In the 75th anniversary year of the Festival of Britain, I am looking at some of the creatives behind the Festival. From those who were involved with setting the overall approach and theme of the Festival down to those who worked on specific tasks to create the displays and pavilions.
Back in July, I looked at Jacquetta Hawkes, and for today’s post, I am looking at someone who in the years after the Festival, would become a very well known author.
This is the page from the Festival guide book for the South Bank Festival site, covering the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:
Among the names of those responsible for the Lion and the Unicorn, the person who created the commentary (the text to go with the displays and exhibits), there is the name Laurie Lee, an author who would later become very well known for the book Cider with Rosie:
Laurie Lee was born on the 26th of June 1914 in the town of Stroud in Gloucester. Three years after his birth, his family moved to the village of Slad, also in Gloucestershire, a village which would provide the experiences and material for the book that would make his name as an author, and a village that he would have a life long attachment to, moving back to Slad in the 1960s, and where he was buried after his death in 1997.
He left his home in Slad at the age of 19. He travelled to London, where he stayed for a year, busking with his second hand violin and working as a builders labourer, before travelling on to Spain. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lee was one of a number of British subjects picked up on the southern Spanish coast by the destroyer HMS Blanche.
The destroyer came under attack by anti-government forces. A news report from a crew member of a merchant vessel being escorted by HMS Blanche describes the attack:
“When dawn broke we were glad to see H.M.S. Blanche close to us and five of the rebel’s aeroplanes came over aloft. At first they thought the warship was Spanish and dropped some bombs round her, but none hit her. The aeroplanes then discovered that the boat was an English naval vessel, and continued to escort us into harbour.”
The British Government did receive an apology for the attack as they were informed that “the anti-Government leaders desire to express their own and General Franco’s profound regret for the bombing of H.M.S. Blanche, which they say was mistaken for the Government destroyer Jose Louis Diez.”
He travelled back to Spain in 1937, and joined the International Brigades, who were formed to support the government of the Second Spanish Republic against the Nationalists of General Franco.
Lee’s experiences whilst in Spain during the Civil War and with the International Brigades were described in his book “A Moment of War“.
Returning to England, he wrote poetry, being named one of five little known poets who were “Poets of Tomorrow” in the Bookseller on the 30th of October 1941. His poetry became more widely known during the 1940s, and by October 1945, the Birmingham Mail was naming Lee as a “Midland Poet”, due to his birth in the Cotswolds.
During the war he worked for the Crown Film Unit as a scriptwriter and also with the publications department of the Ministry of Information.
In 1950 he married Catherine Francesca Polge, whose mother was Helen Garman, one of four sisters who were part of the Bloomsbury set.
In 1951 he wrote the script for the Board of Trade film “West of England”, a wonderful colour film that describes a lost way of life, but a film very much aligned with the themes of the Festival of Britain:
There is a wonderful line in the film, where he is describing the continuity of the countryside, and the churches which have “bells that have rung in a thousand years of Christmases”.
He was also writing drama for broadcast on radio, some of which were published, and again the Bookseller on the 6th of March 1948 advertises “The Voyage of Magellan” by Laurie Lee – “The text of the highly praised verse drama which helped to inaugurate the Third Programme in 1946”.
His work for the Festival of Britain started in 1950. Whilst he was writing the commentary for the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion he was also advertising for contributions to a specific part of the pavilion.
I have not written about the specific area in the Lion and the Unicorn over which Laurie Lee had some key responsibilities.
The overall theme of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion was the British character, language and literature, the instinct of liberty, British craftsmanship, and the area where Laurie Lee had specific responsibility – Eccentricity and Humour.
This display area within the pavilion looked at both British humour and the streak of eccentricity in the British character, and to build this display, Laurie Lee wanted the eccentrics among the British population to contribute. The following is one of many newspaper articles advertising what he was after, from the London Weekly Dispatch on the 19th of November 1950:
“HE WANTS MADMEN TO HELP WITH FESTIVAL SHOW – If you have an eccentric mind, and during a nightmare or in a waking thought, have conjured up the weirdest, most fantastic object, the Festival of Britain wants to hear from you.
One section of a pavilion in next years’ Exhibition will be devoted to the ‘craziest’ conceptions of the British mind.
Mr. Laurie Lee of the Festival staff, eccentric poet, writer of film and radio plays, is the man responsible for choosing four objects that will, he hopes, evoke laughter, admiration, and technical interest.
Junk-Shop Hunt: ‘The main idea is to show in this Crazy Corner, things that will stand up to the foreigner’s idea of the ‘Mad English’ he said yesterday. ‘We want what I’d call fertile madness. for example, if someone told me of a hitherto unknown solution of perpetual motion, it would appeal.
Laurie Lee told me he had already dug into all the junk-shops of the East End of London and Chelsea, as well as in the country, without finding anything more eccentric than a square-rigged model bargue in an ordinary electric light bulb.
He invites ‘British Madmen’ to send written offers of their craziest creations to him at 2, Savoy-court, London, W.C.2.”
This was definently the “men in sheds” section of the Festival of Britain. Laurie Lee was after the sort of creation that use to feature on the “and finally” section of TV news, and on local TV news features.
In January 1951, the West London Observer was reporting on the creations that Laurie Lee was receiving: “They include ‘a machine 20ft square on the best engineering principles, with the sole object of blowing out matches. Says Mr. Lee; Admirable for its particular purpose, but slightly too big. I have suggested he builds a smaller model and perfects it by making it light matches as well. Another offer is a smoke grinding machine. Then, there is a mouse trap maze. This is a really cunning device in rough brick (the rough brick is important, so read on). Lured in by the smell of cheese. the mouse is diverted into dead ends until it becomes hysterical. its frantic running stirs up pepper on the pathways. causing such violent sneezing that it ‘bashes its brains out’ on the rough brickwork.
But, as Mr. Lee wisely points out, ‘you cannot have six months of mouse massacre just for the fun of the thing. How right he is! More than anything, Mr Lee wants little machines that work like mad and do nothing in particular”.
I wonder if Laurie Lee, poet, playwright and script writer, and soon to be author, felt any frustrations with having to deal with this type of submission, however the £11 a week as an Executive Officer in the Civil Service he was earning for his role in the Festival of Britain may have come as a welcome regular income.
In an interview with the Daily Express on the 20th of January 1951 Laurie Lee said that his role was “interesting and exhausting. To overcome this he takes three kinds of anti-nervous pills”.
With the sheer scale of the festival, the short time available before the festival was to open, and limited finances, I suspect that the pressure that Laurie Lee was feeling was common across all those involved.
In the same article he speaks about having just tested some “Walking-on-Air” shoes – he fell flat on his face when he tried them out. He had also received a violin made of matches, a tea-set made of old haddock bones, a pair of motoring goggles with windmill and windscreen wipers attached and some bottled circus clowns (miniatures).
He has also received a “Moral Uplifter”, created by a retired colonel, and worn inside your jacket, and gives out encouraging sounds of “Jolly good show, Hear Hear, applause and even laughs when you tell a joke”.
Also in Lee’s office was a stuffed white rabbit which contained a music-box, however the workings had gone wrong and the rabbit now plays God Save the Queen at unexpected times.
I cannot find a list of all the items submitted to Laurie Lee that ended up in the Eccentricities section of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion. The text for the guide book was probably finished before the final selection was agreed, but the guide book does state that the visitor would see Tenniel’s White Knight
The White Night is a character from the book “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. he is an inventor, of the type wanted by Laurie Lee, and the following print is of the White Knight, by John Tenniel who provided illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s book, published in 1871:
In the illustration, the White Knight is seen sitting on his horse, which is covered in many of his inventions.
He can also be seen on the right in the Eccentricity and Humour section of the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion:
As well as writing for the Lion and Unicorn pavilion, Laurie Lee also wrote captions for other pavilions on the South Bank festival site. A reviewer in the Daily Herald in the days after the festival had opened wrote about the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion “I was especially impressed by the captions, the work of the poet Laurie Lee, who has written captions for several other pavilions as well. These combine point with nonchalance in a way that would be impossible to anyone but a most sensitive artist in words.”
Looking through the Festival of Britain guide for the South Bank and the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion is the only one where there is a named author for the commentary. No idea whether this was because the commentary in the pavilion was considered of more importance compared to the other pavilions, whether it was because of Laurie Lee’s reputation as a poet, or for some other reason.
In the years after the Festival of Britain, Laurie Lee began the strand of his career that would lead to his popular fame as an author.
In 1955 “A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia” was published. This was about a return visit to Andalusia, to find a country that had been broken by the Civil War, but the underlying character of Spain was still to be found.
In 1959, “Cider with Rosie” was published. This was the story of his childhood in the village of Slad, from a time when the way of life in the British countryside was still much as it had been for a very long time, and before modern conveniences such as electricity and the car had arrived.
This is probably Laurie Lee’s most well known book. Turned into a number of TV adaptations and films, radio dramas and a stage play. It was also one of the books used for school English Literature courses and examinations.
Cider with Rosie was followed in 1969 by the second book in Lee’s autobiographical series – “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning“. This book starts when he first leaves his home in Slad, his journey walking to London, then his time in Spain, and ends when he returns to his family home.
“A Moment of War“, published in 1991 tells of his time in Spain and involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Whilst writing these autobiographical books, he continued to write and publish poetry, along with other books such as “Down in the Valley”, a description of the landscape, life and traditions of his Cotswold home:
And also “Village Christmas And Other Notes on the English Year”, which included both his home landscape of the Cotswolds as well as his time living in Chelsea.
The majority of his books show an intense love of place, the landscape, people and traditions that make a place.
Laurie Lee’s attachment to his home village of Slad lasted all his life. Along with his wife, he returned to the village to live in the 1960s, whilst keeping a flat in Chelsea.
As with my post on Jacquetta Hawks, all the photos I can find of Laurie Lee seem to be in copyright, or taken from a source which appears under copyright.
He died in 1997 at the age of 82, and was buried in the churchyard at Slad.
A typical obituary focused on his book A Cider with Rosie, but also said that he was:
“First and foremost a poet, and his writings were autobiographical. He imposed on his work a vigorous discipline and perfection which might involve rewriting a book three or four times. It meant his output was small, with barely a dozen books published.
Lee also represented an era of brilliance and idealism that sprang from the 1930s; he fought in the Spanish Civil War, wrote verse plays for radio, and was a contemporary of such literary figures as Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, George Orwell and Cecil Day-Lewis.”
The majority of his books are still in print, and reading them today, it is clear why he wrote the commentary for the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion, as well as a number of other pavilions across the festival.
I just wish I could write blog posts that are able to “combine point with nonchalance in a way that would be impossible to anyone but a most sensitive artist in words“, as a reviewer of his work for the festival had written.
I have written quite a few posts about the Festival of Britain, and as this year is the 75th anniversary of the festival, I want to look at another aspect of the festival – the people behind the festival, those who created the overall theme, architects, individual pavilions, the written commentary in each pavilion etc.
The 1951 festival was a snapshot of Britain at a key point in history. The Second World War was just six years before the festival, and decades of significant change were in the future.
The South Bank exhibition site was the centre piece of the festival, and was split in two areas.
Between County Hall and Hungerford Railway Bridge was the upstream circuit, the focus was on “The Land”, and looked at the land of Britain, the natural scene, the country, minerals of the island, power and production (mainly driven by what was mined from the land), sea and ships, and transport.
The downstream circuit was between Hungerford Railway and Waterloo Bridges, and the focus of this section of the festival was on “The People”, and looked at the people of Britain, homes and gardens, schools, health, sport, and the seaside.
Responsibility for developing what was on display throughout the festival was through several key roles.
Individuals were responsible for developing the overall theme, architectural design and display design. This started at the highest level with the overall concept of the festival, and then dropped down to those responsible for the same role for individual pavilions and display areas.
The following image is the first page from the South Bank festival guide for the downstream circuit on the people, and the People of Britain pavilion:
At the top are the names of those who had overall responsibility for this section of the festival, and under the title “The People of Britain” are the names of those responsible for the pavilion and displays on the people of britain.
I have underlined one name in red – Jacquetta Hawkes – the Theme Convener, the subject matter expert who was responsible for bringing a consistent theme to the pavilion.
Jacquetta Hawkes was born on the 5th of August 1910 in Cambridge. Her father was Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who won the Nobel prize in 1929, along with Christiaan Eijkman, for their discovery of vitamins. Her mother, Jessie Ann Stevens was the daughter of a ship’s fitter from Ramsgate.
Jacquetta developed an interest in archaeology from a very early age, and would go on to establish a considerable career in what was at the time a very male dominated profession.
As evidence of her ground-breaking role as a woman in archaeology, in 1929 she was the first woman to take the Archaeology and Anthropology degree at Newnham College, Cambridge.
After graduating, she travelled to Palestine to work on excavations, and on her return, she married the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes , who she had met earlier at Cambridge.
Jacquetta Hawkes was a prolific author, with her first book, “The Archaeology of Jersey”, being published in 1938.
I have a couple of her books. The first is “A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales”:
The book, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments, and includes background information, such as the types of monuments to be found, a chronology, a lengthy gazetteer of sites, and, something modern books seem to have lost, a large fold out map.
The book obviously reflects the state of knowledge at the time (1951), but it is still a remarkably useful book for cataloguing and examining so many sites.
Chapter One is titled “The Land of Britain”, and this seems to be a theme that can be found in much of Jacquetta’s work, including the Festival of Britain. Her view of how the land of Britain and the evolution of life on the land are intertwined, and the first couple of paragraphs from the opening chapter sum up this approach:
“If it can be claimed that the whole of our country and not only its surviving antiquities should be seen as the creation of past generations, it is legitimate to go much further, to penetrate below the surface of pasture, arable, woodland and waste and to see the whole substance of the island as one continuous creation. Through milliards of years it has been built and shaped; sometimes lying as a part of a vast continent embracing what is now the Atlantic and North America, sometimes part of the sea-bed of equally vast oceans. tropical, desert, and artic climates have played over it.
So, side by side with the evolution of life, the land of Britain was brought into being; the remodelling of its surface by man belongs to this continuous and still rapidly developing process.”
Whilst the guide to Prehistoric and Roman monuments is at its heart a guide, Jacquetta takes the approach summed up in the two paragraphs above, and expands it considerably in, probably her best known book, “A Land”:
A Land was also published in 1951, I have the 1978 edition (some sources give the original publication year as 1953, however my 1978 edition has 1951 as the original date, and Jacquetta’s introduction is dated 1950).
A Land is not a text book, or single subject book on geology, climate, archaeology, the evolution of life, history etc. but takes all these subjects to construct a story of how the land of Britain has developed, and both the impact on, and the use of the land, by the emergence and evolution of life.
The book links the formation of rocks, minerals and resources to how they were and are used by humans. Granite, Portland Stone, Chalk, Coal etc. all have their origins shown as part of the geological development of the land linked to their future use by people for homes, buildings, industry.
The book is “off its time” – a phrase that implicitly means that almost everything we publish today, will, in the next 50, 100 and more years, also be regarded as containing inaccuracies, not reflect the latest scientific understanding, will have unacceptable views, but as with the story told in “A Land”, human knowledge and culture is on a conveyor belt of continuous change, and the present is just a snapshot in time of both knowledge and culture.
As an indication of how archaeological and scientific advances can impact a book, the introduction to the 1978 edition of “A Land” lists several updates to the 1951 edition.
A Land has been described as being a sentimental and romantic book, and there is a degree of truth to these descriptions, but what I find important about the book is that it presents a way of looking at the country, an intertwined story of continuous evolution – an obvious example being the geological and climate conditions that led to the formation of coal, which was the key source of energy for the industrial revolution, from the start of steam power with Thomas Newcomen’s and James Watt’s engines in the 18th century.
When she wrote “A Land”, Jacquetta lived in Fitzroy Road, just to the east of Primrose Hill, and she references the hill in the opening paragraphs of the book:
“When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden. This garden is a square of about twenty feet, so that to lie on it is like exposing oneself in an open box or tray. Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which, as Primrose Hill bumps up conspicuously at the end of the road. the humus, formed by the accumulation first of forest and then of meadow land, must once have been fertile enough, but nearly a century in a back garden has exhausted it.”
Her mind then begins to wander:
“As I lie looking at the stars with that blend of wonder and familiarity they alone can suggest, a barge turning the bend in Regent’s Park Canal hoots, a soft wedge of sound in the darkness that is cut across by the long rumble of a train drawing out of Euston Station.
The people sitting in those lighted carriages, even the bargee leaning sleepily on his long tiller, are not individuals going to board meetings in Manchester or bringing in coal for London furnaces. For the instant they are figures moved about the map by unknown forces, as helpless as the shapes of history that can be found behind them, all irresistibly impelled to the achievements of this moment.”
And then begins the story of millions of years of the history of Britain.
The Land also shows how in 1950 when the book was written, Britain was still a country with strong regional and local differences.
This was not just with the people, but also how the country was built, with towns and villages often being distinctive by their industries and agriculture and their local building materials, and designs.
This localism was also a thread running through parts of the Festival of Britain, and one of the very many publications associated with the festival, was the following map, published by the oil company Esso, with the title “What do they talk about”:
Published by Esso, no doubt as an incentive to get people out driving and buying petrol to explore the country, if did show a country where many areas were still very distinctive.
