A VISIT TO THE VILLAS
A memoir by John Christian
For me, as no doubt it is for many, a visit to Peter is a treat like no other. These occasions at once assume a pattern that never varies. You arrive, usually on a Saturday, at noon, to be greeted with a warm welcome and a large gin and tonic. Gossip is soon flowing and continues during lunch which tends to be a superb fish pie, one of his culinary specialties, washed down with a good and carefully chilled white wine.
The dining room is lined with pictures on a certain theme: works by such travellers and expatriates as Edward Lear, J W Inchbold, J R Spencer Stanhope and G P Boyce illustrate the concept of ‘the Englishman abroad’. Every room in the house is as densely hung. Even bathrooms and lavatories are a visual feast, although here panels of tiles tend, appropriately enough, to take the place of pictures. 
Equally, throughout the house, no shelf, chimneypiece, table or wardrobe-top is without its burden of objects—pots, glass, metalwork or whatever. ‘Away with the tasteful gap”, the Handley-Reads had cried, partly to distance themselves from Georgian propriety but essentially as the only way to accommodate their ever-growing number of acquisitions. Peter has adopted the slogan as a badge of honour.
Helping to clear the lunch table is never done out of mere politeness, it is an act of enlightened self-interest as well. For the kitchen, reached from the dining room, via a red baize door, epitomises the gap-free philosophy. Here are serried ranks of coloured Parian jugs in every conceivable pattern. A massive dresser groans with Doulton, John Pearson, and other Arts and Crafts ceramics. On the walls are more of the ubiquitous tiles, Pugin and Albert Moore being the room’s chosen designers. And sitting in the middle of the table, and itself bearing more objects, is a neo-gothic fantasy of a lazy Susan, in the form of a miniature version of King Arthur’s Round Table. Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites seem almost present.
Lunch over, my host conducts me on a tour of the house. The outlines of the collection have long been familiar but it is always worth seeing again, and anyway it is constantly enlivened by some new arrangement or purchase. Collections must grow and develop or die, and there is never the slightest chance of demise here. Peter’s interests are wide, something he regards with both pride and mock-despair, and he presides over what is really a collection of collections, linked only by the taste of their owner and saved from visual cacophony only by his remarkable talent for arrangement and display. Fine and decorative art are both central to the collection, as they were to the Handley-Reads. But although Charles and Lavinia had some fine pictures, you always felt that the applied arts were really their forte. I would find it much harder to make this distinction with Peter.
His Anning Bells and paintings by artists as tourists I have mentioned already. Scanning that well-known house in my mind’s eye, I also see his fine and varied group of works by the illustrator G J Pinwell, his W. A.S. Benson metalwork, his Powell glass, his French studio pottery, and his Minton pate-sur-pate. A dresser is devoted to Martin ware, a bathroom is hung with De Morgan tiles and chargers, and the walls of a bedroom are covered with landscapes in watercolour. I facetiously call this the North Wing since at first glance the work of J W North seems to predominate, but this is not really apt. On closer inspection, A W Hunt, Lionel Percy Smythe and others are equally well represented, while shelves and chests of drawers bear a collection of yet another ceramic enthusiasm, the work of the most inventive of all Doulton potters, Mark Marshall.
Without doubt the most extraordinary creation in the house is the so-called Nature Room. Its ostensible theme is the Victorians’ passion for exuberant organic design, but in practice the room is a receptacle for everything weird and wacky that has caught the collector’s attention, whether in the form of stained glass panels, anthropomorphic pots so over-the-top that they make even the Martin Brothers look models of sanity, or those creepy and slightly sinister things that our Victorian forebears did with bird nests, sand and shells. Here is a true Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, conferring on Peter the indisputable title of the Ole Worm of his day. This is not to say that there are not some serious objects, a particularly volcanic Ewen Henderson tea-bowl (hardly Victorian, but then Peter has always kept a weather eye on modern design) comes to mind. Nonetheless, there is an air of self-indulgence about this room and we invariably find ourselves laughing, not just at what Peter has been doing these forty years but the inherent dottiness of the collecting habit, however serious and laudable the motives that drive it.
The Nature Room lies between the spare bedroom and the bathroom and I have often pictured some hapless guest taken short in the middle of the night. His must be a truly ‘gothick’ experience as he picks his way gingerly between gremlin and gargoyle by the light of the stained glass windows, inadvertently playing the part of the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite Keatsian heroine.
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast
The visit invariably ends with a strong cup of tea before reeling slightly from the aesthetic and gastronomic surfeit, one heads for the station.
Over the years, Peter has had untold pleasure from his collection. In fact it is true to say that it has been the centre of his life. But he is the first to accept that no collection is set in stone. It develops as a living organism, and eventually, like grown-up children leaving home, objects have to go back into the outside world.
This is a slightly edited extract from an article by John Christian (1942-2016) included in the catalogue of a Christies sale of watercolours in June 2004 to help fund the Albert Dawson Educational Trust. By the time of the visit described, Peter had lost his partner Albert Gallichan (1930-2001)