Hilo Polo
By:
June 9, 2010
What sport is more highbrow than polo? Just look at the dashing figure below.
The chap’s name is Leslie St. George Cheape. Now I’m a Yank, and a right tosser, but that sounds very posh to me. A member of the English National polo team, Cheape played in the United States several times in the aughts and teens; this photograph would have been taken during one such tour.
But hang on — what’s that on his arm? Let’s take a closer look:
Cheape was a British Army captain, and he likely got the writhing snake inked on his arm in the course of military service. A dashing enigma, he was reported dead from smallpox in Delhi in 1911; in 1915, the New York Times listed him among the missing at Gallipolli. Whatever Cheape’s fate, his portrait (found via the fabulous flickr photostream of the Library of Congress) calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s description of the highbrow as a “man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.” Only here he’s the very embodiment of an idea: that of following contradictory impulses with ease, the quintessence of HiLo negative capability.