Compare that with today, where local areas are much less diverse. Buildings are generally built to very similar designs and off remotely rather than locally made materials, nearly all the industries shown on the map have disappeared, and those that remain are in continual decline (for example in the midlands, a kiln can be seen with the word “Pots”. The midlands pottery industry continues to shrink, with the latest casualty being the Denby factory which shut down their kilns a couple of months ago).
A theme to the festival seems to have been to encourage people to get out and explore their country. As well as the map shown above, there were other festival events across the country, and also a series of “About Britain” guides were published, each with the festival emblem on the front cover.
Each guide covered a specific area of the country and provided a detailed guide, recommended routes and places to see:
Returning to the People of Britain pavilion, of which Jacquetta was the theme convener, the journey through the pavilion was laid out in a chronological sequence, with some of the displays set up as an archaeological dig. Starting from the entrance, the displays covered The Relics Of Our Ancestors, How They Came Here, How They Lived, The Romans In Britain, Men of the Iron Age, The Anglo Saxons, The British Today.
The People of Britain pavilion route from the guide is shown below:
The final paragraph in the festival guide section on the People of Britain reflects on how migration and integration has been part of the development of Britain:
“But though the ancient dead are buried, it is the very blood they brought here that runs in us – yet, whether they came as conquerors or men of peace, all of them suffered a sea change on the way. They were absorbed into the life that was here before them, and themselves became islanders of a land that moulded the thoughts, the feelings, and the behaviour of them all into a whole which is our British way of life and our tradition”.
The above paragraph is another example of why I find the Festival of Britain so useful as a reference point for so much about the country at the time.
The paragraph talks about the absorption of those who migrated to the country in the past, and how all islanders moulded the British way of life. In the decades to come, this would change to a more multi-cultural approach, with issues about absorption, or integration as we would now describe the process.
The Festival of Britain guide names all those who had a role in the creation and design of the festival, with Jacquetta Hawkes being the theme convenor for the People of Britain pavilion.
Reading through the names of those responsible for all the other exhibits and pavilions across the festival, she was one of very few women who had a key role in the creation of the festival.
There is far more to her life than archaeology and the Festival of Britain.
During her marriage to Christopher Hawkes, she had a son, Nicolas who was born in 1938.
Serious archaeology was not possible during the Second World War, so in 1941 she took on the role of Assistant Principal of the Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat, later moving to the Ministry of Education, and then became a Principal and Secretary of the UK National Committee for Unesco, a role she held until the start of her involvement with the Festival of Britain.
The war also marked a change in her personal life, as she fell in live with, and had an affair with the poet Walter J. Turner, and she was devastated when he died of a brain haemorrhage in December 1946.
In 1947, she met the writer J.B. Priestley at a Unesco conference in Mexico, and they fell in love, although unable to marry until 1953, by when they had both been divorced.
J.B. Priestley had written English Journey, which was published in 1934, another useful snapshot of the country as the book covered Priestley’s travels around England.
After her marriage to Priestley, Jacquetta continued to write. She was a governor of the British Film Institute and in 1971 she was a vice-president of the Council for British Archaeology.
Following a short spell on the Isle of Wight, they moved to Alveston in Warwickshire, where she became president of the Warwickshire branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. With Priestley, she was one of the co-founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Following J.B. Priestley’s death in 1982, she moved to Chipping Camden, where she pursued an interest in the old buildings and historic churches of the area.
Her last book, published in 1982, and written with archaeologist Paul Bahn was the “The Shell Guide to British Archaeology“, one of a series of Shell guides, which also includes guides to many of the counties of the country.
Jacquetta wrote and contributed to multiple journal and magazine articles, as well as radio and TV.
Jacquetta was involved in one of the more unusual TV programmes of the 1960s when in 1962 she wrote the script for part of a programme in the BBC Monitor series titled “The Lonely Shore”, with the segment being on “What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?”.
This segment sees archaeologists from the future returning to the site of a lost previous expedition, who had placed their finds on the beach waiting for collection by a future team.
It is brilliant as it highlights the difficulty with interpreting the use and meaning of artifacts from long lost peoples and civilisations. It is almost a parody of the archaeological profession that Jacquetta was for so long, a prominent member.
There is a brilliant bit starting at 8 minutes, 22 seconds where a collecting box for the PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals) is interpreted as an altar set-up for the dog cult:
Jacquetta Hawkes died on the 18th of March 1996, and her ashes were buried with those of J.B. Priestley in the grounds of the church in Hubberholm in North Yorkshire.
Archaeology had started with the gentleman amateur, and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had transformed into professional academic excavation and study of the past.
From the 1950s onwards, archaeology became more scientific, and Jacquetta criticised the reductionist approach that she saw as growing in importance in the profession, rather than the importance of constructing the human past.
She wrote an article for the journal Antiquity in 1967, from which the following abstract is taken:
“Archaeology in is danger of becoming so ruled by its technological and scientific servants that its proper goal of reconstructing the human past is being overlooked. The ingenious new equipment of archaeology attracts to itself a major share of not only money but intellectual effort; the result is that, while historical writing of the quality formerly seen is nowhere emergent, enormous quantities of undigested facts, graphs and tables litter our ever more expensive reports. The time needed to compile these analyses keeps other workers too long uninformed; the excavator may not even live to complete his scientifically showy report. As for controversies in interpretation, pages of correspondence solve nothing that time and new discoveries will not. Meantime, art criticism and studies of religion are neglected because they cannot be tabulated; even the remote stages of the Palaeolithic might be made to reveal more than statistics. A proper balance between science and history, a blend of old and new ideals, must be found if we are to maintain popular interest in archaeology and attract recruits with historical imagination.”
Personally, I believe that the approach criticised by Jacquetta, and her own approach, are both equally valid and important.
The technical and scientific approach, where facts, graphs and tables provide a detailed understanding of a site, city, population and culture, and the approach supported by Jacquetta expands on these individual details, and puts an individual site, facts, graphs and tables within the wider context of both the land and human history.
Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating woman, who achieved so much in a male dominated profession, and her book “A Land” is still an inspiration to look at history in a different way – a way in which geology, climate, life and human evolution, industry, agriculture, buildings etc. can all be understood as an intertwined story.
What is missing from this post is a photo of Jacquetta Hawkes. All those I have found online are copyright, or appear to have been taken from a copyrighted source, so here is a link to a photo of her in 1955 at the National Portrait Gallery – a remarkable woman:
A rather long post this weekend. There are two parts to the post. In the first part I explore the fascinating church of St Pancras, and in the second part, I explore the tragic story of the City of Boston, recorded on one of the memorials in the church.
So to start with the church, this is St Pancras Church as seen from Euston Road on a hot and sunny summer day in 2026:
In the early years of the 19th century, the area around Euston Road was expanding rapidly, as streets and houses were marching over the fields to the north of the city.
The Parish of St Pancras was originally served by the church known today as St Pancras Old Church, however this historic church was far too small and rather dilapidated to serve the growing population, so in 1812, the vicar, Dr. Middleton led a proposal for the construction of a new, much larger church.
The following map is an extract from Horwood’s map of 1799. I have marked the location of the future St Pancras Church with a red rectangle. The road to the north marked Islington is today Euston Road:
As can be seen, much of the area is still open space, but the construction of new housing and streets can be seen at the top of the map, and new streets would soon occupy the whole of the area of the map, hence the need for the new church.
There is an interesting feature to upper left, marked Polygon, which was part of Somers Town.. This was a development of houses, and in the next couple of decades, Clarendon Square was built around the Polygon, with the ring of houses being in the centre, with surrounding roads and houses forming an outer square.
By the end of the 19th century, the Polygon had been demolished, but they are remembered today by Polygon Road which runs along the northern edge of the original feature.
An Act of Parliament enabling the building of a new church was passed in 1816, allowing fund raising and requests for designs to go ahead.
The design selected was by father and son architects, William and Henry William Inwood. William Inwood, the father, was a land steward and surveyor, and the majority of his architectural work appears to have been in partnership with his son Henry William.
Their joint projects in London included:
St John’s Church, Westminster, destroyed by fire in 1940 – 1941
Camden Town Chapel
St Peter’s Chapel, Regent Square
St Mary’s Chapel, Somers Town
Henry William Inwood had travelled in Greece. He may have been there when the initial designs for the church were made, however whether it was father or son who had the overall responsibility for the design, St Pancras Church displays a very Grecian influence.
William Inwood died in March 1843, and was buried in the church he had designed.
His son, Henry William Inwood died in the same month of the same year, having drowned at sea, when the ship on which he had sailed for Spain was lost, with no survivors.
Henry’s death was around 6 days after his father’s death, so at least the father was unaware of the death of his son. The loss of Henry at sea is a horrible coincidence with another story from the church, which I explore in the second part of today’s post.
St Pancras Church looking across Upper Woburn Place:
The inspiration for the top of the tower of the church is believed to have been the Tower of Winds in Athens, shown to the left in the following late 18th century print. The name Tower of Winds comes from the eight reliefs around the top of the tower which depict wind gods:
The most distinctive feature of the church can be seen on either side of the church, where towards the rear there are caryatid porticoes. A caryatid is a sculpted female figure that acts as an architectural support. They have central cast iron columns which provides the support for the roof, with terracotta being used to form the figure:
The name caryatid comes from the town of Karyai in the southern Greek region of the Peloponnese. They are believed to be based on a dance performed by young women of the town in honour of the god Artemis Karyatis. Some sources refer to the women dancing with baskets on their head, hence the stance, and the use of a caryatid to hold something up:
The inspiration for the caryatids came from the Erechtheion in Athens, a 5th century BC temple dedicated to the gods Athena and Poseidon. The following print from 1853 shows the Erechtheion or Erectheum with five caryatids in an almost identical configuration as those at St Pancras Church:
St Pancras church has only four along the front. In Athens, the temple originally had six, four along the front and one on each of the two sides. As can be seen in the above print, the caryatid on the right side is missing.
Thomas Bruce, the 7th earl of Elgin was the British representative to Constantinople (now Istanbul) between 1799 and 1803. This was a time when Greece was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottomans had a reputation for destroying Greek heritage.
They gave Elgin permission to remove artifacts under the pretence that it was to protect the safety of the artefacts during Greek actions in their attempts to gain independence, which was achieved in 1822.
Elgin removed a range of ancient Greek artifacts, including what are today called the Elgin Marbles, along with one of the caryatids, which, along with the Elgin marbles, is now on display in the British Museum.
The photos above are of the caryatids on the southern side of the church, and an identical feature can be seen on the northern side, facing Euston Road:
Internally, the church presents a large, bright, open space. Galleries run along either side of the church, and the altar is built into an apse at the end of the church, where, continuing the Classical design approach, there are tall Ionic columns:
A model of the church:
There are some lovely design features in the church, such as these columns which support the gallery above:
The font and more Ionic columns close to the entrance to the church:
Stained glass:
A statue of St Pancras:
St Pancras was born around 289 in what is today Turkey. During Emperor Diocletian’s persecutions of Christians, St Pancras was brought before the Roman authorities and asked to carry out a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Pancras refused to do so, despite being offered wealth and power.
As a result, the Emperor ordered that St Pancras should be beheaded on the Via Aurelia, the original road from Rome to Pisa. The sentence was carried out in 303. The saint’s feast day is the 12th of May, which is believed to be the day of his execution.
Church memorials are fascinating. They provide a snapshot of those considered by the parish as worth remembering, but they also tell us a bit more about life at the time.
Take the memorial to William Kitchener M.D.
He died on the 27th of February 1827, aged 48. The memorial, as did the obituaries published in the press, made much of his “universal genius”.
William Kitchiner was originally in the medical profession, but after his father died (an eminent coal merchant in the Strand), he inherited a fortune of between £60,000 and £70,000. This allowed him to give up medicine and pursue separate interests.
He wrote a number of books, including a book on Telescopes, and also a large collection of national songs, but his most widely acclaimed book was “The Cook’s Oracle”, which contained 130 recipes, which will “greatly improve the comfort and economy of all, being the best method of making Maigre Gravy Soups; ditto Green Peas, various Fish Soups, all Fried Fish in clarified butter, fresh Salmon Broiled; ditto Pickled; Carp to Stew; Potted Lobster or Crab; Lobster Patties; Stewed Oysters; Scalloped Oysters; Fish Pies, Stewed Eels; Macaroni; Stewed Onions; Omelettes and various ways of dressing Eggs, and warming cold Fish; potato Pie; Cheese and Toast; ditto Toasted; ditto Buttered; ditto Pounded or Potted; Poached Eggs; Puddings; Maigre and Savoury Patties; Preserves; Tarts; Cakes, &c &c.”
A sample of an early 19th century diet.
By the time that first reviews were published, the book already had a print run of 30,000, and typical reviews were:
“We venture to prophecy that the Cook’s Oracle will be considered as the English Institute of Cookery”, and:
“For practical precepts we recommend particularly and chiefly the Cook’s Oracle, in which , along with the plainest directions, there is more of philosophy, and if we may so speak of the Literature of Gastronomy, than in any other work we have seen”.
If William Kitchiner were alive today, he would probably have his own TV cookery series.
William Kitchiner, pictured with a telescope and book:
William Kitchiner had a disease of the heart, and knew that death could come at any moment, the knowledge of which resulted in periods of depression. He died after he had been for a meal with friends (an attempt by his doctor to raise his spirits), and suffered spasms after returning home.
And with what seems to have been the standard medical approach to many diseases at the time, his doctor attempted to bleed him, but he had already died.
A high proportion of monuments in London churches mention that the person spent time abroad. There is a memorial in St Pancras that records time with the East India Company, and the following memorial records that he was formerly of Canton and Macao in China.
I assume this was a reasonably common background, as they had made their money abroad, retired to London (Fitzroy Square in the case of Daniel Beale, below), and got involved in the life of the local parish:
Some plaques record recent events, including the fire at Kings Cross Underground Station on the 18th of November, 1987, a fire which claimed the lives of 31 people, including Soho’s Station Officer Colin Townsley:
During the last war, the church did suffer some bomb damage, but dry rot seems to have been the major post-war problem, as the church was closed on the 18th of May 1951 as it was considered a dangerous structure due to widespread dry rot:
The church was rededicated and opened two years later in December 1953.
St Pancras Church was the most expensive church in London when it was built, the addition of the caryatid porticoes on both sides of the church no doubt added significantly to the cost, but they are one of the features that make this a very distinctive church.
Henry William Inwood the son of the father / son partnership that designed the church, died in the sinking of a ship.
One of the plaques in the church records another sinking:
The Loss of the Steamship City of Boston
Exploring the story behind memorials can reveal so much about both the event being recorded, and life in general at the time.
One of the memorials records the loss at sea of Henry Horace Baker, his wife Rebecca, and their two young children:
In 1870, ships did not have any form of radio equipment. There was limited weather information, and for the north Atlantic route, any information on the location and density of ice flows and icebergs was mainly the exchange of information between captains whilst in port, talking about what they had seen during their crossing.
A sea journey of any length was a risky experience, and there were hundreds of sinkings every year, and for many of these, relatives had to wait for many months before all hope was given up, and there was often no information on the cause of a sinking, or the location.
The Atlantic route was busy with many ships travelling between the US and the UK and Europe.
Shipping lines competed to offer the fastest, safest and most comfortable route across the Atlantic.
One of these was the Inman Line, along with the Cunard and White Star lines, one of the three largest shipping companies in the later decades of the 19th century.
Formed in 1850 by William Inman, the Inman Line operated out of Liverpool, with a fleet of steam ships, nearly all with the name of City of …..
Many of the Inman Line ships were combined steam and sail ships. This offered the benefit of a fallback to sail if there were any problems with the steam engines.
The City of Boston was the Inman line ship that Henry Horace Baker, his wife Rebecca, and their two children, Frederick and Florence, along with their nanny, boarded in Halifax, with the ship departing for Liverpool on the 28th of January, 1870:
The City of Boston carried crew and passengers, some of whom were officers of artillery and other regiments on their way home from Canada and had preferred to make the crossing in a steam ship rather than the troop ship which brought the majority of the troops back to England.
Henry Horace Baker was one of four officers that had their wives and children with them for the journey back to England.
The ship was well provisioned for the journey. Newspaper reports stated that on board were three months provisions for the ship’s use, and among the cargo were the following: 390 tons of beef, 200 barrels of flour, 180,700lb of bacon, and 10,375lb of wheat.
The ship was also fitted with condensers capable of supplying water. The ship also carried 787 tons of coal.
By reading the news reports from the time, we can follow the course of the tragedy that led to the memorial in St Pancras Church.
The lack of any means of communicating with a ship, rumours, false sightings and reports, the challenges of a long sea journey, optimism that the ship would arrive, even when this would have been an unrealistic outcome. One can also imagine the frustrations and worries of those who had relatives and friends on the ship.
We start in February 1870:
February 1870
By the 15th of February, the City of Boston was several days overdue. Newspaper reports started to mention that the steamer had not arrived at Liverpool, and some papers were reporting concerns about the condition of the ship, for example from the Western Morning News on the 15th:
“The agents at Liverpool of the Inman Company state that the Royal Mail steamer City of Boston, which left Halifax on the 28th January, and is several days overdue. lost two blades of her fan on the outward voyage, and is coming home with only a double-bladed fan. Considering the strong easterly gales and the heavy sea prevailing, the agents entertain fears as to the safety of the steamer.”
The number of ships lost at sea was high. On the 21st, as well as mentioning the late arrival of the City of Boston, it was also reported that the Awsel was lost, including 10 hands and the captain, and that the Tea Ship Westburn sailing from China to London had been lost with 700,000 lbs of tea.
