Carts and Caravans
‘Caravans’ by Eric Ravilious, 1936
In 1967, London’s Chelsea had become home to some rich and well-connected hippie bohemians; others ran fashion boutiques and businesses there. Together with the artists and designers who decorated their homes, as well as friends, who included rock stars and celebrities, they formed an influential Chelsea ‘set’ that related to other London countercultural ‘tribes’ through an interest in music, drugs and mysticism. Many, who liked to dress in flowing colourful clothes, as if they were living in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and to fill their homes with exotic rugs and textiles, were also interested in such things as gypsy caravans, UFOs, ley lines, Glastonbury, and the lost Court of King Arthur. Dave Tomlin, author of Tales from the Embassy, found himself involved with a group of these affluent hippies, even though, as he cheerfully acknowledges in the book, he had little in common with them other than a wish to abandon conventional society and to take to the road in a caravan.
At the heart of this band of dreamers was Sir Mark Palmer, called ‘Count Marco de la Paloma’ in Tales from the Embassy; he was (and is) a baronet, Old Etonian, former page to his godmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II, and co-founder, in 1967, of the Chelsea ‘English Boy’ modelling agency. One day, sitting in Hyde Park, Palmer decided that he wanted to ‘drop out’ and find the Holy Grail, and according to a friend who was there at the time, ‘we bought a dung-cart, a sort of tipper cart. We put a tilt on it and wrapped it in canvas and it was very, very primitive. Mark bought this horse, a huge black and white mare. That was the start – and we set off’. Fanciful notions of this kind were in the air, and the plan seems to have appealed to a surprising number of others, including Tomlin, who wanted to join them, and although some, like Rolling Stone Brian Jones and his girlfriend, only came for a weekend or two, a few stayed the distance. There is footage on the internet that shows them camping at Port Eliot, a house and castle owned by Peregrine Eliot, the 10th Earl of St.Germans, who is briefly interviewed in the film. Many details and anecdotes relating to the story are told on an extraordinary website called ‘The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit’, dedicated to the memory of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Iggy Rose, once his girlfriend.
Some time in 1968, an old Austin, containing three people and a dog, ran out of petrol not far from London. Robert Lewis, an artist, and folk musician John James got out of the car and began to push it towards the next village and garage, while Vashti Bunyan did the steering. On the way they saw an old baker’s delivery cart in a field, which evoked their wish for a home on the road; not long afterwards they bought it and the owner’s horse, Bess. Lewis and Bunyan were a couple, living the hippie life in woods in suburban London until they were evicted by police, and they borrowed the money to buy the ‘caravan’ from the musician Donovan, whom they had recently met and who had just purchased three Scottish islands where he wanted to set up a commune, to which Vashti and her boyfriend were invited. Their idea was to drive all the way from the south of England to the Scottish Highlands, a journey that they would eventually complete a year and a half later.
Unconventional strangers were not always welcome in English rural communities, and the couple’s expectations of earning money by performing at market places and other events - Bunyan already had a modest career as a pop singer, having briefly been an art student - were often thwarted by the police; in some villages residents were afraid that they might steal chickens or even kidnap children. Somehow they managed to survive, and fortunately they often came across people, some of them fellow-travellers, who were willing to help them out in one way or another. Bunyan, who sensitively describes these adventures in Wayward, her recent memoir, suggests that their middle-class accents may have made life on the road a little easier than it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, for Bunyan at least, this was not a bohemian interlude before returning to the comforts of respectable life; ‘I was not making any kind of statement’, she writes, and this appears to have been true. Like many others in the counterculture, Bunyan was searching for a world outside time and a simple life without complications; the quest was more than a whim. The gentle songs she wrote on the journey and later recorded for her cult album ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ are surprisingly strong and resilient, even though, as she remarks in Wayward, they were about dreams, not realities. Predictably, perhaps, the original plan to settle in Donovan’s commune didn’t actually materialise.
About a decade earlier, another art student had also taken to the road to escape from London, and in A Time from the World, Rowena Farre tells the story of how she lived with Romanies and other travelling people, picking fruit and vegetables, selling trinkets, and telling fortunes. The descriptions of those she meets are vivid, convincing, and usually reflective of the generosity of spirit of her companions, who appear to have accepted her as a fellow nomad. Farre adapted easily to life on the road and in the encampments, but she just as quickly moved on, and in the book she says little about her inner thoughts and feelings. Everything passes, and the way of life she conjures up and temporarily adopted has since faded away, as Farre herself was wont to do.
It is probable that Rowena Farre spent part of her childhood in India, and that she was sent back to Britain by her military parents - not to boarding school, which would have been the norm, but to live with her Aunt Miriam, first of all in Buckinghamshire and Kent, and then in Sutherland. When her aunt married and moved abroad, Farre trained as a typist, took jobs in offices, enrolled as an art student, and regularly disappeared to go on the road with the gypsies. She vanished from her lodgings soon after the publication of her first book, Seal Morning, about her life with her aunt and their motley menagerie, which included a seal, in a Scottish croft. Seal Morning was well reviewed and became a best-seller, but questions were raised about its authenticity. Extensive enquiries failed to locate the croft in which she said she lived, and there were even doubts about the existence of Aunt Miriam. It was later discovered that Rowena Farre’s real name was Daphne Lois Macready, she had been born in London in 1921, and died in Canterbury in 1979. As she may have intended, little is certain about her life other than that much of it was spent in her imagination - she was ‘an amiable fantasist, an inveterate spinner of yarns’, as one writer has put it. While she appears to have found her way back to India on a spiritual journey, she never renewed connections with the family from which she had become estranged.
For further exploration:
An article on London’s rich bohemians in the 1960s:
https://www.tatler.com/gallery/sixties-sloanes-and-posh-hippies-1960s
Two articles on ‘The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit’ website:
http://atagong.com/iggy/archives/2018/10/paint-your-wagon-iggy-movie-unearthed.html
http://atagong.com/iggy/archives/2020/03/a-tale-of-two-henriettas.html
The hippie ‘wagon train’ at St.Germans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo36IVbnQV4
Two reviews of Vashti Bunyan’s Wayward:
https://thequietus.com/articles/31380-wayward-vashti-bunyan-review
‘Just Another Diamond Day’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-erNldHdV8
An old news article about Rowena Farre: https://www.scotsman.com/news/wanderer-returns-2465461
Vashti Bunyan with her children and dog in front of her caravan