MRS GRUNDY IDENTIFIED

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12549, 11 September 1926, Page 11

MRS GRUNDY IDENTIFIED

| TERROR OF OUR PARENTS: A REAL PERSONALITY 1

Mrs Grundy, that vague terror of successive British generations, has been identified. The London “Times” writes in a leading article: “Like other legendary beings, she has changed her nature with the flight of time. In the year 1800 she was little else than a generally censorious woman, a personification of other people’s opinion upon one’s own conduct. “Gradually her sphere of criticism was restricted to the territory of courtship and gallantry, with its attached colonies of chaperonage, flirtation, and amatory indiscretion. She became, in short, a specialist in maiden modesty and wifely precaution. Then—perhaps in the ’seventies or ’eighties—her history took a strange turn. She, who had begun, as something of an ogress, became almost popular, except among the irreverent young. “No longer thought of as a captious busybody, she won for herself a reputation as a true model of propriety. It was she who would kindly teach young ladies how not to be ‘conspicuous,’ how to avoid being ‘talked about,’ how to fish in dangerous waters without tumbling in. She became a kind of deified aunt, stern but—and here was the essence of tho change in her—helpful and necessary. “Her tenure of Olympus was not, however, prolonged. Irreverent youth rebelled, dragged her down, and, in a thousand angry or hysterical novels, made of her an Aunt Sally. Now even that phase in her career is ended. Her name, which, • in jest or earnest, was oncer on every lip, is seldom spoken.” .Referring to this leader, Mr Ernest Law, of Hampton Court Palace, writes to ‘The Times’ to point out that a “Mrs Grundy” did really exist. “That lady was, as a fact, embodied in the housekeeper of that name at Hampton Court Palace in the late ’forties and early ’fifties of last century. Her fame is perpetuated in a dark space —one of the mystery chain-

bers of the palace—the door of which is rarely opened, and which is still known as ‘Mi's Grundy’s Gallery.’ Here she impounded any picture or sculpture which she considered unfit for exhibition in the State rooms; and here she kept them under lock and key, in defiance of the authority and protests of the Queen’s Surveyor of Pictures. "The story goes that on one occasion the First Commissioner of Works, on a visit of inspection, sent for Mrs Grundy. In answer to the First Commissioner’s request she declined to open the door for him. ‘But I am one of Her Majesty’s Ministers, and I have authority over tho structure of the palace,’ ‘I cannot help that, sir,’ replied Mrs Grundy, ‘only on an order signed by His Lordship the Lord Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household can I allow anybody to enter my gallery.’ That is the sort of thing that ‘Ms Grundy would say.’ “History does not record 'the eventual result; though he did not gel: in on that occasion. But in the centuryold struggle between the Office of Works and the Lord Chamberlain’s department, some forty years after her death, the First Commissioner succeeded in having the occupation of ‘Mrs Grundy’s Gallery’ transferred to his department, to be used for stores. “Some fifteen years afterwards its treasures were gradually brought forth, and the pictures hung in the State rooms, notably Cariani’s beautiful ‘Venus Recumbent.’ No. 88 in the Second Presence Chamber, identified three years ago by Mr Tancred Borenius as having belonged to the famous Venetian collector, Andrea Vandramin, from a drawing in his catalogue of 1627. . “It was not until twenty years ago that a leaden statue of Venus, which had been sent from Windsor, and was stored in ‘Mrs Grundy’s Gallery,’ was brought forth to adorn Henry VIII.'s Pond Garden. ‘What would Mrs Grundy say?’ ”