On the 24th of February, is was reported that insurance premiums on the City of Boston were increasing to 50 guineas per cent. Interesting that you could still insure a ship even after it had been missing. There was also a report from a ship arriving in Liverpool from Halifax that a captain in Halifax had told of seeing a steamer which launched three rockets, but he could not be sure of the position.
By the 28th of February, it had been 30 days since the City of Boston had left Halifax, and there was “a very considerable amount of anxiety has been felt and expressed in the commercial and private circles as to the non arrival of the mail steamer City of Boston”.
There were efforts to calm worries by saying that although the ship had left Halifax with a mechanical problem, she was able to use her sails, and could have been blown off course by strong easterly winds. She was a “strong, well built ship, fully manned, most undeniably well found, and in charge of an experienced and efficient commander”.
March 1870
At the start of March, there was still no news about the City of Boston. There were now serious concerns about the safety of the ship, but also voices that offered some reassurance that the ship could still be under sail, could have been blown off course etc.
On the 8th of March it was reported that the Channel Squadron had been ordered to be on the lookout for ships in distress, particuarly the City of Boston
The Channel Squadron had a secondary purpose, and that was to deliver supplies to the ships that were unable to complete their crossing from America due to the strong easterly winds. It was estimated that there could be 500 ships stalled in the Atlantic, including twenty large vessels, loaded with grain which were bound from San Francisco to Liverpool and were long overdue.
A ship, the Ben Nevis had arrived in Gravesend reporting that they had seen a disabled steamer trying to get to the Irish Coast, however it turned out that that the crew’s description of the steamer did not fit the City of Boston.
On the 10th of March, a sailing ship, the Florence arrived in the Thames, having set sail from New York on the same day that the City of Boston had set out. This gave some hope that the City of Boston could also arrive soon.
In 1870, as has been amplified by the Internet today, there was false information being distributed. On the 19th of March, the New York Associated Press offered a reward of 500 dollars for information leading to the detection and punishment of the author of the false report regarding the arrival of the City of Boston on Wednesday. It had “excited much indignation in the United States”.
By the 28th of March, hope was beginning to fade, and the Newcastle Journal reported that “There is no news of the City of Boston. It is now fifty-eight days since she left Halifax on her homeward voyage, and the opinion begins to prevail that she never now will be heard of. The supposition is that she struck against an iceberg at full speed, and went down, leaving no trace behind her. The City of Durham has left Crookhaven to continue the search for the missing vessel”.
April 1870
By April, the rumour mill was running. On the 2nd of April, Admiral Belcher had written in the Times that “if the City of Boston stood south easterly and fell into the horse latitudes, where few ships care to go, or have any business, and be disabled, she may, like a transport he recollects, be detained there from 100 to 150 days, and would eventually find her way by the trade wind into some port in Florida or the West Indies.”
On the 9th, William Inman, the owner of the ship and the shipping line, said that not an officer in his service believes that the City of Boston had foundered from any gale of wind; and if she is lost, it is to be attributed to running into ice.
On the 14th it was announced that the underwriters of the City of Boston and her cargo had agreed to meet all claims upon them on the basis of a total loss.
On the 19th, a further announcement was made that the reports that the underwriters had settled claims was premature, and that they would not be doing so until the loss was posted at Lloyds.
On the 25th of April, William Inman announced that he was bringing an action for libel against the writer of a letter which alleged that the City of Boston was overladen and also defective in her screw arrangements.
On the 28th of April, Henry Ransford wrote to the Times to state that the letter he had written on the 11th which contained suggestions that the City of Boston was not in a good seagoing tradition, may have been damaged and could have been overladen, were false accusations and that there were no grounds whatever for any imputation on the condition of the City of Boston, and that Henry Rainsford apologised if his letter had misled the public.
On the same day, it was reported that a broken piece of teak wood about three feet long had washed ashore at Perranporth. One side was painted blue, and the other side had been roughly inscribed with a knife or chisel “TY OF BOSTON IS SINKING FEB II”.
May 1870
At the start of May, the ship had been missing for three months. During the month, there were still strange stories about the final days of the City of Boston, and the first obituaries started to appear showing that families of those onboard were accepting the loss of their loved ones.
On the 3rd, New York papers had reached Liverpool, and they included the following report:
“A boy named George W. Doty, residing at Princes Bay, Staten Island, while playing along the beach at that place, yesterday (April 19) in company with two other boys, plucked up an ordinary soda bottle, and discovered in it a piece of hard coarse brown paper, and upon it were written in lead pencil the following words:-
Steamship City of Boston, March 2, 1870. As I write this note (perhaps my last on earth) I hear the wails and moans of my fellow passengers as they see the last vestige of their safety lost and swamped in the deep. the vessel caught fire from the engine room this morning, and is fast driving the passengers to the bow of the boat. They have just attempted to launch the lifeboat, but it got swamped with about forty persons, male and female. The captain is doing his best. I must bung and finish. God help us. James…..Nas”.
The New York Times believed that the note was a hoax, as the ship had been at sea for over a month when the note was apparently written, and that there was no passenger on board with a name ending in ‘Nas’.
Another note found in a stone bottle was handed to the receiver of wreck at the Liverpool Custom House. On the note was written:
“S.S. City of Boston, Feb 4 1870. The City of Boston is fast settling. We have lost 4 men overboard, 3 have died. We………..in great danger for our preservation. The ship is on fire, and hurrying all the passengers to the bows. We have had to come on under canvas. our propellor is broken, and we are now at the entire mercy of the waves. God help us, I am on my bare feet and have been all the week. Sig……….Hough, J Hon, W. Eccleston.”
The newspaper report added that the names at the bottom of the note did not appear on the articles of agreement with the crew, and if it were not a hoax, then it must have been signed by passengers. The authorities in Liverpool did not appear to have had a complete list of passenger names.
On the 21st of May, an obituary notice was published in the Times for Henry Horace Baker – the name that appears on the memorial in St. Pancras church:
“Lost, at sea, in the Royal Mail steamship City of Boston, on returning home from Halifax, Nova Scotia, after five years foreign service. Henry Horace Baker Lieutenant Royal Engineers, aged twenty-eight, third and dearly loved son of Mr and Mrs Henry Baker of 108, Gower-street, London’ also his wife Rebecca (Becky), daughter of Mr James Taylor of Summer-hill, Mayfield, Sussex; together with their children, Fredrick Horace aged five, and Florence Hamilton, aged three; and their faithful nurse, Isabella Oliver.”
The memorial in St. Pancras was probably written by the family of Henry Baker. The memorial tells a terribly sad story of the loss of a family, but what adds an extra layer of sadness is that whilst she was remembered in the Times obituary, the memorial in St Pancras does not include Isabella Oliver, the faithful nurse, who had presumably been with the family for some time.
June 1870
By early June, the City of Boston had been missing for over four months, but newspapers were still suggesting that there was still hope. On the 8th of June in an article about the City of Boston, it was reported that the Cerealis, another missing ship which had left Philadelphia on the 14th of January, had finally been reported safe, after being missing at sea for 141 days.
The safe arrival of the Cerealis was repeated in other articles about the City of Boston on the 11th of June, titled HOPE ON, HOPE EVER, where it was argued that whilst people have started to cease thinking or talking about the missing ship, the Cerealis offers a glimmer of hope.
William Inman, the owner of the shipping line, had by mid June, given up any hope of seeing his ship again, as he had written to the Board of Trade admitting that there was no longer any hope, and whilst there is no direct evidence as to the manner of the loss, his opinion was that the sea ice had broken up suddenly that year, and that the City of Boston had foundered from getting among it.
July 1870
By July, the human impact of the loss of the City of Boston was starting to be reported. There were death notices for some of the crew and passengers, and an article reporting the actions of the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphan Institution demonstrated the scale of human loss from ship wrecks.
The article reported that James McGregor, whose father had sailed out of Liverpool for 10 years, and Ann C. McLean, whose father had sailed out of Liverpool for 11 years, and who had both been lost on the City of Boston, had been nominated as deserving of admission to the institution.
The article also mentions that 66 children had recently been admitted, and that there are many more deserving cases which are postponed for want of room.
There were no fewer than 5,271 wrecks between 1867 and 1868, and the seamen who died from various causes during those years numbered 10,133, of these 6,754 left widows, with an average of three children each.
It was an incredibly dangerous profession.
In July, the Inman Line had set aside £300 to distribute “amongst the more necessitous relatives of the ship wrecked crew”. There was no legally binding need to compensate the families of the crew that worked for the Inman Line, or that they should all receive compensation, of what value and for how long.
August 1870
Despite the claim by the Inman Line that they had set aside £300 for relatives of the crew, it is unclear how this was distributed, and in August there was concern within the town of Workington.
Captain J.J. Halcrow of the City of Boston was well known in Workington, and his aged mother had lived in the town for all her life. Captain Halcrow had left behind a widow and four children, the youngest only two years of age.
It was reported that the family of Captain Halcrow have been left unprovided for, and that a ” few Liverpool gentlemen” have opened a subscription for the benefit of the family.
September 1870
There had been two letters to the Times arguing that the City of Boston had left Halifax in a mechanically poor state and also overloaded. One author had withdrawn his claim and apologised. the second author had not, so William Inman had sued for libel. In August the case came to the Law Courts who found in favour of William Inman, and awarded £250 in damages.
Final Reports
As is usual with such disasters, the event gradually faded from the news, and in the last few months of 1870, there were very few references to the loss of the City of Boston.
Strangely, a couple of alleged messages from those on board the ship were still being found.
In November 1870, a bottle was washed up ay Cranstock Sands near Newquay in Cornwall. The pieces of envelope inside contained a number of names and messages “We are lost”, and “City of Boston, We are all sinking, goodbye”.
In May 1871, another message was washed up on the south-east coast of New Brunswick. The message stated “March 21, 1870 – City of Boston – Ship sinking; over half full now. Good-bye all. Look after my boy. Thompson”.
The name of Thompson was confirmed as being on the passenger list.
It took a couple of months for a complete list of passengers and crew to be published, with lists finally appearing in April. I assume it would have taken a couple of months for lists from New York and Halifax, the two US boarding ports, to be transferred to the UK.
Even with this delay, the passenger list appears to be incomplete. There were 116 listed as passengers, some only given a title such as lady, servant, infant or nurse.
For the crew, only the senior officers were named. In addition there were stewards, firemen and coal-passers, giving a total crew of around 100, so in total there were around 216 people who lost their lives on the City of Boston.
The sinking had an impact on the families of those who were lost at sea. This included Mrs Jane Naughton, or Fegan who died in December 1870 after deeply grieving the lost of her son who was one of the crew on the ship. When she first heard the news she was reported as having been “seized with an apoplectic fit, and her health was never so well thereafter”.
In December 1875, rumours of a new possible cause for the loss of the City of Boston was being reported.
The steam ship Mosel was seriously damaged whilst in Bremerhaven Docks. Cargo was being loaded and during the process, one item of cargo fell to the dockside and exploded, killing 80 people and wounding many more.
The cause was found to be an attempted insurance fraud by a Canadian named Alexander Keith.
Boarding the ship using the false name of Thomas, he had taken out insurance, and also built a bomb which was timed to explode whilst the ship was in the middle of the Atlantic. His plan was to leave the ship when it briefly stopped in Southampton, then claim the insurance money after the ship had been lost.
He was badly wounded during the explosion, and attempted to commit suicide, but was held in custody until he died of his wounds, and confessed before his death.
Newspaper reports of the explosion started to make a link with the loss of the City of Boston:
“There is a suspicion now afloat that the missing City of Boston perished by the same means as those which destroyed the unfortunate men on board the Mosel; but we may ask, if the City of Boston, why not any of the many other vessels which have never been heard of since they left their port of departure? We have the appalling fact found that Thomas had ordered and had constructed a whole assortment of infernal machines similar to that placed by him on board the Mosel. It is impossible not to feel alarmed by the thought that life at sea is almost unprotected by any deterrent agency against attempts like that of Thomas.”
The date, reason for the sinking and location where the City of Boston went down, have never been identified.
The memorial in St Pancras Church records just one family who were lost.
The memorial does not include the name of the nurse who was with the family. All the passenger lists I have seen just record nurse or servant rather than their names, so it is good to add the name Isabella Oliver, at least virtually, to the memorial in St Pancras Church.
Over the last year, I have been reading all the books I can find on the Civil War. Two decades of Civil War and then the Commonwealth, a period which included the only time the country had put on trial and then executed a king.
Two decades which revealed so much about Parliamentary democracy, the role of a monarch, individual freedoms and the political, social and religious issues and conflicts of the mid 17th century. Many of which still resonate today.
London played a key part in every aspect of the conflict, not just at places across the wider city (such as the Putney Debates in St Mary’s church in 1647, which I wrote about a couple of months ago), but also the Londoners who were involved in key events during Civil War, the Commonwealth and eventual Restoration. Many fighting, and sometimes dying in battles across the country.
This is a brilliant book. It tells the story of the siege of Basing House in Hampshire, once one of the grandest private houses in the country, larger, and more impressive than Hampton Court, home to the Paulet family, and a place that was visited by five English Monarchs.
A place that ended in ruins after three periods of siege between 1643 and 1645, and there are plenty of London connections in the story of the siege of the house.
Today, what remains of Basing House is in the care of Hampshire Cultural Trust and is open to visit, so after reading the book, this is what we did.
Basing House is in Old Basing, just to the east of Basingstoke, and on a sunny spring day, only the ruins hint as the violence and death that took place here in the 1640s.
What would become Basing House was inherited by the Paulet family in 1428. At the time the site was occupied by a motte and bailey castle which had been built by the de Ports family who had been given the manor of Basing in 1066 by William the Conqueror.
Sir William Paulet, who would become the first Marquis of Winchester constructed two houses on the site. The first was started in 1531, and the second, which became known as the New House, was started in 1550.
By the time of the Civil War, John Paulet, the 5th Marquess of Winchester was the owner of both of these houses which together formed the Basing House complex that would be under siege.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, John Paulet declared for the King, and fortified the house so it could held for the Royalist cause.
Of the old and the new house, there is very little left, but there is one remarkable survivor. This is the Great Barn, built in 1535, and believed to be the largest Tudor barn in the south of England:
The Great Barn was part of the complex of buildings around Basing House that provided the services needed to ensure the operation of such a large house, and the people who both lived there or visited.
The Great Barn was used for the storage of wheat and barley and still today presents a remarkably impressive structure. The barn is now available to host weddings, hence the mirror ball hanging from the ceiling:
The Great Barn was built in 1535, a date which has been confirmed by tree ring dating.
In the above two photos, you can see slits in the brick walls. These were not part of the Civil War fortifications, but were part of the original design of the barn as they provided ventilation, whilst being narrow enough to keep out birds who would have eaten the grain stored within.
The Great Barn was fought over during the sieges of Basing House.
The first attack was in November 1643, when a force of 500 foot soldiers and 500 cavalry of the Parliamentary army led by Sir William Waller arrived at Basing House, and after a refusal from the defenders to surrender, started an attack which focussed on the barn in order to rob the defenders of their stores.
The attackers managed to force out the defenders, who returned to the main house, from where the defenders starting firing cannons at the barn, which forced the Parliamentarian forces to withdraw, and retire to Basingstoke.
Some of the damage caused by cannon fire can still be seen in the barn today:
The barn is part of a small complex of buildings which jointly went under the name of the Grange, and were located to the north west of the old and new houses, so from the Great Barn there is a short walk:
One of the things that Jessie Child’s book does brilliantly is to follow the story of individuals who became involved with the siege of Basing House, both on the Royalist and the Parliamentarian sides.
One of the those on the Royalist side, and who was part of John Paulet’s regiment defending the house was William Faithorne:
William Faithorne was an apprentice engraver living with the print seller Robert Peake near Holborn Conduit.
Peake was a Royalist, and whether or not he had any real choice in the matter, William Faithorne followed Robert Peake and others, as they escaped the defences being built around the City of London, and eventually ended up in Basing House.
Faithorne survived the siege, but was captured by the Parliamentary forces and ended up imprisoned at Aldersgate, where he was allowed to continue his work as an engraver. He was released on condition that he retired to France, but was allowed back in 1650. He then had a shop at Temple Bar which enabled him to continue his work as an engraver, and also to sell prints.
After leaving the area around the Great Barn, we arrive at the gates leading into the main area once occupied by the old and new houses:
Once inside, there is a 3D model of the site, which shows the extensive earthworks, the old house, built on the site of the original motte and bailey castle, and to the left, the new house:
The following image from 1952 also shows the scale of the site of the old house, the Great Barn can be seen to upper right:
The size of the mound on which the old house was built can be seen by walking along the ditch which surrounds the mound, which rises up to the left, with a shallower, but still impressive bank on the right:
There are plenty of information panels around the site, and to get an idea of the size of the old house, by walking the ditch we come to a set of steps that lead up to the top of the mound:
Where there is a viewing platform:
From where we can look out across the site of the old house, and the few remains of what was once the most impressive private house in the country, and a house that hosted a number of monarchs. I used the panorama mode on the camera to get the whole site into one photo:
It is hard to imagine the violence and suffering that those under siege in Basing House went through, whilst looking across such a peaceful site on a sunny spring day.
The first siege of Basing House took place between the 6th and 14th of November 1643, when Sir William Waller led a force of 6,000. This was a relatively short siege as bad weather, and the threat of a Royalist force heading to relieve the house, forced Waller to withdraw to Farnham, which he had captured for Parliament earlier in the year along with Winchester and Portsmouth.
