I went to Cambridge 1958 – 61 [following] a lovely year off [in which I] spent 3 months in Florence learning the violin with a very handsome old gentleman violinist off the River Arno staying in the coldest house I’d ever known. I had gone school in London at the Francis Holland School – a respected school for politicians daughters, off Sloan Square. After only two A Levels in History and English, I got immediately into Cambridge to an undergraduate degree in archaeology, and after that very happily moved away from my parents house in Camden Hill Square down the road to Ladbroke Grove, a nice garden flat belonging to a very nice couple called Jane and Martin Evans. And so I invited Jacqueline Du Pre to be my flatmate. Her mother enlisted my mothers help in dealing with a difficult teenager, which Jackie was when she was 15, and mother was a kind of counsellor / additional teacher at Queens Gate School in London. She was trained as a teacher but did this voluntarily. She was drawn in to deal with Jackie, because Jackie had a very very specialised attitude to life. She was at Queens Gate School and that’s how mother got to know her. She didn’t go there for very long because her mother insisted she should practice many many hours a day, and my mother kind of fed in what was missing. Jackie was very ignorant about many aspects of life, particularly how to get around London on her own at the age of 15 /16 because her mother took her everywhere by car.
The story of this knife, is that when Jacqueline came to stay with me in my flat, I had a very dreary breadknife which I had taken over from my time at Cambridge. It was very blunt. And there was a day, shortly before an important concert in Jacqueline’s schedule, in which she cut herself a slice of brown bread, and cut her left thumb quite severely. This was an enormous crisis in the whole family: in the whole Du Pre family, in the whole Roberts family. [It was the] concert in the Festival Hall, when she was soloist [aged just 17] in Elgar’s cello concerto for which she was quite a famous exponent. And so there was all sorts of complex discussions about the best kind of plaster to bolster up this thumb, which is a very important thing for a cellist, and she had lots of important thumb position work in that concerto.
So we went out, I can’t remember who bought it, but very swiftly was purchased the most expensive knife on the market and so it always had a certain angst about it because it was associated with cutting thumbs. When Jacqueline Du Pre left, she just walked out and left everything behind….. she then very soon met Daniel Barenboim, and they became very well known. I know who bought it – it was one of her ardent admirers – a Canadian pianist called Guthrie Luke who adored Jacqueline. There were two young pianists in our life at that time, who were the last two pupils of a famous French pianist called Cortot and these chaps were his last pupils and they both adored Jackie but Guthrie absolutely worshipped Jackie, from a distance of course. Guthrie Luke was responsible for purchasing this knife – he was a rich young man, he could have afforded an expensive bread knife. But she had no interest in materials affairs so she left it behind, with a careless backward glance, and so I have inherited this terrific breadknife, and we are talking about 1962, and it has never been sharpened.
The Royal Collection 