic aboriginal people’s of the British Isles, so their horses took over from the vanishing population of wild indigenous horses.

Across the rest of the country, our first ancestors’ settlements were built over, their culture overwritten by Roman and Angle, Saxon and Jute, Viking and Norman – although with remarkably little genetic impact. Their most prized possession, horses, were fully genetically recoded by injections of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norse stock.

Dartmoor

However, on Dartmoor, this isn’t what happened. As the climate changed from around 1,500 BC on, becoming cooler, wetter, stormier and with a rising water table, the land became untenably boggy. The people who had built the 5,000 ruined hut circles that remain today, simply upped and left. Some of their horses remained. These became the wild ponies of the moors where the River Dart rises, the most ancient and indigenous breeding population left in Britain today.

And these, as the owner of the dogs and one of the wild pony’s strongest supporters, Sophie Windsor Clive, explained to me, are what the paradoxically-named Natural England have elected to drive to the verge of extinction.

Natural England has effectively demanded that all livestock grazing on the moor is reduced substantially, by up to 75 per cent, to protect other habitats, plants and species. The government’s environmental quango claims that this will help protect the diversity of Dartmoor. It also insists that decisions about which animals graze on Dartmoor rests with individual landowners. But the wild ponies – of which there are about 900 – will inevitably pay the price.

What is their animus against the Dartmoor Hill Pony? As one would expect from a “non-departmental public body”, nothing at all: it isn’t personal. They have simply decided that the moors are being overgrazed and it is damaging biodiversity. And so, they are planning on reducing “grazing units”. That bureaucratic term bundles together 100,000 sheep with minor historical links to the land, 10,000 cattle with none, and fewer than a thousand of these hardy little equines. So, despite the hard scientific fact that horses, as non-ruminant, highly mobile grazers are infinitely better for biodiversity as opposed to the scorched earth approach to feeding of their even-toed distant cousins, it will be the unprofitable horses, who lack the lobby group support of everyone from the National Union of Farmers on down, who will suffer.

The thing that scares any true biologist are the numbers: with fewer than 1,000 ponies left on the moor, the combination of herd structure and breeding mathematics is already close to lethality. The real bottleneck with horses is stallions, not mares. Once you begin squeezing the number of active breeding males, you can push a population into long-term genetic narrowing astonishingly fast. Exmoor shows what happens afterwards: the animals survive, yes, but as a managed remnant population with obvious bottleneck signatures in the genetics.

You do not immediately get five-legged foals and screaming deformity; you simply burn genetic capital quietly until one day you wake up and realise your “wild” pony is now effectively a conservation exhibit. It brings to mind the last thylacine, the so-called marsupial wolf which the Dingo replaced, who died alone in a zoo in 1936. Or the last aurochs, the truly wild ancestral cattle, who died alone in a Polish Royal forest in 1627. This is not because the animal is intrinsically doomed, but because bureaucratic tidying and agricultural lobbying are accidentally and nonchalantly shoving it over the edge.

So who can save the Dartmoor Hill Pony? The heads of the major political parties have all announced they will, because it is a costless and priceless vote winning statement to make which can be forgotten in time for the next news cycle. I would suggest another route.

In the early 20th century, when the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, began making the nascent sport of polo glamorous and popular, he decided to create a new type of pony for the game. He wanted to bring in Arabians for their speed and agility, but had to get them under the then required pony height limit and wanted more hardiness and stamina. So he cross bred them with Dartmoor Hill Ponies, and in doing so created the Dartmoor Pony official breed.

Our present Prince of Wales, like his father, is no stranger to polo or conservation, and is presently embarking on a host of environmental projects on Dartmoor as one of its largest landowners in his role as Duke of Cornwall. In fact, he is visiting one as I write. Perhaps, he would care to bring the Dartmoor Hill Pony under his protection as one of them. By which I do not mean the sensitive selection of Royal patronage between rival charities, or political interventions or even public corrections of bureaucratic crudeness. Instead, the minor addition of the distinguishing words “conservation” and “agricultural” before the phrase “grazing units” to denote horses as a different class to sheep and cattle, suggested to Natural England by Dartmoor’s largest landowner, the Duchy of Cornwall, preventing this unwarranted cull with the stroke of a pen.