Sir William Waller is an interesting character, as his experience during the 1640s and 1650s illustrate the shifting political and religious tolerance and alliances.
Waller was a professional soldier, and had seen service with the Venetian Republic. As a supporter of Parliament, Waller joined the Parliamentary forces when the Civil War broke out.
As well as his role in the Parliamentary forces, Waller was also an MP, having been elected to represent Andover, but when the Self Denying Ordinance was brought in by Parliament in 1645, (which stated that members of Parliament who were also officers in the army, could only be one or the other), Waller resigned his commission to remain as an MP.
Waller was a deeply religious Presbyterian, and Presbyterian MPs came into conflict with Independent MPs and the New Model Army who wanted freedom of religion, and did not want Presbyterianism to define the state religion of the country.
As a result of his religious view, Waller was one of the eleven Presbyterian MPs accused by Cromwell and other Independent MPs’ of plotting to destabilise the country and promote their religion. As a result Waller fled to Europe, living in the Hague where he met Elizabeth of Bohemia (the sister of Charles I), and on his return two years later he was imprisoned after being accused of plotting the restoration of Charles II.
After being released in 1652, he purchased Osterley Park, became an MP again after the restoration of Charles II, and died in 1668 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
The following print shows the Siege of Basing House. The Old House is on the left, the New House is on the right. The wall surrounding the two houses is that of the Royalist forces holding the houses. Opposite the wall, is another wall which is that of the Parliamentary Army, with a short space of non mans land between:
The print shows the size of the Old and New Basing House, and how little distance there was between those under siege and their attackers.
The first siege was of just over a week. The second siege was much longer. It began on the 4th of June 1644 when Parliamentary forces led by Colonel Richard Norton surrounded the two houses.
After a couple of months, supplies of food and ammunition were running very low in Basing House.
The Royalist Colonel Henry Gage led a force to break through the Parliamentary forces, arriving at Basing House with supplies on the 11th of September. Gage not only managed to get through to the house, but after leaving, he managed to break out to return to Oxford with his soldiers.
The siege continued on to November, when as with the first siege, it was lifted on the 13th of November when the early onset of a harsh winter resulting in the Parliamentary forces withdrawing.
The third and final siege started in August 1645, when the two houses where again surrounded by Parliamentary forces led by Colonel John Dalbier. The third siege was again heading towards autumn and winter, but in October Lt. General Oliver Cromwell arrived with a heavy siege-train (the large canons that were used to break through the defending walls of many a Royalist defended site).
The attack using the siege-train demolished the defensive walls, brought down some of the towers and enabled the parliamentary forces to sweep in and capture the houses that had held out for so long.
It was described that the old and new houses were on fire, and that “nothing but bare walls and chimneys in less than 20 hours” was left.
Today, a sole cannon defends what is left of Basing House from any attack by the towers of Basingstoke:
One of those caught up in the siege was the architect Inigo Jones:
There is much written about Inigo Jones architectural achievements, but very few references to the fact that he was part of a long siege at Basing House, and was captured by the Parliamentary forces after they had stormed the buildings.
Inigo Jones was born in Smithfield in July 1573. Details of his early life are very scarce, but he did have a patron who sent him to Italy to study drawing.
Architecturally, he was responsible for the Queen’s House at Greenwich, the Banqueting House (where Charles I would be executed), St. Paul’s Covent Garden, along with the arcaded square and some of the houses that lined the square.
Charles I’s wife was Henrietta Maria of France, a Roman Catholic, which made her unpopular in the country.
Inigo Jones designed and built a Catholic Chapel for Henrietta Maria in Sommerset House, which made Jones appear a Catholic supporter and sympathiser.
When the Civil War broke out, the chapel was attacked, and much of the art that adorned the interior of the chapel was desecrated.
It is not clear why Inigo Jones was at Basing House, or when he arrived, but he had probably travelled from Oxford.
It may be that his architectural expertise had been used in the design of the defences of Basing House.
He was in his 70s, so living in a house under siege cannot have been easy for someone of that age, and who was not a soldier.
When the third siege ended with Cromwell and Dalbier’s forces seizing what was left of Basing House, Inigo Jones was 72, a considerable age for the 17th century, and he was probably the oldest person in the house.
He was given a £1,000 fine and as a royal delinquent, he was ordered to swear two loyalty oaths, the first to renounce the Bishops, and the second to repudiate the King. This last oath must have been difficult, to repudiate the King that he had worked with for years, as well as the idea of monarchy.
He lived to see the execution of Charles I in 1649.
Inigo Jones died at the age of 78, on the 21st of June 1652, not too many years after the siege ended. He was buried in St. Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf, in the City of London, The church was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666, and monument to Inigo Jones in the church was lost during the fire.
Walking into the central area of the old house:
Those who lived in the surrounding villages and farms had also suffered during the siege. Much of the area was plundered for supplies by both the Parliamentary forces and also those in Basing House, who, in between sieges, or whenever they had the opportunity, would search the surrounding countryside for any supplies they could take back to sustain the house during the siege.
Those who lived in the immediate area did get some small benefit after the siege had ended. Whilst the cannons of Cromwell’s siege train had inflicted terrible damage on the old and new houses, damage which was compounded when the house was taken by the Parliamentary forces, locals were then allowed to dismantle and take away anything they could find, including much of the stone and brickwork, so today, building material that almost certainly came from Basing House can be seen in the old houses of the district.
Basing House once had a large Great Hall where lavish feasts would have been held for any visiting monarch. Today, only the wine cellar remains:
A gap in the walls is a reminder of the end of the Basing House siege:
It was here, in the walls of the Old House, that the defences were finally breached, and the 800 men of Colonel John Dalbier and 6,000 men of Oliver Cromwell stormed in to finally take the house that had held out for three sieges.
Around 300 Royalists, men, women and children, had retreated into the Old House after the New House had been taken.
The rules of war during the Civil War were that if the defenders of a town or house had been given the opportunity to surrender, but had refused, then the attacking force was entitled to kill the defenders once they had taken the town or house. This led to some appalling bloodshed during the Civil War, and the wars in Ireland during the period of the Commonwealth.
Catholic priests were most at risk of being killed as soon as they were found.
After Basing House was taken, whilst there were deaths, many of the defenders were spared.
Again, walking around the ruins of Basing House on a sunny spring day, it is hard to imagine the fear and suffering during the three sieges, the thunder of the cannon and the crashing and splintering of walls when Cromwell’s siege-train opened fire, and the terror and violence when the house finally fell and the attackers stormed in:
But what of John Paulet, the 5th Marquess of Winchester, the man whose loyalty to Charles I was such that he had written:
“If the King had no more ground in England than Basing House I would adventure as I did and so maintain it to the uttermost.”
Despite being the Marquess of Winchester, a man who was fiercely loyal to the Crown, had held Basing House for three sieges, and had refused to surrender, he was spared execution when Basing House fell.
He was taken to the Tower of London, where he was soon joined by the Marchioness, his second wife, Honora de Burgh. His house had suffered significantly during the siege, much of the fabric of the building had been taken by the local population, and Parliament ordered that what remained of the house be razed to the ground.
He also had all his estates confiscated.
He was released in the early 1650s, but without any estates or income, and with significant debts, he was forced to petition Parliament in 1656 for relief.
The restoration of the monarchy when Charles II returned to England and became King did provide some relief, as he had his estates returned to him.
The Parliament after the restoration had passed a resolution to compensate those who had suffered losses whilst in the service of Charles I during the Civil War, however John Paulet did not receive any compensation.
Basing House was not rebuilt and John Paulet lived in Englefield House near Theale in Berkshire, an estate that he had inherited through marriage.
The effigy of John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester. The valiant defender of Basing House:
John Paulet died in March 1674, and was buried in the local church at Englefield.
One wonders whether he thought the siege had been worth it. As well as receiving little, if any compensation for his losses during the Civil War, he could not rebuild the seat of the Paulet family, and to compound his problems, he had a severe falling out with his eldest son Charles over politics and religion.
John Paulet had been a firm Catholic, however his son Charles adopted the Church of England in his adult life. Politically, Charles was also a Whig, a political party that was opposed to absolute monarchy.
The world had changed.
And Basing House still lay in ruins:
Whilst there are the ruins and earth works of the old house, there is almost nothing left of the new house. One key feature can be found in the building in the following photo:
Within the building is a large well that was built as part of the new house:
The well is brick lined, over 18 metres deep and 3.6 metres in diameter. An animal, probably a horse or donkey would have walked around the circumference of the well to power machinery that drew water up from the bottom of the well.
Many of those who died during the siege were buried in the surrounding lands. A monument records this: “In memory of those who gave their lives in the sieges of Basing House 1643 – 1645 Many of whom are buried near this spot”:
The tranquil nature of what is left of Basing House is added to by a large walled garden:
The walled garden is a reminder of the very different backgrounds of the people who held out during the siege, and some who lost their lives.
One of these was Thomas Johnson, who had been born in Yorkshire, but made his name as a botanist and apothecary in London.
He had a business in Snow Hill in London, from where he sold medicinal herbs and plants, and from where he conducted botanical expeditions to counties outside of London, searching for, and collecting, plants. He was also a member of the Apothecaries Company.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Thomas Johnson joined the Royalist cause, and by May 1643, found himself at Basing Castle as a Lieutenant Colonel in the defending forces.
During the Second Siege, he was shot in the shoulder in September 1644 on one of the many skirmishes between the attacking and defending forces. As a result of his wound, he developed a fever, and died two weeks later. He was buried at Basing House.
Title page of an edition of John Gerard’s ‘The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes’, which was “Very much enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson, Citizen and Apothecarye of London”:
I have only just scratched the surface of what happened during the siege, the people involved, Londoners who found themselves on both sides of the battle in Basing, Hampshire, and how the siege was part of a much wider conflict.
And if you are ever near Basingstoke, read the book first, then take a look at what is left of Basing House, and as an added benefit, there is a rather good pub (Bartons Mill), next to the car park
For this week’s post, I am back on the South Bank looking at the survivals of, and references to the Festival of Britain, 75 years after the festival started the transformation to the place we see today, starting with:
Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank
A couple of months ago I was asked by the South Bank Employers Group (SBEG) if I would be interested in working with them to create a series of posters for display across the South Bank as part of this year’s London Festival of Architecture and to mark the 75th anniversary of the landmark 1951 Festival of Britain.
I jumped at the opportunity as the South Bank is an area of the city in which I have long had an interest. I started my first London job on the South Bank in 1979, and it was then that I started looking at my father’s photos, taking the negatives of the photos he had taken of the area starting in 1947, to a local film processing studio to get the photos printed out.
I put together a story to be told across the posters, wrote the text, and provided some of my father’s photos.
The SBEG did all the graphic design, put together the overall layout of the posters, and sourced additional images from the National Archives.
They were installed just over a week ago, so if you walk along the South Bank, you will find three locations where there are a number of posters which tell the story of Festival of Britain 1951 – The Moment That Shaped South Bank.
Last week, we went up to take a look, and for me, it is wonderful to see my father’s photos on display, across the area he explored and photographed almost 80 years ago.
Starting at the South Bank end of Westminster Bridge are the first posters:
These provide a brief overview of the history of the area now known as the South Bank, and also tell the story of Eleanor Coade, and the Lion that stands at the end of Westminster Bridge, originally on the Lion Brewery which stood where the Royal Festival Hall is today:
The design of the posters by the SBEG is brilliant, and it is really good to see Britannia, the blue, red and white compass and the bunting of the festival symbol created by Abram Games back on the South Bank.
The following map shows the location of the posters:
In location 2, between the Jubilee Gardens and the London Eye:
Two more posters on the other side of the above:
Between the BFI and the National Theatre:
Looking towards Waterloo Bridge (on the right) and the National Theatre (on the left):
It was a privaledge to have been involved with the creation of these posters, but by far the best part was the chance to get my father’s photos on display, in the place he started exploring as an 18 year old with a Leica camera purchased from a soldier returning from Germany.
If you visit the South Bank over the summer, please do take a look.
The Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri – Waterloo Station
If you head to the upper level of Waterloo Station, there is a sculpture on the wall which has an unusual history. This is the Sunbathers by Peter Laszlo Peri for the Festival of Britain:
Peter Laszlo Peri had an interesting life. He was born in Budapest, Hungary, on the 13th of June, 1899, and was part of a working class Jewish family. He was involved with art, sculpture, the theatre, architecture and travelled widely across Europe.
In 1932 he was in Berlin, and involved in an exhibition of works organised by the Association of German Revolutionary Visual artists. The works on display were removed by the police, and in 1933 the organisation was banned by the Nazi Party.
The organisation was affiliated with the German Communist Party, who Peri and his wife Mary were also involved with, as Mary was arrested in possession of Communist propaganda. Peri was also in trouble with the authorities as during a political demonstration he had punched a Gestapo officer.
The German Communist Party had also been banned in March 1933.
It was after these events that Peri decided that the only course of action was to leave Germany, and they made the move to England.
I cannot find out what happened to Peri’s wife, Mary. She was Mary Macnaghten, the granddaughter of Charles Booth, who is best known for the poverty maps of London. There is no mention of her after her arrest in all the sources I have found (see end of this section), and in 1965 Peri married the artist Heather Hall, so either Mary had died or they had divorced. This is probably down to my own limited time for research.
Peri initially lifted in a flat in Willow Road, Hampstead, and by 1937 he had found a permanent studio in which to work in Camden.
The studio was at 28b Camden Street, and in the early 1960s the whole area was scheduled for demolition, including Peri’s studios.
A documentary was made about the studios, featuring Peter Laszlo Peri by the documentary company Derrick Knight & Partners. It was shown by BBC2 in 1965, and BFI Replay have the documentary online.
It is a remarkable film because it features Peri, along with the other artists working in a small community of studios. It shows Peri’s work, and as well as the area around Camden Street in the early 1960s.
As usual, whenever I find something interesting when researching a post, it leads to exploring further, and I wanted to find out where Peri’s studio, along with the studios of the other artists featured in the film, were located.
In the following OS map extract, I have circled number 28b. The number is in the central garden featured in the film, and above and below the garden are numbered buildings, each of which was one of the studios featured in the film.
Camden Street is the unnamed street to the left, and College Place is to the right. Plender Street is the short length of street shown in the upper left corner:
The demolition of the studios, along with all the surrounding buildings, including the terrace houses seen in the background in parts of the film, which ran along College Place, was to clear space for the construction of new housing blocks.
The film shows that much of Peri’s work was in concrete, including his own special formulation which he called Pericrete, and this is the material used for the Sunbathers.
Whilst Peri was a long term user of this type of material, many of the other works created by different artists for the Festival of Britain were also made out of materials which were cheap to use and quick to create given the time and financial constraints of the festival.
The use of this type of material, rather than a material such as bronze, was, along with the speed with which the festival site was demolished, one of the reasons why very little sculpture and artwork on display at the Festival of Britain survived.
The Sunbathers was lost after the festival closed.
In 2016, Historic England launched a campaign to find lost public artwork, and the Sunbathers was rediscovered in the garden of the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath.
Historic England launched a funding campaign to restore and display the Sunbathers.
The work was initially on display in the Royal Festival Hall, and in August 2020, it was put on display in Waterloo Station:
The PA photo agency have an image of the Sunbathers installed during the Festival of Britain, on the side of the Underground Station adjacent to the main Station Gate access point to the festival. Click here to view the photo on PA’s website.
Peri continued to work during the 1950s and 1960s, still using concrete, but also experimenting with Polyester resin.
Camden council rebuilt artists studios on the same site, and Peri did return. I am not sure if they are still there. There are buildings on the alignment of the old studios, with a green space in the middle. One building is occupied by an industrial design company. I am not sure what the other building is used for.
Peri did not have long in his new studio back in Camden, as he died in 1967.
Born in Budapest, escaped the Nazi’s in Berlin and lived just over 30 years in London, it is good that Peri’s work for the Festival of Britain is now on display at Waterloo Station, not that far from when it could be seen in 1951:
There is another reminder of the Festival of Britain in Waterloo Station:
The Lion and the Unicorn, Wetherspoon’s – Waterloo Station
Reader and guide Frank sent me an email about the Wetherspoon’s in Waterloo Station. I had not been down to this part of the station (the Sidings) for some time, so did not realise it was open. A visit was needed to see The Lion and the Unicorn:
The pub is named after the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion at the Festival of Britain.
The best description of the pavilion comes from the guide to the South Bank festival:
“The British People are something more than the sum of: men with ancestors, children in schools, families in homes and gardens, and patients in hospitals. They are, in addition, compositions of various particular habits, attitudes, instincts, qualities and characteristic moods. but these attributes, not being tangible, are hard to display ‘in the round’, in an exhibition of tangible things.
Nevertheless, we should not like visitors – particularly from overseas – to leave the South Bank without having seen, at least, some token and visible reminders of the British People’s native genius. So this Pavilion offers one or two clues to their character.
The title of the Pavilion – ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ – serves to symbolise two of the main qualities of the national character; on the one hand, realism and strength, on the other fantasy, independence and imagination.”
As well as the name, the pub includes a number of references to the 1951 pavilion as well as the festival in general
On the large screen close to the entrance is a rotating series of images, one of which is a photo of the overall Festival of Britain site on the South Bank:
The food menus have a photo of the Lion and the Unicorn from the festival, including a brief summary:
There is also some decoration in the same style as the decoration in the 1951 pavilion.
On the wall at the far end to the bar is an open bird cage, framed by a couple of photos, with birds flying from the open cage:
The photo on the right shows the bird cage and birds as they were presented in the 1951 Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion:
I did wonder whether the one in the Wetherspoon’s was an original from the festival (another find of a lost item, similar to the Sunbathers), so I emailed Wetherspoon’s to ask.
Rather surprisingly for a large company, the same day, my question was forwarded to the person responsible for their pub developments who replied that the bird cage was a replica.
The escaped birds flying from their cage:
The following postcard from 1951 shows the birds flying along the ceiling of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:
The plan from the Guide to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank showing the route and subjects covered in the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion:
The following postcard from the festival shows the entrance to the Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion. The rear of the Royal Festival Hall is in the background. The pavilion was along side what is now Concert Hall Approach (on the left of the pavilion) and on the site of the Whitehouse Gardens area, in front of the Whitehouse apartments (the old Shell downstream building):
The guide-book acknowledges the challenge of explaining the British Character. The closing paragraphs for the pavilion read:
If, on leaving this Pavilion, the visitor from overseas concludes that he is still not much the wiser about the British national character, it might console him to know that British people are themselves still very much in the dark about it. For them, the British character is as easy to identify, and as difficult to define, as a British nonsense rhyme.
The lion and the unicorn
Were fighting for the crown;
The lion beat the unicorn
All round the town.
Some gave them white bread
And some gave them brown;
Some gave them plum cake
And sent them out of town.
I am not sure how much the average drinker in the Lion and the Unicorn will be aware of the story behind the name of the pub, and the bird cage and birds on the wall, however I believe that Wetherspoon’s are to be congratulated with their choice of name and decoration, and hopefully it will spread a bit more awareness of the Festival of Britain to a few of the drinkers in the Lion and the Unicorn.
The text over the image on the menu includes the words “only the Royal Festival Hall building now remains”, and I find it really strange that the Wetherspoon’s at Waterloo Station has more information on the Festival of Britain than the Royal Festival Hall.
The Royal Festival Hall did have a large celebration over the weekend that marked 75 years since the opening day, however walking in the RFH today, and there is nothing obvious about the Festival of Britain, and the Royal Festival Hall’s place in the festival.
The Royal Festival Hall did have a good exhibition area, along the side wall between the bar that faces the river, and the café at the back. This included the following wonderful model of the festival site:
The exhibition and the model disappeared a couple of years ago, with the area now occupied by what looks like a corporate hot desk space.
There is also an archive area to the rear of the building, but this always appears to be closed, and whilst there is window and display space, there is little on display.
A real shame as the Royal Festival Hall was built by the London County Council for the Festival of Britain, and for the long term. It was the first large public building constructed after the war, and is a really wonderful building.
It would be great to see the Royal Festival Hall putting more of its history back on public display.
For my last connection with the Festival of Britain, I am staying on the South Bank for:
Siegfried Charoux’s Motorcyclist sculpture – Southbank Place
This is Siegfried Charoux’s sculpture of a Motorcyclist. It can be found between the new buildings that occupy the space where the Shell Centre office blocks once stood. It is close to Chicheley Street which runs from York Road to Belvedere Road:
The Motorcyclist was created by Siegfried Charoux and installed in 1962 in front of the recently completed Shell downstream building, and by a strange coincidence given one of the other topics in this week’s post, roughly where the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion was located during the Festival of Britain.
It was installed at its new location in 2019:
The Motorcyclist therefore has no direct connection with the Festival of Britain, however the creator of the work, Siegfried Charoux, does.
Siegfried Charoux was born in Vienna in 1896, and served in the First World War with the Austro-Hungarian Army. He was invalided out of the army in 1917 after being wounded.
A cartoonist and sculptor, he moved to England in 1935 because of the threat from the Nazi’s who disapproved of his left wing views, and who had destroyed one of his works which displayed a sympathetic view of a Jewish figure. He was able to stay in the country as he had the support of the Tate Gallery Director James Bolivar Manson, who sponsored his Home Office application.
He became a naturalised British citizen in 1946, and continued working as a sculptor.
One of his commissions was a work for the Festival of Britain.
The following is a view of the South Bank festival site from the north bank of the river. The Skylon is on the left and the Dome of Discovery can be seen in the background where Jubilee Gardens are today.
Look in front of the Dome of Discovery, just to the right of the flags on the boat and there is a large sculpture facing the river:
This is the Islanders by Siegfried Charoux:
The Islanders was part of the Sea and Ships Pavilion, and intended to portray the struggle and resilience of the British people in their relationship with the seas that surround the country.
The scale of the work is hard to get from the above photo. The earlier photo shows how clearly it was visible from across the river, and if you had stood next to the sculpture in the above photo, your head would have been level with the feet of the three characters. It was truly colossal.
The Islanders was made out of concrete, and was destroyed as part of the demolition of the Festival of Britain site,
Charoux also created another work that was on the South Bank. This was “The Cellist”, which was on display outside the Royal Festival Hall. It was later moved to Kenwood House where it was on temporary display. I have not been able to find any record of where it is now, and do not recall seeing the work on previous visits to Kenwood House.
Charoux created an extensive collection of works and exhibited annually at the Royal Academy between 1940 and 1974.
He died in Hendon on the 26th of April 1967, and his remains were returned to Austria where he was buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery.
So although the Islanders was destroyed after the closure of the Festival of Britain, Charoux still has a work on display at the South Bank, not far from the original site of the Islanders.
It is part of what fascinates me with the history of London. All the networks of connections you can build between the city of today, and the people and events of the city of the past, including for Peri and Charoux, events in Europe which resulted in their works being part of the Festival of Britain, and works which can still be seen today.
And if you get the opportunity to visit the South Bank, take a look at the posters spread across the three sites.
This is the post that should have appeared last Sunday, the 3rd of May, which was the 75th anniversary of the official opening of the Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 1951.
Unfortunately, on Friday 1st of May, my web site went down again, coming back online on Sunday afternoon. I wont go into the issues with my current hosting provider (to keep my blood pressure down), but in the next couple of weeks I plan to move to an alternative, and hopefully better performing hosting platform.
So on the 75th (and one week) anniversary of the opening ceremony of the Royal Festival Hall, this post looks at the construction and opening of this South Bank icon.
If you attended the opening ceremony, then you may have purchased this souvenir programme of the event:
The foundation stone of the Royal Festival Hall had been laid on the 12th of October 1949 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and less than two years later the building would host the King and Queen and other members of the Royal family, with the King unveiling a commemorative tablet in the foyer.
There was then a service of dedication led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the first of a short series of inaugural concerts.
The works performed on the 3rd of May 1951 are shown in the following page from the souvenir programme:
The London County Council had arranged the week of inaugural concerts, and for the coming months there was “a full programme of Festival concerts, ballet, song recitals and light orchestras throughout the summer season and autumn. A season of ballet from July 26 to September 1 will be presented by International Ballet, who are planning imaginative productions of both new and familiar ballets in settings devised specially for the hall”.
The souvenir programme was a comprehensive booklet on the inaugural concerts, with biographies of the conductors along with comprehensive programme notes, which included extracts from the musical score, taking the audience through some of the intricacies of the work, and how some of the instruments in the orchestra had key parts.
It was a programme written for an audience with a serious interest in classical music.
At the back of the souvenir programme were a number of pages of adverts, from companies who had some part in the design, construction and fitting out of the Royal Festival Hall.
Adverts were a common part of the guide books for each of the Festival of Britain locations, and today, looking through these adverts is a rather depressing experience, as they are a list of all the British industries and manufacturing companies that have either closed or been taken over during the last 75 years, however there is one company associated with the Royal Festival Hall that is still in operation:
Harrison and Harrison were Thomas Hugh Harrison, who was born in 1839, presumably in St. Pancras as he was the son of Thomas William Harrison of St. Pancras who had a company manufacturing parts for organ buildings.
The firm of Harrison and Harrison dates from 1872 when Thomas Hugh Harrison set up a manufacturing business in Durham, where the firm was based in 1951, and where it is still repairing and building organs today.
Regarding the Royal Festival Hall, on the website of the company, there is the following: “A hugely influential event was the building of the organ in The Royal Festival Hall in 1954. This landmark instrument, which was restored by H&H in time for its sixtieth anniversary, introduced the British organ world to the classical influence of the continental Organ Reform Movement”.
The Festival of Britain on the South Bank opened on the day after the inaugural concert, and the site was already generating some excitement. The South Bank was lit up, and it must have been quite a sight after wartime blackouts and post war austerity, as this article from the May 2nd issue of the London Daily News indicates:
“London’s famous skyline shines bright for the Festival; London’s river picks up the gleam. On the South Bank floodlights and search lights on the exhibition buildings make a blaze of reds, blues and yellows. Against the shadowy Shot Tower is the brilliance of the Royal Festival Hall. Then the Skylon points its finger to the night sky. Above Hungerford Bridge are the illuminated flag-masts of the Bailey footbridge.”
The Skylon was already attracting unwanted interest, as at the start of May:
“Students using grappling irons and nylon ropes, scaled the 295 feet high Skylon on the London south bank exhibition site at midnight and tied to a pole 50 feet from the top, a University of London Air Squadron scarf.
One of them said that five students entered the site late last night and two climbed the Skylon with the nylon ropes 120 feet and 220 feet long and climbing equipment which they had specially made. It was intended to fix the scarf to the lightning conductor but the frailty of the structure at the top made this too hazardous.
The scarf was taken down by workmen.”
Getting within 50 feet of the top was an achievement, not sure I would have wanted to try such a climb:
As well as the souvenir programme, the London County Council had also been involved with the publication of the Official Record of the Royal Festival Hall:
Having the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank was part of the London County Council’s, 1943 County of London Plan, which proposed that the South Bank should become a cultural centre, with a river walkway, public space, offices and homes.
The state of the South Bank was described in the plan as follows:
“It is one of the great anomalies of the capital that while the river, from Westminster eastwards, is lined on the north side with magnificent buildings and possesses a spacious and attractive embankment road, the corresponding south bank, excepting St. Thomas Hospital and the County Hall, should present a depressing, semi-derelict appearance, lacking any sense of dignity and order appropriate to its location at the centre of London, and fronting on to the great waterway. This gloomy aspect is intensified to-day by war damage.”
So it was in need of serious improvement.
Across the Festival of Britain site, the London County Council were responsible for the Royal Festival Hall as well as the new river wall and walkway, and their funding, design and construction, was why they survived, whilst the rest of the festival site was demolished soon after the closure of the festival.
A paragraph in the Forward to the Official Record provides a view of the challenge and intentions:
“The Royal Festival Hall is the only building of such magnitude and importance to have been completed in London since war began in 1939; and it is the first new concert hall the capital has had for much longer than that. This building is of great size and complexity – for it is much more than a concert hall – built on difficult terrain and conditioned in its design by the need for utmost economy in the use of steel and other scarce materials, has had to be planned and produced to an inexorable time-schedule and with a vital and uncomfortably close completion date always in mind. Yet the Council has been at pains to provide a building which is everything that careful planning and anxious forethought could make it, and which has been designed to be worthy of the unique occasion of its inception as well as the longer term use for which it is mainly intended.”
There are a small number of photos in the book, and a large number of drawings, including the following view of the external and internal parts of the building:
The numbers refer to: 1 – Roof Garden, 2 – Choir, 3 – Boxes, 4 – Orchestra, 5 – Stalls, 6 – Grand Tier, 7 – Entrance Staircase, 8 – Side Promenade, 9 – Main Foyer, 10 – Restaurant, 11 – Terrace Restaurant, 12 – Escape Stairs, 13 – Terrace.
The paragraph from the forward hinted at the challenges of building on the South Bank. A major challenge was water, as the ground where the Royal Festival Hall was to be built was saturated, and ground water height varied with the tide in the Thames.
The options were either pumping or freezing the ground, and the solution taken was:
“To sink a sort of subterranean fence round the whole building site, some 350 steel pipes a yard apart , driven 20 feet down with their tops connected up to suction pumps. When the pumping began, water was thrown out at a rate of 150,000 gallons an hour, but when the general water level was reduced to that of the pipe ends, half that ejection rate served to keep all the excavations comfortable de-watered and workable down to 20 feet below the surface”.
A diagram from the book showing the layers of strata, with the excavation for the building on the right and the River Thames on the left:
The Official Record looked at the Auditorium:
“Heart and kernel of the whole concert hall building is of course the great auditorium itself, the vivifying principle that alone gives validity to the outer parts and members of its body that encircle it in protective, ordered complexity. So it is the auditorium that will here be more critically judged than anything else, more keenly discussed and therefore longest remembered.
All else is but accessory and ancillary to this one essential element; the elegant restaurants and terraces, the foyers and bars and all the rest – mere handmaidens in helpful, agreeable attendance.
Spatially the auditorium is immediately satisfying, probably partly because one unconsciously realises that it is so exactly shaped for its particular job. Nothing has been done in the way of embellishment to detract from this obvious functional fitness, and indeed one guesses – and again correctly – that such decoration as there is is all calculated to promote the prime purpose of the Hall: the hearing of good music.”
One of the features of the seats in the auditorium was the use of sound absorbing glass fibre in the pads of the seats, to eliminate the sound of a seat tipping as well as to create the effect where an empty seat had the same acoustic properties as an occupied seat.
Boxes lining the walls of the auditorium:
There was a considerable amount of research into the acoustic properties of the auditorium:
One of the unique features of the Royal Festival Hall is that when you enter the building and stand in the foyer, it is not immediately obvious where the auditorium is located. The foyer presents a wide open space, with thin columns supporting the structure above, with only bars and reception desks in view.
The auditorium is suspended above the foyer, a design that needed a clever means of support with four stairwells at each corner constructed within a bastion to support the auditorium. The following image from the book shows how the auditorium is almost a capsule suspended within the overall building:
The main foyer, with one of the bars to the left. The sloping floor of the auditorium forms the ceiling:
One of the themes of the Festival of Britain was the use of new designs for even the most basic of functions, and in the restaurants of the Royal Festival Hall, this included newly designed chairs, with a rubber cushioned seat, and a dumb waiter made out of tubular metal, timber and aluminium:
The auditorium was by far the most important feature, but restaurants were also an important part of the overall visitor experience, and for those dining in the restaurant with a window seat: “At night a new prospect is revealed as the lights shine across the river”:
Design of the terraces and gardens around the hall were just as important as the interior, and long before the large terrace that we see today was built in front of the hall, there was a lower and smaller upper terrace “from which there is a magnificent view of the river and the northern embankment”:
As with the souvenir programmes, in the official record of the Royal Festival Hall, there were a number of adverts for companies involved in many aspects of the building, including Cox & Co of Watford, who were responsible for the auditorium seating:
One of the aims with the design of the Royal Festival Hall was to make use of the latest technologies available for building such a concert hall. As well as theatre and sound technologies, this also included air conditioning and heating systems, and the following photo from the book shows heating pipes which threaded through the building:
One of the challenges with designing and building so quickly, along with the use of new technologies was that the design had to change as construction progressed.
The installation of air conditioning, heating pipes and electrical cables required the drilling of unplanned holes in the buttresses of the hall that gave support to the auditorium as well as many of the walls.
As well as the design of the interior, the importance of the auditorium, and the use of the latest technologies, one of the other key features of the Royal Festival Hall was its location on the South Bank, directly overlooking the Thames, and the building was intended to present an impressive view:
As mentioned earlier in the post, the South Bank was in a dismal state, and the LCC plan proposed significant new buildings along the South Bank which would mirror the buildings along the North Bank, and the above image shows how the Royal Festival Hall was intended to be the first part of this.
This is an issue I have with the South Bank today. The walkway is lined with trees and especially when they are in leaf, they do obscure much of the view of the Royal Festival Hall from the north bank.
Trees are key in the built environment. Not only do they improve the visual aspect, they also provide shade, have a cooling effect etc. however, for the short space of the walkway in front of the hall, removing the trees would restore the view of the Royal Festival Hall as was intended by the designers and developers.
My father took a whole series of photos of the South Bank showing the area before it was cleared ready for the build of the festival, and then construction.
The first of his photos is from 1947 and shows the site prior to demolition. The Royal Festival Hall would be built on the site of the lion Brewery, which is to the right, with the Coade Stone Lion on the top:
A view on the South Bank. The large building is the Lion Brewery after the Lion had been removed:
Building the foundations of the Royal Festival Hall:
The Shot Tower is the tall tower in both photos:
Looking across the site, the tall houses in the background were in Howley Street, which has long gone, replaced by the slip road that runs between Belvedere Road and the roundabout at the southern end of Waterloo Bridge:
The above image gives an indication of the depth of the foundations.
One of the objections to the Festival of Britain was the impact it would have on both materials and workers, who were also desperately needed for post war reconstruction of the homes, offices and factories that has been destroyed by bombing, and general deterioration since the 1930s.
There was a wonderful book published specially for the Festival of Britain by the Association of Consulting Engineers. The book is a comprehensive exploration of many large infrastructure and construction projects in which the association’s members were involved. The book included a section on the Royal Festival Hall, with a detailed description of the design, construction and challenges.
The following image from the book shows the Royal Festival Hall in the foreground, with the build of the Dome of Discovery in the background, with the rest of the site being built around. The image provides an idea of the sheer scale of the construction of the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank:
Back to my father’s photos, and this one shows the build of the Royal Festival Hall well underway:
And finally it has been completed:
Photo showing detail of the terraces at the front of the building, much the same as the print from the official record shown earlier in the post:
The Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 2026, on the 75th anniversary of the opening ceremony:
The large yellow object on the left is a work called Pin Drop by Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, created as part of the 75th anniversary and is “reimagining the iconic Skylon for the digital age”.
The Royal Festival Hall is a result of a 1943 LCC plan, as well as using the South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain.
A wonderful building, but what I find really remarkable is the speed at which it was built. Just over three years from design to the opening ceremony.
The Festival of Britain, which opened to the public on the 4th of May 1951, was though much more than just the South Bank.
If you would like to explore the festival in more detail, you may be interested in the following posts:
The Festival Of Britain – Maps, Football, Guidebooks. Science And Abram Games is a look at some of the publications that went with the festival as well as the Exhibition of Science at South Kensington: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/abram_games/
Hopefully the site will be up and stable if you would like to read these, and all being well will be on a far more stable hosting platform in the next couple of weeks.
The Exhibition of Industrial Power and London Archaeology – two completely unrelated topics in today’s post. The first, I will come to in a moment, whilst London Archaeology is the first post of the month “Resources” feature, where I look at some of the resources I use, and which you may also find helpful, to understand and explore London’s long history. London Archaeology resources will be at the end of the post.
But first, if you have been reading the blog for some years, you will know I have an interest in the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Just six years after the end of the Second World War, the Festival was a huge undertaking in terms of planning, resources, construction. etc. at a time when the country was very short of these resources along with the cash needed to pay for a festival.
There were many who argued, with some justification, that all the resources and money would be far better spent on the rebuilding that the country still urgently needed.
The Festival of Britain was though intended to help show the country both to the nation and to the rest of the world. The long history of the country and its people, the arts, design, creativity, science, industry and manufacturing capabilities of the country.
Designers, sculptors, authors, architects all contributed to show a very different post-war world, an optimistic view of the future after years of war and rationing.
Whilst the South Bank exhibition was the main festival site, and the place that is most commonly associated with the Festival of Britain (and where the Royal Festival Hall is today one of the few, physical survivors of the festival), the Festival covered the whole country.
There was a Festival Village, a touring exhibition on an old aircraft carrier, football matches organised with European teams, music and literary festivals etc. all branded with the Festival of Britain design.
There were seven main festival sites:
The main South Bank Exhibition
The Exhibition of Science in South Kensington
The Exhibition of Architecture in Poplar, East London
The Festival Ship Campania, which toured major ports around the country
The Travelling Land Exhibition which went to Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham
The Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow
The Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast
In London, there was also the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea, not one of the exhibition sites, but a major, and well visited part of the festival where there were gardens, rides, illuminations after dark, cafes and restaurants etc.
The main exhibitions each had their own guide book. These were detailed guides to the exhibition, and contained a wealth of information on the exhibits and wider context of each respective exhibition.
Each guide book had the Abram Games designed Festival of Britain emblem on the front cover, but with a different colour background for each exhibition, with the rest of the guide following the same style and approach to content.
The guide books provide a wealth of information on not just the Festival of Britain, but also the country in 1951, and I have been trying to collect one of the guide books for each festival site, and I recently found one of the two that I am missing.
The guide book cover for the 1951 Exhibition of Industrial Power at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow:
My other guide books are shown in the following images, the first three are the South Bank, South Kensington Science Exhibition, then the Exhibition of Architecture at Poplar:
My final three are the Festival Ship Campania, the Touring Land Exhibition, and then the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea:
There is now only one of the main Festival of Britain guide books that I need to find, the Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition held in Belfast. This guide book follows exactly the same format as the main guide books shown above. I have seen a couple in exhibitions, but have never found one for sale.
Next year is the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, and it would be great to find the Belfast guide by the end of the year.
I have written about the other exhibition sites in previous posts over the years, and will now look at the Glasgow Exhibition of Industrial Power.
The guide book starts with some background to the exhibition:
“In common with the other Festival exhibitions, Industrial Power is not a trade fair. Nowhere in these halls will you find stands set aside for commercial exhibitors. The exhibition has been planned, from the turnstiles to the exit, to tell a story – the story of Britain’s tremendous contribution to heavy engineering. It is a story which concerns not only machines, but the men who made them. It sets out to show not only British inventiveness, but the effect it has had on the world. Against this background are shown the outstanding products of British heavy engineering in the present day.
The theme is simple. Heavy engineering is the conquest of power. There are two main sources of raw power used by heavy engineering today. They are coal and water. There is therefore a coal sequence and a water sequence which unite towards the end of the exhibition in the Hall of Railways and Shipbuilding.”
The exhibition was visited by Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, in June 1951, however in a reminder that although this was six years after the end of the Second World War, the country was still involved in the Korean war, as in the same report of the princess visiting the exhibition, she also “included at her own special request a visit to soldiers wounded in Korea who are now in Cowglen Military Hospital, where she had a rapturous reception”.
As with the other exhibition sites, at Glasgow, the story was presented to the visitor as they walked through a series of Halls which focused on individual aspects of the overall theme. Walking through the Glasgow exhibition, there was a Hall of Power, of Coal, Steel, Power for Industry, Electricity, Railways and Shipbuilding, Irrigation and Civil Engineering and Hydro-Electricity.
The final part of the exhibition was the Hall of the Future, which offered a vision of a source of power for the future.
The route through the exhibition and the individual halls is shown in the following plan from the guide:
A very vivid example of how the country has changed since 1951 was that coal was a central theme of the Exhibition of Industrial Power, as coal was the main energy source for almost all British industry, electricity generation and domestic energy use.
The Hall of Coal celebrated this fact, and the intention of the displays were to leave the visitor with evidence that:
Coal sets the wheels in motion and keeps Industry thriving
Coal is the basis of the Machine Age
The displays took the visitor from the geological formation of coal, where plants took energy from the sun, through to the process of mining coal, and to help with providing the visitor with the experience of mining coal, there was an artificial mine as part of the exhibition.
To make the experience as real as possible, there were two National Coal Board cages which could take 30 visitors each. There was a descent of only 16 feet to the “mine”, however to make this as realistic as possible, the descent commenced with a jerky start to simulate a big drop, then a slow descent and a sudden stop at the bottom.
Having reached the artificial mine, visitors would see a full sized section of a modern, 1951 coal mine, complete with working machinery, manned by a team of Scottish miners.
As well as the modern mine, there were also historical displays showing how mining had evolved, including when children and women formed a significant part of the mining workforce, when miners had to descend to the coal face hanging on a chain rather than within a cage, the role of a 17th century fireman who would descend to the mine at the start of a shift, wrapped in wet rages, to set fire to the gas that had accumulated and clear the workings.
Unfortunately, there are no photos of the exhibitions in the guide as it was published in advance of opening, however it does contain drawings of the some of the halls and exhibits.
This is the Coal Cliff in the Hall of Power:
And the Hall of Coal from the pit cages:
The approach to how information was presented, the mix of physical objects, illustrations, sculpture, reliefs, lighting, written descriptions and the theme of taking the visitor on a journey was the same in Glasgow to all other Festival of Britain exhibitions, including that on the South Bank, although in Glasgow the exhibition was dedicated to power and heavy industry.
What these black and white illustrations do not convey is the use of colour throughout the exhibition. For example, as part of the display showing how coal is formed, there was a symbolic sun, created by bright, pulsing bulbs, to represent coal’s origin in heat.
The other halls followed a similar approach, with the Hall of Steel covering the historic development of the material from the work of Darby, Huntsman, Cort, Neilson, Bessemer, Siemens, Brearley and Hadfield, the “fathers of the steel industry” as the exhibition described them, through to the processes used to produce steel in 1951, the modern machinery and working practices.
The Hall of Electricity again starts with the discovery of electricity: “Electricity is invisible, and can be measured only by its effects. That is why it remained hidden for so long, a latent force in human history, its power unsuspected“, and then runs through how electricity is generated, the modern power station, and uses Sir Charles Parsons as a central figure in the development of large scale generating systems.
The Hall of Hydro-Electricity told the story of places throughout Scotland where the flow of water is used to generate electricity. The last section of the hall covered the Severn Barrage, a proposed project to make use of tides on the River Severn to generate large amounts of electricity.
Generating electricity from the large tidal range of the River Severn has been an on / off proposal for the last 75 years, since the Festival of Britain, and the Severn Estuary Commission reported in March 2025, their recommendations that such a tidal project was feasible.
I suspect that there will still be discussions on such a project in 75 years time.
The Hall of Shipbuilding and Railways included “a great ship-like structure that runs the length of the hall”.
As with all the halls, the story of the development of shipbuilding and the railways was told, starting from first developments through to the latest technology, and the displays included “a magnificent locomotive which will be exported to the Government of Victoria when the exhibition closes”.
Rather ironically, given the exhibitions focus on industrial power, Scotland was suffering power cuts in 1951, and on the 15th of June, 1951, many Scottish newspapers reported that “Exhibition Plunged In Darkness. The £400,000 Exhibition of Industrial Power at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, was plunged into darkness for almost an hour today by an unexpected power cut. Visitors who had just entered the hall to tour the exhibition were left standing in total darkness where a few seconds before they had been gazing at vivid artificial lightning flashes”.
Power cuts appear to have been common throughout Scotland in 1951, later in June the Paisley Daily Express was also reporting that Paisley, along with most parts of the country were suffering power cuts for more than an hour, that there was a ten percent voltage reduction, and that the exhibition in Glasgow again suffered power cuts.
The final hall before visitors left the exhibition was the Hall of the Future.
In this hall the visitor looked down into five pits, each of which covered one of five men who influenced heavy industry in the past, or may do so in the future. These were Watt, Trevithick, Faraday, Parsons and Rutherford, and above the pits a shining cone flashes lightning and represents the limitless future through the promise of nuclear power.
The Hall of the Future:
The design of the guidebook for the Exhibition of Industrial Power was identical to the other Festival exhibitions, whether on the Southbank, Poplar, or the Festival Ship.
The text was intended to educate, and did not (to use a modern phrase), “dumb down” or patronise the reader, but it was also of its time.
As with all the other exhibition guidebooks, the one for Glasgow included a range of colour adverts for companies who had provided their products for exhibition, or who were involved in the theme of the exhibition, so we have Wolf Electric Tools:
English-Electric (with the advert also emphasising the use of coal as a source of energy):
Another common theme of all the exhibition guide books is that the majority of the companies advertising in the books have long since either closed or been take over by foreign competitors, and the adverts from the Exhibition of Industrial Power show just how much the decline of heavy engineering and manufacturing industry in general has been in the last 75 years.
Conveyancer Fork Lift Trucks:
Another advert for English-Electric, this time about their expertise in hydro-electric power:
John Brown shown in the following advert was a major Scottish industrial company, which included a significant presence in marine engineering and ship building. The company built multiple war ships and the liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2.
After a series of mergers, the engineering part of the company was taken over by Kvaerner in 1996, who closed the engineering works in 2000, and the Clydebank shipyard ended up as part of the French Bouygues Group in 1980, who closed the business in 2001.
Thomas Smith & Sons – one of the major industrial crane manufacturers of the country and with a significant export business. Their cranes were also used on docks throughout the country, so were probably to be found in the London Docks.
Again, after a series of mergers and take overs, the company has all but disappeared, but there is a very small part of the business surviving within another group, but not at all recognisable to a visitor to Glasgow in 1951:
The British Oxygen Company:
The British Oxygen Company started off in 1886 as Brin’s Oxygen Company after the two French brothers who founded the company – Arthur and Leon Quentin Brin. The company was renamed the British Oxygen Company (BOC) in 1906.
In the early 2000’s BOC was one of the largest industrial gas suppliers in the world, however a few years later, the company was purchased by the Linde Group of Germany.
Interestingly, BOC’s former head office in Windlesham, Surrey was apparently designed in the form of an Oxygen molecule.
Crompton Parkinson, a major manufacturer of electrical power equipment:
British Aluminium – another company that has disappeared, however the Lochaber hydro-electric plant and pipelines shown in the illustration in the advert are still in use, generating electricity for an aluminium smelter owned by Alvance British Aluminium, the one remaining aluminium smelter in the UK:
The Standard Vanguard:
Thomas W. Ward Ltd – a steel working and construction company, who also had a major business in ship breaking:
In the Hall of the Future, the future of power was through the potential of atomic power and the splitting of the atom. John Laing advertised their work in building and civil engineering with the construction of the Atomic Energy Establishment’s Windscale Works, today known as Sellafield. Today, John Laing are more of an infrastructure investor, rather than a construction firm.
Babcock – once a major manufacturer of power station equipment. industrial and marine boilers, and many other heavy industrial products, today they are more a defence equipment supplier, including naval ships, ground vehicles, equipment support etc:
The Exhibition of Industrial Power was not as popular as the organisers expected, with attendances averaging between 1,500 and 3,500 a day.
The following is typical of the news reports of the time:
“MOST DISCUSSED EXHIBITION IN SCOTLAND – In three weeks the Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall comes to an end. If nothing else, it has been the most discussed exhibition ever held in Scotland. And perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that many of those who have joined in the discussion have never visited it to see what all the talk is about.
Why haven’t the crowds flocked in? That is not merely a puzzle to the organisers – it has perplexed all manner of people. ‘Too technical’ say some. ‘Not technical enough’ declare others. ‘ A designers dream’, ‘A designers nightmare’.
So the conflict of opinion has swayed back and forth – in speeches, conversation and correspondence. Many have averred that it is not a woman’s show, yet many women who have visited the Hall have been full of praise for what they have seen.
Flattering too have been comments of overseas visitors, many of whom had already toured London’s South Bank. ‘Better laid out’, ‘More compact’. ‘a wonderful achievement story’ – comments such as these have been made.
The great mystery of 1951 still remains unsolved. Soon the Exhibition will be only a memory but it seems not unlikely that it will live on as a debating point for a long time to come. And even yet the missing thousands may materialise in a final rush to see for themselves the cause of all the commotion.”
There were incentives to visit the exhibition, for example, specific tickets winning a prize of a paid trip to the South Bank exhibition in London, so on the 10th of July, Mr John Campbell of Glasgow won a free air trip to London to visit the South Bank as the 150,000 visitor to Glasgow.
There were also organised trips to the exhibition from across Scotland. These included school trips, as well a trips organised by local Labour party organisations, for example the Arbroath Labour Party organised a visit for 300 in June, which included the provision of a special train to take visitors to Glasgow.
Overall, the Exhibition of Industrial Power was considered a success. There seems to have been a good number of international visitors as one of the apparent achievements listed was the amount of foreign currency brought in during the exhibition.
After closure in October 1951, many of the items were taken back by their manufacturer, some were auctioned off, others were scrapped.
I have not found any photos of the interior of the exhibition, however the following film does show the exhibition being opened by Princess Elizabeth, and a brief walk around some of the exhibits:
The Festival of Britain guide books help to illustrate just how much the country has changed in the last 75 years.
The Glasgow Exhibition of Industrial Power shows just how significant has been the decline and loss of heavy engineering and manufacturing. A loss that did not just impact businesses, but has also had a significant social impact in multiple old industrial areas of the country – a social impact which is still very present.
Now I just need to find the Ulster Farm and Factory exhibition guide book to complete the set.
Resources – London Archaeologist and the Archaeology Data Service
Archaeology is the way we understand so much of London’s physical past, along with the lives of people who once lived in the city. Despite how much the city has been redeveloped over the past few decades, and indeed has been through very many developments over the centuries, there are always new finds that help to tell the story of London’s long history.
Whilst major discoveries make the local and national news, that is plenty more that does not, but which deserves a bit more publicity.
One of the ways of following the work of archaeologists in London, and the latest discoveries is through the publication London Archaeologist, of which the following image is of the latest issue of the four times a year publication:
The cover image is of an iron eel spear, and to give an idea of the type of contents, the autumn edition features excavations at 14-19 Tottenham Mews in Camden as well as excavations at 1 Liverpool Street which has the title “The Dead Marshes” to highlight the historic location of the place.
These two articles are detailed, for example the Liverpool Street report runs to seven pages of text, maps, site plans and photos.
There are also articles about previous finds such as a Roman cremation found on the Old Kent Road, along with the results of new research on the large quantity of Roman painted wall plaster found at the Liberty excavation in Southwark.
A subscription to London Archaeologist is a great way to keep up to date with excavations and general archaeology across the city. The current price of an annual subscription is £22, and details can be found at the following website:
A brilliant thing about the publication is that if you want plenty of reading to explore archaeology across London, then back issues of the publication from issue 1 in 1968, through to the end of 2023 are all available for free, and to download at the Archaeology Data Service, and as an example of the early content available, there is a fascinating article in issue 1 in 1968 on the Roman House and Bath at Billingsgate by Peter Marsden.
The archive provides more than enough fascinating reading for the dark winter evenings, but there is far more to the:
Archaeology Data Service
Firstly, the link to the archive of London Archaeologist at the Archaeology Data Service is here:
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is the “leading accredited digital repository for archaeology and heritage data generated by UK-based fieldwork and research”, and it is apparently the oldest repository for archaeology and heritage data in the world, having been established in 1996.
The search methods to explore the database takes some practice, and getting some experience with how to frame queries, but if you are interested in the huge amount of archaeology and heritage across London (and the rest of the country), it is well worth the effort.
and at the top of the page there are a number of menu options, but to provide an idea of the breadth and depth of contents, I will click on the Search option, where you can then search the Data Catalogue or the Library.
The Library is a database of archaeological investigations and consists of either a summary of a record held in another archive, or a downloadable report (click on “Available from ADS” on Access Type on the left column of options to select records where the reports are available).
As an example, searching the Library for “Wapping”, there are a number of records, many are a brief abstract, but there are a number with a full, downloadable report.
One of the records is titled, and includes a PDF download of the full report “LAND AT THE HIGHWAY, WAPPING LANE, PENNINGTON STREET AND CHIGWELL HILL, (PARCEL 4) LONDON E1 AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT”.
This plot of land is unusual in Wapping in that it is still empty and surrounded by hoardings. It is between Tobacco Dock and The Highway, and is adjacent to the derelict Rose public house (if you have been on my Wapping walk, we walked past the site towards the end of the walk, heading up from Tobacco Dock to The Highway).
The document is a detailed, 524 page report on excavations at the site, including full background detail such as the geology and topography through to a large listing of all the finds.
Back at the Search Data page, clicking on Data Catalogue brings up another screen, and at top left you will see “Filters” with below this a search box.
Searches can be detailed and specific, but just enter “Wapping” and on the right a whole range of search results are listed, 188 in total (although be careful as there are a number of other Wappings around the country, hence the need to explore how to make specific searches).
The first record covers: “An English cargo vessel which stranded near Flamborough Head in 1891 in fog”, nothing to do with London you might think, but clicking on the Resource Landing Page provides more details from the source, and the “Wapping” was a steam collier that carried coal to London and was known as an “up-river” or “flatiron” due to her low superstructure and with masts that could be lowered allowing the ship to pass under the many bridges of the Thames.
Interesting that a ship that carried coal along the east coast was also able to travel far up the Thames to deliver its cargo, including passing under bridges.
I have been tracing the remains of Civil War defences in Wapping, and a quick search for “Wapping Fort” found the following:
“Fort Number 1 of London’s Civil War defences was in Wapping, south of the Church of St Georges-in-the-East. The common Council resolution called for a bulwark and a half, with a battery at the north end of Gravel Lane, which is where Vertue showed it. Lithgow however refers to it as a seven-angled fort close by the houses and the River Thames Rocque’s map shows a mound on the generally accepted line of the ramparts at the junction of the present Watts Street and Reardon Streets, which would accord more with Lithgow’s location. Lithgow’s description is of a palisaded earth fort having 9 portholes with guns for each.”
If we look at Rocque’s map, then we can see the mound quoted in the above reference to the Civil War fort in Wapping:
Many of the records returned after a search do not contain details about the site, but can be a brief abstract and / or records of where the information can be found, however there is still plenty to be discovered, and the availability of the London Archaeologist archive at the ADS is a wonderful resource in its own right.
Where there is information in the ADS, such as the detailed reports on excavations, the potential location of a Civil War fort in Wapping, or the collier of the same name that had been designed to carry coals down the east coast, then through to central London, it all helps provide a greater understanding of the city.
For the first time in just over 11 years, I have not been able to complete a post.
We were away for the whole of the last week, with very limited Internet access, and the week before I planned to complete two posts, the Essex Street Water Gate post which I did finish for last Sunday, and a second post for today, the 15th of June.
However, whilst trying to complete these posts, the website kept going down.
I managed to complete the Essex Street post, but also spent loads of time trying the find out why the website kept going down. Not for long periods, just over one hour was the maximum downtime, but there were many shorter periods of around 20 minutes – not helpful when you are trying to complete a post.
I spent lots of time in contact with the hosting provider. The first agent I was in contact with said the site was over using the available resources, and said this may be down to a number of out of date software components, or to a hacking attempt, and recommended that I upgrade some of the software and install some additional; security software, which I did.
The site kept on going down.
Back in contact with the hosting provider, and a different agent, who now said that the up to date software modules could be in conflict, or that the security software could be over using resources.
Running very short of time, I just about completed last Sunday’s post, unloaded anything that was not essential for the website – and we went away.
The website did continue to suffer some downtime, but not as much, and the last brief period of 6 minutes downtime was last Tuesday afternoon, and it has been up 100% of the time since then.
So, I have no idea what caused the problems.
The hosting provider has also recommended that I upgrade the site to their next service tier, which I am happy to do, but would prefer to know the root cause of the problems, to have confidence that an upgrade would be the fix.
I will see what happens this coming week, but hopefully normal service will be resumed next Sunday.
I am a couple of weeks late with this post, as it should have been towards the end of April to coincide with the opening on the 23rd of April, 1924, of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
A look at the exhibition is interesting as it shows how much has changed in the space of one hundred years. Physical change at a place where London was expanding in the 1920s, change in Britain’s place in the world, and a change in attitudes.
I have a copy of the plan of the exhibition site, and it is wonderful example of mid 1920s graphic design:
The plan was created by Stanley Kennedy North (a small box to lower left states “Done by Kennedy North 1923”).
Kennedy North was an interesting character who worked across a wide range of media including stained glass, maps and advertising posters.
The plan was created 10 years before Harry Beck’s innovative map of the London Underground, which still forms the basis of the map in use today, so Kennedy North portrayed the routes across London leading to Wembley Park in his own style, and across the lower part of the map are the routes and stations that will take the visitor to the stations in Wembley for the exhibition.
The text at the bottom left corner of the plan informs the visitor that “The Exhibition is 6 miles from Marble Arch by road. There are 120 stations in the London area from which it may be reached in an average time of 18 minutes, and from 120 it is possible to travel to the Exhibition without changing. Trains from Baker Street and Marylebone take 10 mins; Piccadilly Circus 15 mins; and Charing Cross 18 mins. Trams pass the South Entrance from Finchley, Hampstead, Paddington, Willesden, Hammersmith, Putney, Acton, Ealing. Omnibus services run to all the entrances”.
Wembley in the 1920s was an area transforming from a rural landscape to a built suburb of London, and many Londoners would probably not have known the area, or visited before, so the travel details in the plan with timings demonstrated how easy it was to reach the exhibition site.
The Wembley site was chosen in 1920, when the Government gave the go-ahead for the exhibition, and it would be built on the site of some pleasure gardens built in the 1890s Sir Edward Watkin.
The focus of the 1924 exhibition was the new stadium, which had been built for the exhibition, and would be the site for the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as a wide range of events during the exhibition.
It was intended to demolish the stadium after the exhibition, however it was kept open afterwards and used for major football events, as well as hosting the 1948 Olympics.
The Britain from Above website has a number of photos showing the site, with the stadium to the south, built alongside the railway, and the Empire Exhibition site around the east, west and running north of the stadium:
The idea that the stadium was intended as a temporary structure may seem remarkable given the size and construction effort, however a glimpse of the overall site as shown in the above photo gives an indication of how much building work was required to complete the exhibition site.
This was also a time when Wembley was transforming from a rural landscape of fields, hedges. trees etc. into a fully built part of the wider London.
The following photo of the exhibition, looking to the east shows that fields were still surrounding much of the overall exhibition site. The tracks of the railway which would facilitate much of the development of the land can be seen to the right of the stadium, and along the northern edge of the site, splitting off at Neasden which would be at top right:
This photo is looking north, with the very first stages of construction of the new stadium. The photo is dated 1922, and the trees in the photo appear to be in leaf, so if 1922 is correct, then the stadium would be built in less than a year which seems remarkable if the date is correct:
The aim of the 1924 Empire Exhibition was to demonstrate and celebrate Britain’s place in the world, along with the British Empire which was portrayed as “Co-operation Between Brothers”.
The exhibition was opened on the 23rd of April, 1924 by King George V. Some excerpts from his opening speech serve to show some of the thinking behind the exhibition:
“The Exhibition may be said to reveal to us the whole Empire in little, containing within its 220 acres of ground a vivid model of the architecture, art, and industry of all the races which come under the British Flag.
It represents to the world a graphic illustration of that spririt of free and tolerant co-operation which has inspired peoples of different races, creeds, institutions, and ways of thought to unite in a single commonwealth, and to contribute their varying national gifts to one great end.
This Exhibition will enable us to take stock of the resources, actual and potential, of the Empire as a whole; to consider where these exist and how that can be best developed and utilised; to take counsel together how the peoples can co-operate to supply one another’s needs and to promote national well-being.
It stands for a co-ordination of our scientific knowledge and a common effort to overcome disease and to better the difficult conditions which still surround life in many parts of the Empire.”
The speech demonstrated a very paternalistic view of the Empire, and that the focus of the Empire was on the common good, but the sentence that “of all the races which come under the British Flag”, and the comment that the exhibition will “enable us to take stock of the resources, actual and potential, of the Empire as a whole”, demonstrate why the Empire was considered important to the country, and Britain’s place in the world.
Built to the north, and around the stadium were a whole series of buildings and pavilions, as well as a lake.
The buildings and pavilions were each dedicated to a specific country or region in the Empire, as well as two large buildings, one each for Industry and Engineering, and a smaller building for Art.
The size of the country buildings perhaps illustrates the relative importance at the time of each, with large buildings for Australia, Canada and India, and smaller buildings for South Africa, East Africa, the Gold Coast etc. down to Malta which appears to have had the smallest building on the site.
Each of these buildings featured displays from the country, customs, resources, products and people, and many of the country buildings included indigenous people demonstrating some of their local crafts. Looking at some of the film from the exhibition and it is hard to see these indigenous people as being just part of the exhibits on show to the visitors to the exhibition.
If you were a visitor to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition then you may have wanted to return home with a souvenir, and some of the most popular were a range of postcard packs showing various scenes from the exhibition.
I have a couple of these, and they show what it would have been like to walk around the exhibition, and to appreciate the substantial scale of the exhibition which had been built on a green field site in a couple of years.
The first shows the approach to the Empire Stadium as it was named for the exhibition, with the twin towers on either side of the main entrance. Of the two buildings in the lower part of the photo, the Australian pavilion is on the right, and that of Canada on the left:
The first game of football hosted by the Empire / Wembley Stadium was in the year before the exhibition, when the 1923 FA Cup Final was held between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham, and which Bolton went on to win 2 – 0. The stadium had only just been completed and there was some doubt whether it would be ready in time. The Football Association were though keen to stage the event in the new, large stadium.
The result was crowds of much higher numbers than the stadium could accommodate, and scenes of chaos before the match could be completed.
The stadium had been built for 127,000 people, however the numbers that crammed in to watch the final were anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000. There were too many to make an accurate count, and the higher number was the estimate by the Police.
Headlines from the following day given an indication of the problems at the stadium, for example, from The People (London, Sunday April 29th 1923):
“1,000 Casualties at the Cup Final, Mob Overruns the Ground, Barriers Stormed and Pitch Invaded, Unparalleled Scenes, 200,000 Crush into Space For 127,000, Mounted Police 40 Minutes Tussel, F.A, Disclaim Responsibility.
Scenes without parallel in the history of football occurred at Wembley Stadium yesterday when mob-law spoiled the match for the Cup between West Ham United and Bolton Wanderers, which the latter won by two clear goals.
Crowds swarmed onto the playing pitch and for some time perfect chaos reigned. It is estimated that about 1,000 people were treated for minor injuries. mounted police were sent for, and they had to be used to clear the ground, the players themselves doing their best to persuade the unruly spectators to give them sufficient space to play the game.
Eventually, after wild scenes, the teams managed to begin the match, but even then the crowd persisted in interrupting play, and at one period the game had to be suspended for 12 minutes while the pitch was again cleared.
Mr. F.J. Wall, Secretary of the F.A, made the following statement – The F.A. greatly regret the inconvenience caused to the spectators during the match, but can assure the public that the arrangements were not in their hands and that they cannot, therefore accept responsibility.”
The F.A, were indeed correct, as the responsibility for managing the stadium during the F.A. Cup Final had been transferred to the management of the British Empire Exhibition, who do not seem to have been prepared for such a large, public event being held at the site, much of which was still under construction.
The following photo is from the 1920’s books Wonderful London, and although it is not dated, it may show the 1923 FA Cup Final:
The crowds and numbers on the pitch are similar to the newspaper reports, and there seems to be little building around the stadium, which would have been the situation in April 1923, one year before opening of the Empire Exhibition.
The postcards continue to show the site in detail. The following photo is looking to the north west, and the two large buildings in the upper right corner are the Industry Pavilion (top) and the Engineering Pavilion (below and to the right):
Industry and Engineering focused on Britain’s expertise and capabilities in these areas, and a statement from the Gas Industry explains why they wanted to be at the exhibition:
“As you are doubtless all aware, the British Empire Exhibition will be opened at Wembley in April, and the Gas Industry felt it should do something worthy of the Exhibition and of itself on this occasion. The industry is arranging a suitable exhibit, and this Company is contributing its share in providing money for this purpose.
The main object of the British Empire Gas Exhibit will be to show the public the domestic and industrial applications for gas and educate them in all the ways in which gas can serve in the house and in business. I hope that those of you who visit Wembley will not omit to visit the Gas Exhibit in the Palace of Industry.”
With the inclusion of major exhibitions of Industry and Engineering, the 1924 Empire Exhibition was very similar to the 1851 Great Exhibition and the 1951 Festival of Britain.
It is one of the strange trends of the last 50 or so years, how industry and engineering have gone from being an important part of the country’s core capabilities and national pride, to be something that only really gets mentioned now when a factory closes.
Industry and engineering feature on TV in programmes such as Gregg Wallace Inside the Factory and programmes on projects such as Crossrail which often seem to focus on the created tension of “will X activity be finished on time”.
I suspect that much of this was down to the closure of so much industry during the 1970s an 1980s along with the transfer to foreign ownership of so many British industrial and engineering companies.
Back to a walk around the Wembley exhibition site, and this is the Canadian building:
The photo shows the scale of some of the buildings at the exhibition, and also shows the boating lake that was set between the Canadian and Australian buildings and those of Industry and Engineering.
Part of the Australian building on the right (Australia had the largest building of all the countries represented at the exhibition), and the building of Malaya on the right:
It was a common theme of 20th century exhibitions that they also had / needed an amusement park. For example, the 1951 Festival of Britain also had the Festival Gardens at Battersea.
The 1924 exhibition was no exception and the following photo shows the entrance to the amusement park:
What was in the amusement park was probably one of the final parts of the planning and build process, as the plan of the site, created the year before, shows the area covered in blue and white stripes, with a flag bearing the text “The unrivalled and entrancing mysteries and the miles of smiles in the amusement park will be disclosed when this fine dustsheet is removed on opening day”.
The Newfoundland (part of Canada) Pavilion:
The Burmese Pavilion:
Many of the country buildings, were constructed in the style of traditional architecture from the country concerned, as with the Burmese (now Myanmar) Pavilion shown in the photo above.
Another view of the boating lake:
The Indian Pavilion, along with Australia and Canada was one of the largest pavilions, and was built in the style of grand buildings in India:
The following postcard is labelled the Palace of Industry, however apart from what may be in the display cabinets, there does not seem to be much industry on display:
As well as exploring all the country pavilions, and then going to the amusement park, the stadium was the scene of major events throughout the time of the exhibition.
One such event that ran for a couple of weeks until the 1st of June, 1924 was titled “London Defended” and could be watched in the stadium every evening starting at 8:15pm.
London Defended consisted of: “Two hours of intense yet joyous excitement. Thrill follows thrill, with not one moment of dullness. deeds of daring that claim your admiration and hold you spellbound with the wonder of it, the skilful horsemanship of the Metropolitan Police, the dash and daring of the London Fire Brigade, the breathless exploits of the Royal Airforce, Massed Bands, counter marching to the flickering glow of 200 torches, London Scottish pipers and Highland Dancing; and then the Great Fire of London, giving a fitting finish to an amazing night of adventure”.
Who could resist that for 4 shillings for the best covered seat, down to 6 pence standing on the upper terraces or free on the lower terraces.
Another event featured “a spectacular chariot race”, with six Roman chariots racing abreast. The race was supported by “Hundreds of Performers, Troops of Wonderful Horses, Flocks of Clowns, Marvelous Acrobats, Daring Trick Riders, hers of Elephants, Performing Bears, High Wire Acts, Dare-Devil Raymond in 100 foot Land Dive, Roman Riding, etc. etc.”
In 1924, there was no public television service, the first public radio transmission had only started four years earlier in 1920, and films with sound were not widely available until 1927, also the majority of the population had not travelled outside the country, so this type of entertainment, and the pavilions at the exhibition, would have been a significant and exciting experience for the majority of people.
View along the lake:
The British Empire Exhibition was open between the hours of 10 am and 11 pm, with admission costing one shilling six pence for adults and nine pence for children.
The exhibition was the first major event in London where I have seen specific mention of the car as a means of transport to the event. Publicity material for the exhibition stated “Visitors are advised to park their cars in the B.E.E. Official Car Park ONLY. Accommodation for 2,000 vehicles at popular prices”.
The 1920s were the start of wider car ownership, which would explode after the 2nd World War, and would influence planning for the city over the 20th century.
The Sarawak (a Malaysian state) Pavilion:
The South African Pavilion, which featured along the front a colonial architectural style of a long covered terrace and a colonnade:
The above photo also includes a rather strange means of transport that appears in a number of photos of the exhibition. Obviously motorised, with a driver in the front, and a row of covered seats behind.
