John Elkington

Miserable weather for a Coronation, but Elaine and I went across to Richmond this morning: partly to have our ears looked into, partly to escape a local street party featuring karaoke (which was then postponed anyway); partly to get away from the constant hammering as our roof is stripped and renewed; partly to visit bookshops (with Elaine buying Michael Frayn’s new book in The Open Book store just as he walked into the shop); and partly to have lunch by the river at Tapas Brindisa.

As we walked out of the restaurant and down to the Thames, a bearskinned band struck up for the first time – and the second tune they played was Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Said thank you to the bandsmen as they walked off sodden to their next gig – and would like to say thank you to Eric Idle for writing such a quintessentially English song.

The Volans team clambered aboard two of (Sir) Tim Smit’s time machines this week: The Lost Gardens of Heligan beamed us back into a sustainable version of the past, while The Eden Project transported us into a version of a sustainable future.

Along the way, I found myself pondering what the plural of Tardis might be – linking out to the time machine in the long-running Dr Who TV series. Tardises? Tardes? Tardis? Whatever it may be, these extraordinary places helped put us all in a more elastic timeframe, and reminded us how some people can turn the apparently impossible into the possible and then the inevitable.

And, like Tardis, which is unimaginably bigger on the inside than seems physically possible when the converted police callbox is viewed from the outside, both Eden and Heligan serve as portals to much wider worlds of possibility than you would suspect when viewing their mapped areas.

Ever since Louise, our CEO, took over the reins at Volans, we have put more effort into team-building, in all its forms. Or perhaps I should say she has. This week, the team (including Elaine) spent three days in Cornwall, being taken behind the looking glass at two wonderlands created by our friend (Sir) Tim Smit: Eden and Heligan.

In addition to Tim, we were taken behind the scenes by the likes of Rob Chatwin (Eden’s CEO), Alexandra Dixon (Director of Special Projects, and now driving Eden’s Costa Rican expansion), Jo Elworthy (Director of Integration), Blair Parkin (leading the Pollination program that is co-evolving new Eden ventures in the UK and overseas), Charles Sainsbury (the man charged with ensuring that Eden walks the sustainability talk), and Ramón van der Verde (Heligan’s Managing Director).

We’ll see where all this takes us, but the adventure made me feel even keener to find innovative ways to converge our different worlds.

As a Chief Pollinator, I was also delighted to encounter evidence around Heligan of a couple of small ways I had nudged things along – via introducing Tim to Peter Byck, of Carbon Cowboys fame, and to Annabel Ross, who went on to co-create the Voices of the Lost Gardens exhibits, with wheeled shepherds’ huts used to immerse visitors in the life stories of a range of wild and farmed animals.

Delighted to see my interview with Dr Azzam Alwash of Nature Iraq appearing in @worldofTOPIA today: https://worldoftopia.com/john-elkington-nature-iraq-azzam-alwash-conversation/…. Stems from our Green Swans Observatory fact-finding process.

Another excision from Tickling Sharks is this sequence on my criminal career, and that of an uncle:

When we came back from Greece, I moved to London to be with Elaine, while she began to work with Oxford University Press, in Dover Street, in the former town house of the bishops of Ely.^[i] Mention of the good bishops, gatekeepers to heaven and hell, reminds me that my life sometimes ran perilously close to the guard-rails of legality, and occasionally beyond. 

When Elaine and I were hitchhiking back from seeing a former Swedish boyfriend of hers in Stockholm in 1969,^[ii]we accidentally ended up in the Reeperbahn, the red-light area of Hamburg. Here we bumped into a short, owlish German, Peter Siemer, who became a friend. He turned out to be a dealer in ancient gold coins but had become too well known in the London auction houses. Whenever he arrived, the prices went up. So, I ended up bidding for specified lots for him, then travelling across to Hamburg with the coins, on ferries sailing to and from Harwich. No tax was paid, as far as I know, so already we were crossing the line. 

Then I met a friend of Peter’s, Frank Stop, a towering student with long blond locks and a stubbly beard. A German Viking. At his suggestion, Frank and I began buying left-hand drive Volkswagens in Germany, after which I would ship them back to London and sell them through The Evening Standard, for around twice what we had paid. Most were bought by American students wanting wheels for road trips across Europe. 

I recall one German count, from a well-known family, arriving and paying for a car for his son, in cash—and Elaine insisting we sleep on the loot until the banks opened in the morning. 

On the subject of lawbreaking, maybe there are genes for smuggling? I learned from my mother, and her youngest brother Paul, that their brother Peter had been a ringleader in a smuggling racket after WW2. That said, Uncle Peter’s prior service in the Fleet Air Arm had not been without incident. On one occasion, he had steered a Harvard training aircraft into the station commander’s married quarters—and promptly been asked whose side he was on? 

When the European war ended in 1945, Peter was back in the UK again, a qualified naval fighter pilot, still training for the final push in the Pacific. When the atomic bombs in Japan brought WW2 to an end, the founders of the gang—‘Pete’, ‘Gus’ (Adam Thomson, later founder of British Caledonian Airways), and ‘Hank’ (MacArthur)—were still together as chief petty officer pilots, kicking their heels until they were demobbed. 

Wanting to earn more money, they set up their own air transport company, using old Walrus seaplanes, previously used in whaling operations. They smuggled in freely available and relatively cheap contraband from France: cognac, nylon stockings, perfume, branded cigarettes etc.—all scarce to the point of non-existence in post-war, poverty-stricken Britain. One flight ended close to total disaster when flying back from Caen they made their UK landfall in thick fog on the last few drops of fuel sputtering in the Auster’s single engine. (See High Risk by Sir Adam Thomson, Sedgwick & Jackson, 1990.)

Eventually the trio were forced to throw in the towel, selling the Walruses for their scrap value. Compared to such entrepreneurial exploits, ours were modest affairs. But I have often wondered about any genetic links between the appetite for entrepreneurial risk-taking and for pushing the law to—and sometimes beyond—the limits. 

In the same spirit, something that I am not remotely proud of is that, like some other students at the time, I periodically stole books from bookshops. There was even a book at the time by counter-culture activist Abbie Hoffman called Steal This Book.^[iii] But, really, there was no excuse. Inevitably, I was caught red-handed at a large London bookshop, charged, and fined £10 at the local magistrates’ court. Asked why I had done it, I replied that I had never done it before (not true), didn’t know why I had done it (though I did, and in retrospect books had become—and remain—something of a mania) and would never do it again (at least I didn’t lie there).

Meanwhile, by her own account, Elaine ‘cooked and cleaned and bottle washed at our flat in Ebury Street for John, his brother Gray and a huge number of visitors who often stayed, some for extended periods.’^* One of the latter was someone we had grown up alongside in the Cotswolds, who came to stay after being released from prison in Austria. 

He had been in Iran for some time, eventually driving homeward in a car packed with cannabis. He had been arrested after he ran out of money to pay for petrol and tried to sell drugs to a plain-clothes policeman at Vienna’s central railway station. Sentenced to twelve years in prison, he had spent much of his time playing chess with the governor, only getting out because his father, an international judge, had pulled strings—though he cut off his son from that day forward.

Among his guests when he stayed with us was a mother and sometimes also her daughter. He had been sleeping with both, though I’m not sure either knew that. I had just returned from Germany and had brought back a bottle of whisky from duty free, something we usually never had in the flat. The mother arrived and polished off the whole bottle in a single sitting. Anaesthetic, perhaps?

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^* Crucial to that period were John Bennett and Charles Logan, more than twice our age and living around the corner in Eaton Square. Our ground flat at 91 Ebury Street flat was theirs. Gloriously gay, in Noel Coward fashion, they had picked up Gray when he was hitchhiking to Oxford—and, in hindsight offered us the flat in the hope that he would play the piano with John in the basement flat at Ebury Street. He did—and we reaped the rewards, until the 99-year lease ran out. The flat came with a wonderful little garden.

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^[i] The story of Elaine’s working life from 1968 to 1977 can be found here, https://elaineelkington.com/biography

^[ii] I’m not sure I had thought very much about Scandinavia before that, except via the Vikings and the adventures and writing of Thor Heyerdahl, a huge inspiration—who I later heard speak at London’s Royal Geographic Society.

^[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book

As part of the editing process for my 21st book, Tickling Sharks, I have been forced to cut great tracts of the narrative – including such of the story of our rad trip to and from Greece in the summer of 1970. So here it is:

Next, six of us—Elaine and I, Martin Lindsay and his wife Jan, Rex Gowar, and Ian Lovell—took my family’s Land Rover and headed off through Europe to Greece for a couple of months. Our adventures along the way were many and various, including being shot at in the old Yugoslavia. Mercifully, the bullet had been fired at long range, so it was slowing, and hit a crossbeam at the back of our vehicle.

Three people we met along the way who live on in memory were the musician Shawn Phillips, a female café owner in Skiathos, and the artist Giorgios Varlamos. 

We met Shawn, hippy-to-hippy, as we drove into Positano, Italy, somewhere I hadn’t been since 1959, but loved both times. He was striking to look at, even for the day: American, gauntly handsome, bearded and with long blond hair reaching down to his waist.^[i] This Texas-born musician was later described by rock music impresario Bill Graham as ‘the best kept secret in the music business.’^[ii] He invited us to visit his home, high on the slopes overlooking the town. Exhausted, Elaine, Martin and Jan chose to catch up on sleep in the small hotel we had booked into, while Ian, Rex and I took the bait. 