For without such a Royal intervention, Britain, in its infinite managerial wisdom, may now be in the process of destroying a most ancient and indigenous upland horse population, and not because anyone hates them, but because the system cannot distinguish between a sheep, a cow and a living fragment of historical ecology.

Please do click through to the original article – with free registration – online here, as clicks today will save the wild ponies’ tomorrow: https://spectator.com/article/how-the-king-can-help-save-dartmoors-ponies/

Written by

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

My latest article in The Spectator (and another one quoting me in the same issue)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Desmond Morris was a master of provocative truths

25 April 2026

Article as published online here

When the recently deceased zoologist Desmond Morris chose the title for his 1967 book – The Naked Ape – that would make his name, one wonders if he didn’t look back at the last book of ‘popular science’ in the field of biology. Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Descent of Man scandalised Victorian society by claiming that humans are descended from apes. Morris seemingly decided to go that one step further and claim that we still are apes, just hairless ones.

Morris was a master of provocative truths. He enjoyed generating pseudo-scandal by extrapolating from known scientific facts towards possible implications in realms which were difficult to stomach even in the Swinging Sixties. He put forward the idea, for example, that women’s lips emphasised with rouge were a form of signalling mimicry of their genital lips – the ‘naked ape’ indeed. Just as their breasts were meant to mimic the buttocks – the usual view for our primate ancestors, given their preferred sexual positions.

It was actually his next book, expanding on that topic – Manwatching – which caught my own teenage interest in the other subject that sells just as well as sex: violence. Morris pointed out that a man in an argument with a flushed face has all his blood in his skin, whereas a man with a pale face has all his blood in his muscles and therefore is far more likely to strike first.

Morris’s originality lay in altering how people perceived the human animal

It was dramatic inferences from observations like this that led me to biology as an undergraduate at Morris’s alma mater, Oxford. It was there, in the Tinbergen* Building which housed the then Faculty of Zoology, that I met him thirty years ago. These inferences continue to inform my work today, including my research on the interaction and co-evolution between humans and wolves and their domesticated descendant, the dog, for my book, The Children Of Wolves: How Men And Dogs Were Forged In The Land Of Ice.

Sex and violence are great selling points, but the true controversy that Morris caused was at a far deeper level. He lobbed the grenade of hard natural science – animal behaviour – into the soft social scientific soup of the then-dominant schools of psychology: post-Freudian analysis and Californian self-affirming therapy.

Morris’s originality lay in altering how people – civilian and scientist alike – perceived the human animal. He opened the door to other scientists who were not so much noted for their empirical research as the conceptual shifts they caused like his near-contemporary and friend at Oxford, Richard Dawkins, whose The Selfish Gene of 1976 shifted the paradigm from the communitarian sociobiology of E. O. Wilson and others back to the harsh Darwinian reality.

Interestingly, both came from the tutelage of one of the fathers of animal behaviour, *Niko Tinbergen, who argued for developed behaviours as a more predominant cause of behaviour, as opposed to Konrad Lorenz’s view of genetically determined instinct. (It is no coincidence that these giants of biology who met in 1936 endured very different wars, the developmentally-biased Dutchman as a prisoner of the Nazis, the genetically-slanted Austrian as a card-carrying member of the party, even though they jointly took the Nobel in 1973, the same year Morris went to work with Tinbergen.)

He did not, however, begin as a scientist but as an artist. In 1950, at the age of 22, Morris debuted as a painter alongside one of the fathers of surrealism, Joan Miró – he would later befriend Salvador Dalí as well – and only later did he turn to zoology.