And a reminder of British involvement in the middle east – the Palestine Pavilion:
The New Zealand Pavilion:
The area between all the pavilions was landscaped, as shown in the following photo with the caption of Lake, Gardens and Indian Pavilion:
The Palace of Arts:
The Palace of Arts was divided into a number of rooms, including period rooms of 1750, 1815, 1852, 1888, and 1924, rooms covering the art of the theatre, watercolours, oil paintings, sculpture, modern oil paintings and art from India, Burma, Australia and Canada.
The guide to the Palace of Arts introduced the exhibition with “The British Empire Exhibition has for the first time made possible the assembling under one roof of the paintings of today, not only from the United Kingdom, but from every Dominion of the Crown. now first can be seen in one place how the Daughter Nations have developed their art from that English School which is represented so splendidly in the Retrospective Galleries.
All the Dominions were invited to send the best of their own choice, and if it be questioned that the space given to the painters of the past is small compared with the whole of the varied collection, the answer is that, in a living Empire, the art best worthy of study is the work of living men.”
The guide apologised for the lack of sculpture from the countries of the Empire, but explained that this was due to the difficulties and risk of transporting sculpture over such long distance.
A rather strange part of the exhibition was a recreation of Old London Bridge, as shown in the following three photos:
The sign on the right of the photo, by the ramp is indicating that the station for trains to Marylebone can be found across the bridge.
I do not know what was used as the source for recreating London bridge, but it does not look like the majority of prints and drawing of the bridge.
Although the plan of the exhibition shown at the start of the post stated it was the British Empire Exhibition 1924, it actually ran over two years, and was open from the 23rd of April to the 1st of November 1924 and then from the 9th of May to the 31st of October 1925. The second year of opening was not originally planned, however the success of the exhibition led to the second year of opening.
The final closing ceremony on the last day of October 1925 was held in a very full stadium and was attended by the Duke of York (the future George VI) who gave the closing speech.
The ceremony suffered some very typical British weather as it was held in pouring rain, however the papers of the time reported that “In spite of the mist and the fog which enveloped the British Empire Exhibition today, thousands of people travelled to Wembley to attend the final scenes”.
The Duke of York closed the exhibition with the words “Further, the Exhibition, in its pavilions and by its spectacles in the Stadium has presented a picture of Empire which has kindled our imagination and stirred our pride in the Union Jack. In declaring the British Empire Exhibition closed, I am confident that its results will endure for the benefit of the British Empire and of its peaceful mission in the world.”
The British Empire Exhibition was considered a major success.
As well as the photos above, a number of films were made of the exhibition, a sample of which are below:
First, some remarkable colour film of London, building the site, the opening and the exhibition site (note that in the film it states that the closing ceremony was held 6 months later by the Prince of Wales. this was the closing ceremony for the first year, and a full ceremony was held as at the time it was not certain that the exhibition would open again in 1925. The decision to reopen would be taken in the following months):
A British Pathe film showing King George V and Queen Mary walking around the exhibition site:
The State Opening of the British Empire Exhibition, including a fly past by RAF byplanes:
Will It Be Ready In Time – film of the site during construction following concern about delays due to a strike by workers:
Film of one of the pageants held in the Empire / Wembley Stadium:
A variety of scenes from the exhibition:
I started the post with a comment that a look at the exhibition is interesting as it shows how much has changed in the space of one hundred years. Physical change at a place where London was expanding in the 1920s, change in Britain’s place in the world, and a change in attitudes, and I hope the above has shown how.
Wembley as a place is now so very different. A built up place, part of the wider London. The original Wembley Stadium, built for the 1924 exhibition was closed in 1999, demolished, and the stadium we see today opened in 2007.
The rest of the festival site is now full of apartment blocks, hotels, shops, and what is now the SSE Arena, was the Empire Pool Wembley, which was built over part of the artificial lake shown in some of the above photos, and completed in 1934.
Britain’s place in the world has changed dramatically. No longer an industrial and military power (of any size) and a lost empire.
And a change in attitudes from 1924, when you look at the paternalistic approach to the countries “under the British Flag” and the emphasis on resources, along with the sentence in the guide to the Palace of Art “how the Daughter Nations have developed their art from that English School“.
The 1924 exhibition did indicate some aspects of the future. it was the first major event which recognised the car as a significant means of personal transport, and it was the first time that the King’s voice had been heard via the radio, as the fledgling BBC had broadcast the opening ceremony.
The one thing that has not changed, as can be seen in the films, are the uniforms, carriages, and approach to Royalty.
The opening ceremony was probably one of the first big stadium opening events, and these continue, for example with the opening of the 2012 Olympics in Stratford.
I wonder how this will be looked at, one hundred years later in 2112.
Firstly, if you would like to hear me say erm far too many times whilst I talk about the blog, I had a chat with Liam Davis who hosts a weekly podcast on Shoreditch Radio, where he invites guests from all walks of life to talk about London.
There is also a good discussion with Feargus Cribbin of the London Pub Map.
Not the most promising of headings, but hopefully I will show you why it is worth it.
The period between Christmas and the first full working week in the new year is a strange one in the City of London.
There are not too many people around, there will be those who have taken an extended break over Christmas and the first few days in January, also, working from home is a very attractive way of working at this time of year.
Although Christmas is rapidly fading from memory, there are still plenty of decorations and lights. Add to that a very wet start to the year, and an evening when the rain gets heavier by the hour, and the City takes on a very melancholy appearance.
The majority of people on the City’s streets are taking the sensible approach of heading home as quickly as possible, however it is also a good time for a little exploration.
Personally, I prefer the summer. A bit of warmth, plenty of sunshine, long evenings, however London looks good at almost any time of year, and to demonstrate, I took a walk from Liverpool Street down to the Bank, taking a series of photos as I went, with light rain to start, and heavy rain at the Bank preventing a longer walk.
I started at Exchange Square, which is an open space between office blocks at the end of the shed over the platforms of Liverpool Street Station.
The trees in Exchange Square are currently decorated with lights:
The view from this space is good during daylight, but after dark it takes on a very different aspect, with the lights of the square, the station, and the tower blocks behind.
I assume that if the proposed development above Liverpool Street station goes ahead, then the view of the office blocks in the distance will be blocked by the new tower built over the station:
From the fencing between the square and the station, we can look down on the platforms:
Artificial lighting after dark brings out a different level of detail within the roof over the station platforms:
Exchange Square lights:
There are plenty of people using the station, but not as busy as on a working day outside of the Christmas / New Year period:
The McDonald’s at the station entrance:
One of the good things about walking while it is raining are the reflections of lights on the surface of the streets, creating pools of colour. This is by one of the entrances to Liverpool Street underground station, with the Railway Tavern at the corner on the right:
Entrance to Liverpool Street Underground Station:
View back to the station entrance, with purple lighting, and the brightly lit interior of the station in the background:
View back towards Liverpool Street Station. The alternative view, if the proposed development goes ahead, can be seen in this pdf. The view does not seem to appear on the projects website, only in the pdf of Exhibition Materials.
Taxis waiting outside the station:
The view along Bishopsgate:
The main streets are much quieter than usual, and the alleys and courts that can be found across the City are dead:
Cornhill looking west towards the Bank junction, with St. Paul’s Cathedral just visible in the distance:
At the rear of the Royal Exchange:
The towers of the City above the “relatively” low rise buildings around the Bank:
At the Bank junction, in front of the Royal Exchange looking along Cornhill, and the rain was getting heavier:
The Royal Exchange with the towers of the City:
Looking down Lombard Street:
No. 1 Poultry, between Poultry (right) and Queen Victoria Street (left):
A final look back towards the east of the City:
The rain was very heavy by the time I reached the Bank, and as water and the electronics in a camera do not mix that well, I joined the few remaining commuters walking into the Bank station to head home.
The Festival of Britain – Land Travelling Exhibition
If you have followed the blog for a few years, you will know that I am really interested in the Festival of Britain. The primary site for the festival in 1951, was on the Southbank, in the area between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge.
There were though festival sites all across the country, as the intention was for the country to be involved, not just a London centric festival.
Each of the main festival exhibitions had their own festival guide book. All were based on the same format and design as the Southbank festival site, but with a different colour to the cover page where the Abram Games famous festival emblem featured.
I have been trying to collect all the festival guide books for some years, and I recently got hold of a copy of the guide book for the travelling element of the 1951 exhibition:
This guide book covered the land travelling exhibition, which visited Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham. As the land travelling exhibition, this would reach major inland cities, where the exhibition on an old aircraft carrier covered major coastal locations (link to this at the end of the post).
The introduction provides the background to the travelling exhibition:
“The Festival Exhibition is visiting four of our major inland centres of industry: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Nottingham. It is therefore appropriate that the main theme of this Exhibition should be the British people and the things they make and use: our past and present achievements in technology and industrial design, and how these provide us to day with manifold opportunities to enrich our daily lives.
The things that will be seen in this Exhibition are not ordinary, average products, but some of the best things that this country is producing at the present time. They are things that we can be proud of, that can inspire and fill us with confidence in the future; and they are a challenge to British industry to emulate the achievements shown here.”
For a travelling exhibition, this was a complex undertaking with thousands of display items grouped into sections as the visitor walked through the exhibition.
The themes were: Materials and Skill, Discovery and Design, People at Home, People at Play, People at Work, People Travel, and the route and individual displays within each section are shown in the following double page map from the guide book:
The focus on technology and industrial design was appropriate for the locations of the exhibition as these were still major industrial centres. It also followed the overall theme of the future, presenting an optimistic view of the future following years of war, rationing and austerity. An attempt to show what the country could make, as there was still an urgent need to reduce imports, grow exports and sell for foreign currency, and to provide a unifying experience which would involve everyone across the country.
Unlike the Southbank Festival guide book, which contained long written sections describing the displays, the guide book for the Travelling Exhibition was mainly a catalogue of all the individual items on display, however it does contain some brilliant drawings of the exhibition areas.
The following image is titled “The Façade”, and shows the main entrance to the exhibition:
The image looks as if it is a Hollywood film premier rather than an exhibition of technology and industrial design.
The timetable for the travelling exhibition was as follows:
MANCHESTER – At the City Hall, Deangate. Open from Thursday, 3rd May to Saturday, 26th May inclusive
LEEDS – On Woodhouse Moor (Woodhouse Lane and Raglan Road Corner), Leeds. Open from Saturday, 23rd June to Saturday, 14th July inclusive
BIRMINGHAM – At the Bingley Hall, King Alfred’s place. Open from Saturday, 4th August to Saturday, 25th August inclusive
NOTTINGHAM – At Broadmarsh, Lestergate, Nottingham. Open from Saturday, 15th September to Saturday, 6th October inclusive.
The exhibition was open seven days a week, with a morning start, and closing at 11:00 pm, including Sunday, although on Sunday’s the exhibition opened at 2:30pm, as I assume there was still an expectation that people would be going to church on a Sunday morning.
The travelling exhibition was not the only Festival of Britain event organised in these cities, for example, in Birmingham, newspapers were also advertising other Festival of Britain events such as a City of Birmingham Show in Handsworth Park, with events including a dog Show, a Rabbit Show and ending with fireworks. There was also a military tattoo at the Alexandra Sports Stadium and a Festival of Opera and Drama at the Midland Institute and Moseley and Balshall Heath Institute.
The next image shows the Corridor of Time:
The Corridor of Time was introduced in the guide book as follows:
“The things that have been made in each age have depended upon the degree of man’s mastery over the materials of the earth and the development of his skill in making and using tools and machines. The story of the ascent of man, the ‘tool-using animal’, from the most primitive times to the present day is told in striking and symbolic form in the Corridor of Time. As we advance with time and see the achievements of the past mirrored in the future, we cannot but be optimistic of the possibilities for man that lie ahead.”
At the end of the Corridor of Time the visitor entered the arena where there was an information desk where “industrial enquiries will be directed to a special information room staffed by representatives of the Council of Industrial Design and of industry”.
It is interesting as to who the exhibition was aimed at, as at times the guide book almost sounds like a description of a trade show, rather than an exhibition that was aimed at the general population.
To help people attend the exhibition from the towns and villages surrounding the four cities, British Rail offered cheap day return tickets, and for Birmingham this offer applied to all stations within an 80 mile radius of the city.
The following image shows “The Arena” which led from the Corridor of Time to the rest of the exhibition:
From the Arena, we enter the “People at Home” section of the exhibition, which in the guide book is illustrated by an image of “The Garden Room” of the “House of the Future”:
The Garden Room is a view of what would be happening in the future with the popularity of conservatories and large windows facing onto a back garden, however in the exhibition there was a recognition of the housing problems that the majority of the population continued to face:
“THE BED-SITTING ROOM – With smaller houses and scare accommodation, this form of room has taken on a new importance in recent years. Special efforts and imagination can make the bed-sitting room very congenial, either for the adult living apart from the family or as a place of privacy for the older child.”
We then come to the “People at Play” section, which is illustrated with “The Fashion Theatre”:
The People at Play section included displays on:
Outdoor Sports and Games
Hobbies (Amateur Photography, Amateur Radio, Painting and Home Cinematography)
Leisure Wear (which was displayed by “actress mannequins” in a continuous performance in the Theatre of Fashion)
The Rolling English Countryside (walking, rambling, mountaineering, cycling , rowing and canoeing)
Indoor Sports and Games
A look at the list above might imply that the exhibition was aimed at the affluent middle class, however taking Amateur Photography and Cycling as two example, that is exactly what my father was doing in 1951. He started off with a Leica camera purchased cheaply from a serviceman returning from Germany after the war, and cycled the country with friends after National Service, staying at Youth Hostels, which was a very cheap way of seeing the country.
We then come to the “People at Work” section, with an image of the same name:
“Britain’s industrial achievements and engineering skill are renowned throughout the world. We were pioneers and leaders in industrial engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries”, so began the introduction to the “People at Work” section. The guide book featured the jet engine, or the “Whittle Engine” as it was called in the Exhibition Guide after Frank Whittle who was instrumental in the development of the jet engine.
The guide mentions John Barber who had taken out a patent for what would become a gas turbine, the core of a jet engine, as early as 1791.
Barber’s designs were very much in advance of their time, and manufacturing technology was not at the stage where the designs could be turned into a working gas turbine.
In a perfect example of what ever you think the future will be, it will almost certainly be different, in the section on People at Work, there are some paragraphs under the heading “The Future”.
The guide explains that the future of electricity and energy production is with home supplies of coal and peat, and that cheap supplies of these, rather than the expensive oils currently being burned would help power the future.
No understanding in 1951 of the impact of burning large amounts of fossil fuels, and digging up large amounts of peat.
The next section of the exhibition is “People Travel”, with an illustration of the same name:
The guide compares the arduous methods of travel at the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the travel opportunities one hundred years later in 1951, with air travel and the car providing the means to explore the country and the wider world – “the private car has added a new degree of freedom to the mode of life of many people in all countries”.
To show some of the accessories that went with the freedom of travel provided by the car, the exhibition included:
Picnic Basket “Fieldfare”: G.W. Scott & Sons Ltd, 4-10 Tower Street, London W.C.2
Twin cup vacuum flask. British Vacuum Flask Co. Ltd. Lissenden Works, Gordon House, London, N.W.5
Coffee cups and saucers, acrylic. S.C. Errington (Hanwell) ltd, 132a Uxbridge Road, London W.7
So the opportunity in the summer of 1951, if you had a car, was a drive out into the countryside, where you could stop and have lunch from your plastic sandwich box, drink coffee from acrylic coffee cups and saucers kept warm in the vacuum flask, all stored in your Fieldfare picnic basket from Tower Street.
“PEOPLE TRAVEL because now the opportunity is open to all”:
The logistics of the travelling exhibition were impressive. It covered an area of 35,000 square feet, and was the world’s biggest transportable, covered Exhibition ever to be constructed.
It needed to be assembled and disassembled quickly due to the tight time schedule of openings and closings in the four different cities.
The exhibits were designed for quick and easy assembly, and to allow for differences between the sites, such as different floor levels, the exhibition structures were on adjustable footings. All exhibits were also completely wired for connecting up at each site.
The guide includes a photo of the Exhibition Façade under construction, and I am sure that is the main hall of Alexandra Palace:
Alexandra Palace makes sense as it would have provided a large area for construction of all the exhibits, and the contractors responsible were the City Display Organisation, London.
As with all the Festival of Britain Guide Books, the one for the Travelling Exhibition included a large number of adverts, many in colour, and they feature a range of British industrial enterprises, the vast majority of which have all disappeared in the years since the 1951 festival.
In the Triumph Renown, manufactured by the Triumph Motor Company, you could get out and visit places and events such as displayed in the following photo:
I think that is a location in outer London, as in the photo we can see the following:
Before Lego, there was Minibrix:
Minibrix were manufactured by the Minibrix Rubber Company, a subsidiary of the I.T.S. Rubber Company of Petersfield in Hampshire. Production started in the late 1920s.
The bricks were made out of solid rubber, and were therefore rather heavy compared to the plastic bricks that Lego would later introduce.
Competition from Lego, who used plastic for their bricks, which was cheaper to produce, and allowed a much wider range of models to be built, meant that Minibrix could not compete, and Minibrix ended production in 1976.
The fate of Minibrix sums up much of the industries and businesses featured in the Festival of Britain, with the majority disappearing in the next 40 years.
One that does still thrive is Rolls-Royce, who continue production of the jet engine in Derby.
I still have a couple of Festival of Britain Guide Books to find, but if you would like to read some of my other posts on the festival, you can find them at the following links:
