A Tribute to Godfrey Goodwin by Maureen Freely

Godfrey Goodwin, who died in August 2005 at the age of 84, will be best remembered for A History of Ottoman Architecture, the classic 1971 study that persuaded the British art-history establishment to cast away its tired prejudices and give this great architecture the credit it was due.

He will be remembered, too, for his fine works on Sinan, the Janissaries, Ottoman women, and life behind the scenes at Topkapı Palace, for his years of service at the Royal Asiatic Society, and for the inspired lectures that imbued three generations of students with his passion for Turkish art and culture.

But I shall always remember him as I first saw him, on the campus of Robert College, Istanbul, on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1961. I was eight years old, and standing in the atrium of Hamlin Hall, the student dormitory where he was the housemaster, and where my friends and I had been rollerskating for several hours. This was long before they invented skates that made no noise. It was, I think, the screeching and scraping of our metal rollers on the marble floor that had attracted our large audience.

The students watching us from the interior balconies were applauding us for an unusually graceful figure eight when suddenly there was silence. We looked up and there, on the top balcony, was an ominous figure in a striped satin robe. He glared down at us. “Ah,” he said. His voice was rich, resonant and full of woe. It was clear from his watery eyes that he had been hoping to sleep in. We prepared ourselves for the dressing down we deserved. But when he spoke, it was to make a suggestion.

“If you must make noise on a Sunday morning, and I suppose you must, could I perhaps persuade you to decamp to a distant land, populated, if at all possible, by my worst enemies, whose names I would be more than happy to provide forthwith?”

Or words to that effect. Adults wanting to get along with children tend to do so by condescending to them: with Godfrey it was always the opposite. He knew you would understand him perfectly, no matter how elaborate his syntax; the question was whether or not he could return the compliment. “Where shall we begin?” he would ask, when he’d tired of the adults at Christmas dinner and defected to the children’s table. As he adjusted his monocle – and he had every reason to use one, for he was blind in one eye – we’d give him our suggestions. And then, for the next few hours, we’d watch him drawing hobgoblins in vast tableaux of tilting buildings, crashing planes, wobbling space-ships and ocean liners battling the waves.

He spent the early years of his own childhood in Portugal, where his father was managing director of the company that built Lisbon’s trams, and where, we were led to believe, scenes of high drama were commonplace. Recalling this turbulent period, Godfrey’s mother once told us how the family was sitting together one evening, reading and sewing to the tune of a distant thunderstorm, when one of them looked up and said, “Goodness! Listen to the bombs!” After his father died of tuberculosis, the family returned to England, where Godfrey was despatched to a series of schools that left him with a seething contempt for received opinion and his own ideas about respect, truth, beauty, justice and just about everything else his teachers had found unworthy of comment.

After leaving Clifton College, he studied briefly at the French Institute and at RADA. An artistic uncle in Montparnasse gave him his first entrée to the world of art. He enlisted in 1939, fought in North Africa, and in the last months of World War II found himself in Italy, where, while motoring through the countryside, he had the unexpected pleasure of turning a corner to find an entire battalion of Germans waving white flags and wishing to surrender to him. He declined, though he directed them to a major-general he thought might be more obliging. Billeted in a village in southern Italy about which he knew nothing, but which seemed to be at the end of a tramline, he decided to take the tram one afternoon, just to see where it might take him. He ended up in Rome, which was not quite liberated. Here he met Lianna Ferri, a glamorous left-wing journalist, who gave him his first introduction to the soon-to-be postwar intelligentsia.

He eventually returned to England, but he did not stay long. Though he visited Italy religiously for the rest of his life, his true home away from home became the eastern Mediterranean. He came to Istanbul via Alexandria, in 1952, and to Robert College via the English high school in Niflantaflı, in 1956, but, like his more discerning colleagues, he refused to cloister himself on campus. He got into the habit of taking large groups of friends on walks through the Old City every Saturday afternoon, and he spent many evenings in Beyo€lu, where he had made some very interesting friends – among them the artist Aliye Berger-Boronai (whose family inspired a yet-to-be-published novel). There was also the growing army of interesting students, many of whom, like the artist Özer Kabafl, went on to become close friends. Invitations to his modest but elegant bachelor pad in Hamlin Hall were much sought after, for even if the unusual mix of guests left some speechless during the first few minutes, his famous punch (falsely said to be strawberries floating in pure alcohol) soon cured them of their shyness.

The British consulate often asked him to take visiting dignitaries on a tour of the city. One such dignitary was Lord Chorley, who’d brought along his daughter Gillian, as his wife did not like to travel. Godfrey invited Gillian to one of his parties. She insisted on staying to do the washing-up. In 1965, they were married. In 1968, they returned to London, where their son Bertie was born soon afterwards.

By then they had set up house in Chalcot Square, in a tall and narrow house that was not quite large enough for Godfrey’s eclectic art collection. In the mid-Seventies, when I first moved to London, I lived for a time in the room in their attic. This was when I attended the first of their famous dinner parties – splendid six- and seven-course spreads, courtesy of Gillian, who was, among many other things, a culinary historian, and a dizzying succession of fine wines, courtesy of Godfrey. Though the mix of guests was always unusual – archeologists and musicologists, historians and television producers, teachers and former students, heads of research from Amnesty International and tongue-tied children of family friends from Istanbul – no one (except me) ever lost the conversational thread. I can remember Gillian passing around the salmon pâté or the daube or the raisin pudding that, according to a book she’d just found in a little-known archive, had been popular during the Middle Ages, but still listening intently to a discussion about a recent auction at Sotheby’s.

