MAPS

Anthony : I’ve always enjoyed maps. My father introduced me to maps. Whenever we went up a hill in Scotland which we often did, particularly on New Years Day, he always took a map and he was very good at getting me and Charles to do the map reading. I think Jane was interested, Susan not so, but I always liked to know where I was. Walking up hills I got to depend on contour lines and all the other details on the ordinance survey maps, to the extent that for my 21st birthday I asked for a complete set of maps from my aunt Doll Fitzwilliams [Anthony’s father’s sister and also…] my godmother, and she gave me a complete case of the whole of Britain, I think it was Bartholomews, of quarter inch to the mile maps and found this very useful when driving round or planning holidays. I referred to this box all through my life, but used it less and less so just one of the things I had to dispose of when we downsized. 

One of my memories of other peoples incompetence with maps was in the cadet force at Rugby and we went on a great expedition and oh the disaster when the person in charge admitted he had been reading the thing upside down. It was the sort of thing I was incapable of because I could live with maps, I knew maps, but to other people who didn’t use maps all the time they were always foreign things turning them round, like Mum trying to give me directions in the car. She was always turning the atlas round so it pointed in a particular direction, rather than focusing on north and south which I had learned to do. She was just like the great majority of people, and I’m disappointed that none of you had the same interest in maps, wanting to know where you were and where everything is. I suspect Barnaby now with his boys liking to visit places has a pretty good clue, or they have, but then yes as a young man I did a lot of hillwalking, particularly with John Murray, Alison’s cousin through whom I met Alison, I gradually bought most of the maps, they lived in the top shelf of that great big bookshelf in the basement of number 9 and I was using them all the time. Then when the latest issue came out, about the time I got Bovuy, I started getting all the local Scottish maps, and so up there somewhere is a box of about 100 ordinance survey maps of Scotland and a whole lot of bits of England I had holidays in or wanted to remember, and so when I saw this map [Mil didn’t take a picture of it and it is now gone] for sale just round the corner at that shop in Derby Street I couldn’t resist it, and this is a map, a drawing or a lithograph of the city of Glasgow from the South, showing the Clyde in the foreground and rows and rows of terraces mounting up and Kelvingrove Park in the middle and so I got it framed. It was published by the London Illustrated News around 1860 so shows Glasgow about 1860 and it always has surprised me that no-one has never really wanted it. To me living in Glasgow and not having a map of where everything was… and I’ve subsequently bought two more, but nobody wants, so I plan to dispose of them. I love them aesthetically (as well as practically).

Maps to me are much more utilitarian than up on the wall. I’ve given people maps of their area cut into jigsaws, but no, I don’t think of them primarily as aesthetics, I think of them as useful tools. (My father) regarded maps as an absolute necessity. Those were the days that the road map was relatively new. He came in at the beginning of the motorcar, he originally had a motorcycle when the speed limit was 12 miles an hour.