Simon Schama’s tour of Downing Street concludes with a look at the famous staircase.
Read the transcript for the film below:
Simon Schama:
So this is the main staircase of Downing Street and, as you see, in keeping with a lot of the rest of the house, it’s not like the grand ambassadorial staircases of the Vatican or the Louvre. It’s a modest staircase. In fact, it was remodelled in 1960 to look like this. So where you might have in other great houses of state, even in the White House, huge portraits, larger-than-life size, here we have modest engravings and photographs of the ghosts of Downing Street, from Walpole to John Major. When Tony Blair ceases to be prime minister, all the photographs and engravings have to move down a little bit. Essentially, it’s a communion with history.
Interesting little group of engravings here. It was the fashion early in the 19th century to have statesmen standing by imperial columns. Here, for example, is Lord Grey, who presided over the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. And his arm, as you see, is resting nonchalantly on a classical plinth. There is George Canning with a Roman column by the side of him. And the ideal of the self-denying, self-sacrificing Roman statesman was the ideal to which these usually public schoolboys and aristocrats aspired.
Every so often, unusually, there’s somebody who’s a little different. And this fellow in the corner, who’ll be moved, I don’t know if he’s going to move Winston Churchill along, but he might be demoted to going downstairs, is Spencer Perceval who nobody remembers, but he was prime minister after William Pitt the Younger, much more famous, had died, from 1807 to 1812, in the middle of the Napoleonic War. And Perceval has none of these classical things. He’s just sitting in the chair holding a document. He appeared conscientiously before the House of Commons. Perceval had 12 children here. He was a modest man. He was a passionate Christian, evangelical, believed deeply in the disgrace of the slave trade. And everybody out there remember to answer your mail, email or not, properly. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812, our only assassinated prime minister, because he forgot to return someone’s letters. The man in question, a Mr Bellingham, was in a debtors’ prison and thought for some reason that Mr Perceval, the prime minister, could get him out of trouble, out of clink. Perceval simply handed it to a clerk. The clerk forgot about it. Bang, one dead prime minister. So, to add insult to injury, when Mr Blair goes up top, Mr Perceval will go further down. That’s the luck of the draw when you’re in Downing Street.
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