Thank heavens. What an extraordinary evening that proved to be, in a large space with a gothic window looking down over the moonlit Mediterranean. Shawn played us the tapes of the music he had just recorded with some of the best-known musicians of the day. His music melded many styles, including folk, rock, jazz, funk, progressive, pop, electro, and classical. Then, part way through the evening, as an energetic bass line thrummed through huge speakers, Shawn’s black cat got to its feet and started to dance. 

I swear.

The second memorable person was a Greek woman who looked like Eli Wallach, the striking male actor who featured in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We illegally pitched our tents on her beach for a month, eating at her café. Each morning, she would string out freshly caught octopi to dry on a washing line.

Along the same beach we met an American calligrapher, Gail, who lived on her rowboat. She and I got on rather well, to the point where, when we were leaving by boat, she surprised us on the jetty with a vast lump of halva, which she knew I loved. By then, however, we shared a criminal record, of sorts. Late one night, we had taken Gail’s boat to visit a nearby fish farm owned by a big Greek shipping family, who were not immensely popular at the time. 

The Milky Way stretched above our heads, so bright against the darkness that you felt you could put your hands over it—and swing on it. Golden puddles of phosphorescence spooled out either side of our gleaming wake, and, as the sea water ran back down the oars, it illuminated our hands and wrists. 

I shall pull a delicate veil over the nature of the operation, which resulted in a small haul of lobster and sinagrida, the most prized fish in Greece, the ‘fish of kings.’ All of this had been quite some distance from our beach, and, for perhaps obvious reasons, we said nothing about it to anyone. But when we walked into the café for breakfast the next morning, ‘Eli’ quipped that she had heard we had done ‘a good job’ the previous night. 

Island grapevines are quite something.

As for Giorgios Varlamos, we met him at his gallery in Athens, where Elaine and I bought our first piece of art together.^[iii] A highlight of the visit was Giorgios taking us through his photograph albums, almost exclusively black-and-white images, among other things from his student days in Paris. These proved to be an inspiration for my own efforts, largely created in huge albums produced by Tessa Fantoni.

We talked to Giorgios about how he had developed the large image we had bought, of hunters and their dogs in a forest clearing. It was printed from a woodcut, for which he had used crunched up newspapers as a visual reference, so the cross-hatchings echo newsprint—with a strong suggestion of deeply encoded meaning. 

Wherever we went in Greece, mostly off the beaten track, we enjoyed remarkable hospitality. In northern Greece, for example, we woke up one morning, having slept in the open air, each of us with a watermelon by our head—with the farmer’s oxcart trundling off into the distance, unheard and unthanked. That happened twice, in different places.

Then there was the time, outside Nafplio, when we put up our tents in what we thought was an open field. It turned out to be an open prison.^* Elaine woke up from a nightmare in which someone was chopping off her feet. Standing alongside the tailgate of the Land Rover, from which our legs extruded, was a man with an ax. When we spoke, mainly in French, it transpired that he was a murderer, having killed his wife and her lover. We had stopped for the night in his prison. He was perfectly pleasant and hospitable, but we moved on quickly.

When we got to Yugoslavia, close to the Albanian border, we were robbed. Our fault: it was illegal to camp outside campsites, so by settling ourselves down by a stream in a magical little valley, we had set ourselves up. Elaine and I were sleeping in the back of the Land Rover again, on rugs bought in Greece. She and I had disagreed energetically the night before as to whether we should be sleeping on them. Happily, I had prevailed. Everyone else had their belongings stacked on the front seat of the vehicle. In the night, one or more locals quietly opened the Land Rover door and made off with all the rugs that weren’t being slept on.

More kindness came the next day when my Anglo-Argentine friend Rex and I climbed into the mountains to see if we could find any trace of the robbers. Early on, we came across a logger’s camp, where they fed us wonderful sourdough bread, just out of their wood-fired oven, with thick yoghurt. Higher up the mountain, we found a shepherd’s log cabin, sunk deep into the earth. A formidable, drooling dog, a mastiff, was chained to his kennel outside—but came bounding at us, dragging chain and kennel behind. 

Mercifully, he was called off by the shepherd’s wife, who offered us glasses of what I think may have been salty mare’s milk—strangely delicious. Then, as we sat by the fire, she sat alongside me, neither of us with a word of each other’s language, as she was counting off the stitching in the pattern of my thick Norwegian jumper. A form of cultural diffusion.

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^* When we visited Nafplio in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the open prison was pointed out to us. ‘Yes,’ we said. ‘We slept there in 1970. And were woken up by an ax murderer—holding an ax.’

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^[i] https://johnelkington.com/2020/08/giorgos-varlamos

^[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Phillips

^[iii] https://johnelkington.com/2020/08/giorgos-varlamos