Morris’s first book was The Biology Of Art in 1962. It was there that he posited that the urge to represent oneself artistically – common to all primates – came from the urge to make a mark on the world. This led to his painting work with Congo the chimpanzee. Courtesy of Morris, Congo had his own exhibition in 1957 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

It was reading about this that led to my own time with the bonobo Kanzi and his sister Panbanisha at Georgia State University’s Ape Language Research Centre in 2001. There I saw the limits of the strict academic, peer-reviewed scientific method that one can abandon in popular science. The biggest problem in dealing with great apes, who have five times the functional upper body strength of a human of the same weight, is getting them to submit to controlled study. Asking Kanzi, time after time through headphones, to identify which picture was of an apple rather than an orange, eventually led to him understandably losing his patience. He would tear the headphones off, break them in half and then flip a 200lb surgical steel table through the air with one hand.

Panbanisha, a bonobo, with her eldest son Nyota (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison, 2001)

What was far more interesting to me, and apparently scientifically irrelevant, was what he would do when he was given a full head mask of a gorilla – the natural enemy of bonobos in the wild. He would put it over his own head and chase Panbanisha around the laboratory. At first, you could see her mock-fear as she ran from her brother, but that faux panic – as with a human child – began to degrade into true fear. At that point Kanzi stopped and took off the mask to reassure her it was still him. Then he handed her the mask, which she put on, and they began the game of chase again in the opposite direction.

That pretence of the bonobos perceiving their sibling as another, dangerous species is far more important than whether they could reliably identify 100 pictures or 101, use 300 symbols or 301. That, right there, is the suspension of disbelief, the origin of drama itself.

It is that realm of scientific outlay into the wider world of human existence, that speculation beyond what academic authority will allow, that Morris opened the door to. And many others, including myself, have continued to pass through, combining art and science, license and scholarship, to speculate in ways that continue to fascinate us to this day.

P.S. It was nice to see on the same weekend as the above article of mine appeared in The Spectator, my words on a very different part of the animal world quoted in another article (online in full here): 

“For the six days in April, the Maestranza ring in Seville is the centre of the bullfighting world. During one of the traditional corrida, Spain’s greatest living matador, Jose Antonio Morante, made a mistake. Local press described ‘un exceso de confianza’. Suddenly, he found himself with the bull at his back, charging, and was gored at the top of his thigh, suffering injuries so eye-watering that they made international news. One of his colleagues, Roca Rey, was also hospitalised several days later, with a severe injury to his right leg. Morante described the ‘immense pain’ of the incident. Sport has a complex relationship with danger…. The appeal to the audience is straightforward. Some are agonised or repulsed by introducing physical danger into something as ephemeral as sport. But for the rest, there is more riding on the outcome of dangerous pursuits. Ther is more tension to the proceedings and a greater rush at their conclusion. (Bullfighting enthusiasts may bristle at this. The leading English-language chronicler, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, does not consider bullfighting a sport, as ‘no-one keeps score and there is no way for anyone or anything to win’. He prefers to think of it as a category of performance art, whose success is determined by ‘how much the audience has been emotionally moved’.)”

Introduced by H. M. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker-Bowles, Natasha Hamilton, formerly of the band Atomic Kitten and, far right, William Sitwell, restaurant critic for The Daily Telegraph, host as Roy Sommer, Managing Director of Davidoff cigars presents the ‘Davidoff Bon Viveur of The Year Award’ to Alexander Fiske-Harrison, for his article ‘Courage Best’. On the left is AFH’s old friend, whom he had not seen since 1991 and who recently left the British Army after 23 years, including two decades in the 22 SAS, and with whom AFH is now working on new project, more which later (Photo: Jules Annan)

Click on image for PDF

COURAGE BEST

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Britain’s only bullfighter and veteran bull runner, pays homage to British stoicism and bravery

THE most laconic tale of British bravery in combat is arguably Lord Uxbridge’s sang froid remark after being struck by cannon shot at the Battle of Waterloo: “My God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg.”

To which the Duke of Wellington replied:

“Yes, Sir, so you have.”

One doesn’t need to be a Kenneth Tynan to recognise this as a performance, even if made unconsciously, with understatement used to say infinitely more than the words themselves. It does not make much difference if the story is apocryphal: the mere fact that the story has survived in popular consciousness in this form tells us exactly what the British perceive their own particular brand of bravery to be.

It is also hardly surprising, then, that I grew up with the Charge of the Light Brigade as my model, as it was to the British Army. Indeed, it is from the cannon captured that day that most of the Victoria Cross medals are cast (more of the VC later).

Compare this form of courage with a tale from my adopted country of Spain. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the medieval Alcázar fortress of Toledo was under siege to little effect, when the attackers captured the son of the colonel of the garrison. They reconnected the severed telephone lines and summoned the colonel to the parapets so he could watch as his son was handed the telephone to tell him that he would be executed unless the fortification surrendered. The colonel told his son that ‘he knew what to do’. Father and son saluted one another, the son turned and told his captor to shoot him, which he duly did, before he turned to salute the father, who returned the salute.

The tales of Uxbridge and the Spanish colonel are extreme examples of courage. But like a cocktail mixed with alien versions of similar ingredients, the latter’s is somehow un-British. Nevertheless, we recognise the resemblance.

Seneca, the father of Roman Stoicism, was a Spaniard born in Córdoba, hence the Hispanic flair in his pronouncements on this subject. “A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave,” he wrote. It was no idle theorising, for within twelve months the Emperor, his former pupil, falsely accused him of conspiracy. Seneca duly took his own life, remarking, with more than a hint of caustic Britishness: “After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for Nero to kill his teacher and tutor.”

One of the reasons I came to Spain was to witness an echo of such bravery outside of war. Ernest Hemingway gave a similar reason for coming to watch bullfights one hundred years ago. I remember when I first went to Pamplona to run with the bulls, I witnessed the boiling mass of 300 tonnes of humanity fleeing four tonnes of toros bravos, Spanish fighting bulls. The mass of people shattered and fled like a medieval rabble under a heavy cavalry charge. This was a sight few people in the modern era will ever see: a populace put to flight through its own streets, as though a siege had been broken, a city wall breached. Of course, I am aware that the event itself, and even talking about having done it, is all rather un-British.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison runs between two bulls in Pamplona in 2011

Continue reading →

Dean Winters with Michael Nyqvist in John Wick

I crashed the New York magazine interview of a favourite actor of mine, Dean Winters, whom I remember so well as the chief villain’s consigliere, Avi. (Along with a thousand other credits, including from Law & Order whose set I had just been on as I was staying with my dearest friend from university, Hugh Dancy, who leads the current series, and his wonderful wife Claire Danes in Manhattan.)

Dean, and the journalist Nate Jones, were in the oldest bar in the city, The Ear at 326 Spring Street, near the Hudson (actually, where the Hudson river used lap against the front door.)

Kela 2022

(Auf Deutsch darunter.)

FRIEND

“There lay the dog Argos.

Then, when he noticed Odysseus near,

he wagged his tail and both his ears drooped,

but he could no longer move towards his master

to approach him; however, seeing him from afar, he wiped away a tear…

And then death took Argos as his fate,

immediately after seeing Odysseus in the twentieth year.”

Homer, The Odyssey, Book 17

Like a perfect pebble,
found upon a beach strewn with one thousand rough-edged stones—
this one, polished by nothing but coincidence,
feeling smooth only to your touch.

A comfort,
a concern,
a greeting and goodbye—
a weapon sometimes,
loyal against the world,
against everything not her own.

But for her own she stood
more sure,
more solid,
than Mother Earth herself.

Which is why you held that stone in your hand,
forgetting, for as long as you could,
its unbearable weight,
until your arms ached.

Until that day,
you had to walk out into the sea,
grasping her tight,
delaying the letting go—
fending off the horror,
fending off the betrayal,
fending off
the forgetfulness of human grief.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Kela, a Belgian-German Shepherd cross, was born in the Alps of Salzburgerland in Austria on Christmas Eve in 2009,  and died in the arms of her mistress, my girlfriend, Klarina Pichler, almost fifteen years later, on the day of San Pedro Claver y Corberó, patron saint of slaves, and those who travel by sea which she did so much, in the hills of Sotogrande in Andalusia looking out onto the Mediterranean Sea. 

As a puppy, she, out of the entire litter, chose her mistress herself – a pebble among rough stones, smooth only to her touch .

At the end, her lithe mass of muscle once giving such speed and strength was diminished to nothing but an almost unmoving happiness at our company and her mistress and I alternated carrying her wherever she needed to go.

Even then, we did not want to let go, did not want to let the veterinarian in to our house beside the sea, betraying the definition of loyalty itself, an act of kindness that felt so great a sin it would make Judas himself turn red with shame.

(She was the most notable dogs I have ever met, famous among those who knew her and even among those who did not, making national newspapers like The Daily Telegraph, online here.)

Kela 2018

SEELENSCHATZ

“Dort lag der Hund Argos.
Als er Odysseus nahe bemerkte,
wedelte er mit seinem Schwanz und ließ beide Ohren hängen,
aber er konnte nicht mehr zu seinem Herrn gelangen,
um sich ihm zu nähern; dennoch, ihn aus der Ferne sehend, wischte er eine Träne weg…
Und dann nahm der dunkle Tod Argos als sein Schicksal,
gleich nachdem er Odysseus im zwanzigsten Jahr gesehen hatte.”
Homer, Die Odyssee, Buch 17

Wie ein perfekter Kiesel,
gefunden an einem Strand, übersät mit tausend rauen Steinen—
dieser eine, zufällig geschliffen,
fühlt sich nur unter deiner Berührung glatt an.

Ein Trost,
eine Sorge,
ein Gruß und Abschied—
manchmal eine Waffe,
treu gegen die Welt,
gegen alles, was nicht ihr eigen ist.

Aber für die Ihren stand sie
fester,
solider,
als Mutter Erde selbst.

Deshalb hieltest du diesen Stein,
vergessend, so lange du konntest,
sein unerträgliches Gewicht,
bis deine Arme schmerzten.

Bis zu dem Tag,
an dem du ins Meer hinausschrittest,
sie fest umklammernd,
zögertest du das Loslassen hinaus—
wehrtest das Entsetzen ab,
wehrtest den Verrat ab,
wehrtest die Vergesslichkeit menschlichen Leids ab.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Kela, eine belgisch-deutsche Schäferhund-Mischung, wurde am Heiligen Abend 2009 in den Alpen des Salzburger Landes in Österreich geboren und starb fast fünfzehn Jahre später in den Armen ihrer Herrin, Klarina Pichler, am Tag des San Pedro Claver y Corberó, dem Schutzpatron der Sklaven und derer, die auf See reisen, was sie so oft tat, in den Hügeln von Sotogrande in Andalusien mit Blick auf das Mittelmeer.

Als Welpe wählte sie, aus dem ganzen Wurf, ihre Herrin selbst aus – ein Kieselstein unter rauen Steinen, glatt nur zu ihrer Berührung.

Am Ende war ihre schlanke Muskelmasse, die ihr einst so viel Schnelligkeit und Stärke verlieh, zu nichts weiter als einer fast unbeweglichen Freude an unserer Gesellschaft verkommen, und ihre Herrin und ich wechselten uns ab, sie überallhin zu tragen, wo sie hin musste.

Selbst dann wollten wir nicht loslassen, wollten den Tierarzt nicht in unser Haus am Meer lassen, was das Wesen der Treue selbst verriet, eine Tat der Güte, die sich so sehr nach Sünde anfühlte, dass sie sogar Judas selbst zum Erröten gebracht hätte.

(Sie war der bemerkenswerteste Hund, den ich je getroffen habe, berühmt unter denen, die sie kannten, und sogar unter denen, die sie nicht kannten, und schaffte es in nationale Zeitungen wie The Daily Telegraph, online hier).

FINANCIAL TIMES

FT Weekend

March 6/March 7 2004

LATIN AMERICA: ARGENTINA

[Photo Caption: The Argentinian sport at the Campo de Polo de Buenos Aires – Getty]

A world city rises again

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, in Buenos Aires, finds a metropolis re-energised by Argentina’s bright young things

My friend, a Buenos Aires socialite called Guadalupe Marey, leant over our martinis and summed up the feeling in a single phrase, “Buenos Aires está de vuelta” — Buenos Aires is back.

Two years after the riots, the currency devaluation following removal of the dollar-peso peg and the subsequent default on international debt, the City of Good Air has regained some of its former ambience (although the literal air still suffers from traffic fumes).

Nowhere is this more the case than in the immensely fashionable Palermo Viejo area, which houses the exquisitely laid-back Bar 6, supplier of the continent’s best martinis.

Palermo was once the dark place of Buenos Aires, where gauchos invented the tango in cheap brothels and drank in even cheaper bars before their nightly knife-fights in the streets. Argentina’s greatest author, Jorge Luis Borges, grew up there and summed it up as a place of “carefree poverty”. Now, it most resembles the twin Sohos of London and New York: carefree but by no means poor.

Buenos Aires is a popular year-round destination, but its popularity surges during the Argentine Polo Open, which takes place in December. The Open is quite unlike any other. These are the best players in the Argentina, which means the best in the world.

While it’s fun to watch half a tonne of horse and rider indulge in tactical acrobatics at 30mph, it’s also very rewarding to cast your opera classes around the stadium or simply go and prop up the long bar afterwards. This is where the world’s jet-set mingles with Buenos Aires’ most beautiful. You will find the young English pros chatting up their billionaire patrons, trying to maintain their enthusiasm in the game so that next year’s vets’ bills will be covered. Beside them you will find the more impoverished and yet more skilled Argentine players, usually trying to juggle selling a horse bred on their estancia with preventing the sylph-like beauty on their arm being chatted up by the competition.

Buenos Aires (BA to the cognoscenti) as a tourist attraction is a city of imposing monuments: the graffiti-riddled grandeur of the Plaza del Congreso celebrating the power of a country that was the seventh richest on earth a century ago; or the famous tombs of Recoleta, the Belgravia of BA, described by Borges as “the coming together of marble and flowers/and the little squares cool as patios”. This splendour can be fully lived at the incredible Alvear Palace Hotel where one can relax in the Versailles of all cocktail bars before sloping down for dinner at La Bourgogne (see right).

However, for every piece of the old BA there is a piece of the new to match. Philippe Starck has teamed up with Argentina’s greatest fashionista, Alan Faena, to produce El Porteño, a combination of cutting-edge hotel and apartment block. And if you want a fusion of South American cuisine and European sensibility try the Gran Bar Danzon, a favourite with BA’s bright young things, its décor paying lip-service to Manhattan chic.

After dinner one again has the choice between old and new. For the historic city the tango shows are good if you know where to go, Bar Sur in San Telmo being among the best.

Others might like to see what the city’s dancing scene is like at ultra-fashionable nightclubs such as Rumi in Palermo or Tequila on the outskirts. If exclusivity is defined by second-tier polo players, B-list celebs and glamour models queueing at a door, these places really are the Holy of Holies.

DETAILS
Info: Gran Bar Danzon, tel. +54 11 4811 1108
Bar Sur, San Telmo, tel. +54 11 4362 6086;
http://www.bar-sur.com.ar

LA BOURGOGNE

A jewel in Buenos Aires’ crown is the superb La Bourgogne restaurant in the Alvear Palace – one of the few hotels of its size and grandeur that has remained in private hands, which may have been its saving grace. Continue reading →