“I’m not quite sure I would agree,” she said crisply. “One only has to think how the price of Botticellis went up and down throughout the nineteenth century.”

“One could, if one wished, choose to go down that path,” I remember Godfrey replying. “But that would be to ignore the obvious.”

The next morning, I came down to find him sitting at the same table with his son Bertie and the almost life-sized model of a Human Torso that usually stood on the chest next to the wall. Bertie, who must have been about eight at the time, was pressing on the little screws that were, as he pointed out, just where the nipples should have been. As he removed the lungs that had been keeping him from getting a really good look at the circulatory system, he asked his father if they had any purpose other than to keep people breathing. As Godfrey passed me the orange marmalade (Seville ’76, said Gillian’s neatly lettered label), he looked at me very sadly and asked, “I don’t suppose that, somewhere in the course of your travels, you picked up a few interesting facts about lungs?” I hadn’t. “And quite right, too,” he sighed, as he put on his coat.

Then he walked across London, to Bevington School in North Kensington, where he was the deputy head teacher. Most of the children were from immigrant families and discipline was a problem. His solution was to instruct teachers not to let misbehaving students disrupt the class, but to send them straight to his office. Here he would have them look at the fish in his aquarium. When they had calmed down, he would ask them what they wanted him to draw. While he drew, they would have a chat – not about discipline, but about their likes and dislikes, their lives and travels.

Godfrey, Gillian and Bertie were themselves intrepid and resourceful travellers, even when they stayed close to home. They were members of the Landmark Trust, through which they were able (by booking months and sometimes even years ahead) to spend most of Bertie’s half terms in historic cottages, manors and stately homes through the British Isles. There cannot be a boy in England who saw so much of his national heritage at such close hand, and at such an early age.

They also travelled widely in Europe, North America and, most of all, Turkey. Wherever they went, they met an interesting and unusual mix of people. Once, when Godfrey and Gillian were travelling in the southeast of Turkey, an interesting boy asked if they would mind giving him a lift to the next town on their itinerary. Of course, they said graciously. As they were driving through the barren hills, they turned the corner to find Kurdish warriors approaching them on horseback at great speed. They thought it was all over, but then the boy in the back seat stuck his head out of the window and cried, “Baba! Baba!” For the leader was his father. Once they’d been properly introduced, he insisted on escorting the Goodwins to the safety of his village, where they were fêted and fed and lodged for the night.

In the early Eighties, when they visited us in San Francisco, there was an earthquake. Though it measured only 5.8, it caused our tall, narrow apartment building to lurch so violently I thought it was about to crack. As I stood whimpering under an inner archway, watching the tower on the top of Telegraph Hill come swaying towards us, and then swooping back towards the bay, Gillian remained on the tiny balcony reading. Not once did she look up from her book. Later, when I asked her how and why, she said, “I tend to be rather fatalistic about such things.” And quite right, too.

When Gillian died, quietly and stoically and long before her time, in 2000, Godfrey was almost eighty. His health was fragile, and he must have known he had only a few years left. He spent them well, wisely insisting on doing only what he loved most. He turned the tall, narrow house on Chalcot Square over to Bertie, moving into the little ground floor flat that had once been his mother’s, but it was soon looking as elegant as his old bachelor flat in Hamlin Hall. Though there was no proper kitchen, and though his shaking hands made it difficult for him to manage his little hob, he continued to entertain, always with the old Godfrey panache. “You have a choice to make,” he told me and my twelve-year-old daughter the last time he cooked for us. “We can start with a rather nice champagne and move on to a rather nice claret. Or we can drink champagne all evening, which might be even nicer!”

He returned every summer to Istanbul, where, with the help of his loyal assistant, Mehmet Alagöz, he taught two courses at Bogaziçi University. One was on Byzantine architecture, the other on Ottoman architecture, and each involved weekly field trips to the monuments he knew and loved so well. The pace was gruelling, but he still found time for his friends, who by now ranged in age from two to ninety-five, and who were expected to treat each other with the same courteous interest he accorded to everyone he entertained – preferably on the terrace of the Hotel Bebek, where the drinks were very expensive but of a quality to make money no object, and where the waiters always made sure he had a chair facing the Bosphorus.

He’d often said he wanted to die walking back up the hill to the campus. When the end came, it was almost that sudden. He fell ill in June, and died in mid-August, while many of us were still away on holiday. He gave his body to science. “For goodness’ sake,” he told his son Bertie, “don’t waste money on a funeral. Spend it all on champagne and a party to remember me by.” His final wish was that “it shouldn’t run out”.

His last two days of lucidity came after Bertie gave him a few sips of Cos d’Estournel one evening, and on the following evening a few drops of vintage champagne. He continued to dine out, and dine well, until two weeks before he died. One of his last trips was to his favourite Turkish restaurant, in Primrose Hill, just round the corner from Chalcot Square. The two old friends who’d arranged the outing with the nursing home staff had phoned ahead to the restaurant, so that they’d have his favourite table waiting for them. Alarmed to hear of his illness – for they were his friends, too – the entire staff came out to the street to greet him. How the rest of us wish we could do the same now.

Published in Cornucopia Issue 34
2005