Books: Self-Portrait as a Young Man

It is never easy to explain quite how it is that, from time to time, from within its grey ordinariness, society suddenly releases the extraordinary.

Roy Strong’s new book provides some clues to this mystery and helps to explain how a quiet, slightly geeky boy from the London suburbs could emerge not only as the director, first of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG)and then the Victoria and Albert Museum, but also a butterfly of contemporary fashion. And then, later, reinvent himself as a gardener and television personality.

Strong dedicates this Self-Portrait as a Young Man to the writer Antonia Fraser “who has always been curious as to [sic] whence I sprang”.

As revelations go, it’s by no means the full monty but for the most part this is an honest, if slightly old-fashioned, book in which Strong fills in the principle gaps in the published history of his life to date.

Self-Portrait traces the period from his birth in 1935 to “the heady days of 1967”, when, aged 31, he was appointed director of the NPG, the youngest ever, a fact we can be fairly sure about as he manages to take every opportunity to trumpet this success.

There are so many strands in Strong’s life that it is not always easy to keep track of time and place. At times the storyline leaps about like a demented puppy, as detail and diversion tumble over one another in confusion.

What is undoubted is that Strong’s origins were Enfield and his evocative descriptions of daily life in this north London suburb will be recognised by all those who shared an upbringing in the towns and cities of postwar Britain.

For all their external similarities, behind their front doors each house had its own story. For Strong, the youngest of three very different brothers, it was of a house dominated by an impoverished hypochondriac father, a hat salesman, and his mother, Mabel, determined to do the best for her boys – and in particular for their education.

Mabel Strong was the first of a number of women who were to shape the direction of young Strong’s life. Indeed, it was frequently women, primarily academics, who provided the encouragement and inspiration that opened his eyes to a world of opportunities unimagined in the Strong family where his father had tried to get him to leave school at 14 and start earning money.

By 1959, with a master’s degree from Queen Mary College and a PhD from the Warburg Institute, Strong was educationally well-qualified but his academic mentors had left him ill-prepared for life outside an “intellectual fairyland”.

This was, however, the eve of the 1960s, a decade that would offer opportunities to a new breed of meritocrats who clambered up the greasy pole on the strength of their ability more than their age, talent rather than background, imagination more than experience.

This was no easy path. As much as anything, Self-Portrait is a story of hard grind and self-discovery – of museums and galleries reopening after the war; the theatre, opera and ballet; of sex –“I was not only cripplingly shy but aware that I was sexually ambiguous”; religion; and travel – “there is a bit of me that… is less than keen about ‘abroad’.”

There’s a wonderful description of a disastrous trip to Trebizond in a hired Dormobile which, notes Strong with massive understatement, “in retrospect seems wildly out of character for me”.

The happiest times were perhaps those when Strong was working creatively. He revels in his recollections of his participation in exhibition projects with Richard Buckle.

In the midst of all this lies the personal. It’s long been Strong’s custom to record the deaths of his friends and family with a short obituary. The death of his highly disruptive brother, Brian, in 1997, prompted a real cry of anguish, unexpected from a man who was then 62.

“Why is it that everything to do with the Strong family always had to be so unutterably awful, so humiliating, so haunting? Why aren’t there those normal relationships of love and joy, turbulence and tranquillity?”

In 1959, Strong was appointed as an assistant keeper at the NPG, a job that proved to be part of another “timeless, closed world” but one that allowed him to build his reputation as an Elizabethan scholar and creator of exhibitions.

Seven years later the post of director was advertised. Strong eagerly grabbed his chance. The meritocratic foot was in the door.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant