Category Archives: London Characters

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Laurie Lee

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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 written about the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion before, most recently in this post, which included the new Wetherspoon’s in Waterloo Station which is themed and named after the Lion and the Unicorn.

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:

Attribution and source: Джон Тенниел, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

There is a photo of Lee, along with his wife at the following link: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw251363/Katherine-Kathy-Francesca-Lee-ne-Polge-Laurie-Lee although at the time of writing, the National Portrait Gallery appear to be having problems with loading images.

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.

The Creatives behind the Festival of Britain – Jacquetta Hawkes

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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:

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw56556/Jacquetta-Hawkes?_gl=11a7d30k_upMQ.._gaOTE3MDgxNDI4LjE3ODQ5OTExNDU._ga_3D53N72CHJ*czE3ODQ5OTExNDQkbzEkZzAkdDE3ODQ5OTExNDQkajYwJGwwJGgw

Apologies to Charles and George Dance, and exploring St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster

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Thankfully, I do not make that many mistakes in my posts, but when I do, readers always find them, which is really brilliant as some are very embarrassing, and I want the posts to be as factually correct as possible.

I have made a couple of mistakes in the last two posts. In my post on Basing House, I brought the siege forward from 1643 to 1943 in a couple of places in the text, but the most embarrassing was in last week’s post, when I confused the late 18th – early 19th century architect, George Dance the Younger, with the contemporary actor, Charles Dance.

When I wrote the post, I had the Pevsner guide in front of me, clearly stating George Dance the Younger, but there was obviously some disconnect between my eyes and brain, and my fingers as I typed. I still did not pick this up when reading through the final version of the post.

I have no idea if Charles Dance is a descendant of George Dance, although according to his Wikipedia entry, Charles Dance attended the Plymouth Drawing School and studied Graphic Design and Photography at Leicester College of Arts, so he may have similar talents to George Dance.

As a penance for making this embarrassing mistake, I decided to find out more about George Dance the Younger and to track down a couple of his remaining works in London.

Later in the post, I will also be exploring St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, after reading a brilliant book about this medieval chapel, and original home of the House of Commons.

George Dance the Younger

George Dance the Younger was born in Chiswell Street in 1741, the fifth and youngest son of George Dance senior (for simplicity, all future references to George Dance the Younger will be as George Dance).

George Dance by George Henry Harlow in 1814:

Source and attribution: George Dance by George Henry Harlow pencil and chalk, 1814 9 1/4 in. x 7 3/4 in. (235 mm x 197 mm) Purchased, 1936 Primary Collection NPG 2812

To add to my earlier comments about mistakes and trying to be factually correct, the National Portrait Gallery record with the above image does not make clear this this is “the Younger”, but does give the dates of life of the sitter as 1741-1825, which coincides the life span of George Dance the Younger.

The portrait is also dated 1814, and his father, George Dance the Elder, had died much earlier in 1768.

At the age of 17, George Dance went to Italy with his older brother Nathaniel (later Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland who was a painter, member of Parliament and member of the Royal Academy), and whilst in Italy, George studied in a number of cities including Florence, Rome and Naples.

In 1765 he returned to England, and took over his father’s role, by purchase, as the Clerk of Works to the City of London.

My first stop in my search for locations connected with George Dance was the house where he lived during the later part of his life, and where he died in 1825.

To the left of centre of this terrace in Gower Street is a blue plaque:

The house with the plaque:

Which confirms that George Dance the Younger lived there:

In addition to St Bartholomew the Less featured in last week’s post, George Dance was responsible for a number of works across London, however the majority have been demolished. These include:

  • Repairs and alterations of Newgate Prison after damage sustained during the Gordon Riots
  • St. Luke’s Hospital, Old Street
  • The Giltspur Street Comptor, also known as the City House of Correction
  • The Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall
  • At the Mansion House in the City, he added a potico to the west door, which was later removed, and he also lowered the roof of the Egyptian Hall
  • At the Guildhall, he rebuilt the southern front in a Gothic Style, but this was later demolished, and the Chamberlain’s Court, also demolished

Between 1806 and 1813 he was responsible for the home of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, however the building was rebuilt by Charles Barry between 1836 and 1837, but Barry did keep Dance’s original portico, which we can still see on the front of the building:

The Royal College of Surgeons does look as if it was the product of a single design, however the portico is from George Dance’s original building (1806 – 1813), the lower part of the building behind is by Charles Barry (1837 – 1837), and the attic storeys and the wings are by Stephen Salter (1888 – 1889):

My next stop was in London Wall to find the church of All Hallows on the Wall, which was rebuilt between 1765 and 1767 by George Dance:

Which is recorded on a plaque next to the entrance to the church:

As a town planner, George Dance worked on a transformation of part of the Minories, which included the original layout of America Square in 1728. My father photographed part of America Square in 1949, when it looked very different to Dance’s original plans:

His work on America Square extended south to include the construction of the Crescent:

The original buildings of the Crescent were badly damaged by bombing during the last war. The damage started with total destruction on the right and progressively reducing along the buildings to the left.

Pevsner’s guide to the City of London explains that there were originally 11 houses, and only numbers 6 to 11 can be seen today. Numbers 6 and 7 (the two on the left of the terrace) retain their original doorcases. The facades were extensively restored in 1985-6 when replicas of numbers 8 to 11 (the houses to the right) were built.

Although only two originals survive (with much restoration), it is good to see that George Dance’s crescent design can still be seen, having avoided being replaced by yet another glass and steel block.

Dance was also responsible for the original layout of Finsbury Square in 1777.

A number of his plans and proposals were not carried out, including improvements to the Port of London and for the layout of the Camden estate in St. Pancras.

George Dance also worked on a number of projects outside of London, including::

  • The Theatre Royal, Bath
  • Ashburnham Place, Sussex
  • Wilderness Park near Sevenoaks in Kent for the Marquis of Camden
  • Alterations to Kidbrook near East Grinstead for Charles Abbot, the Speaker of the House of Commns

As well as an architect, George Dance was also an artist, and perhaps one of his most touching works is a portrait of his son, also George, dating from 1793, when his son was around the age of 15. He would later die of a liver complaint and fever whilst in India in 1813:

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

As well as his brother Nathaniel, George Dance was also a founding member of the Royal Academy.

Sir John Soane and William Mountague were pupils of George Dance, and when Dance retired from his position of Clerk of Works to the City of London in 1815, William Mountague took on the role.

George Dance died in Gower Street on the 14th of January, 1825, aged 84, and he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, close to where Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Joshua Reynolds were also buried. At the time of his death, George Dance was the last of the 40 founding members of the Royal Academy.

In May of 1825, the Royal Academy held an exhibition of sculpture, and one of the items on display was a bust of George Dance, described as “An animated and expressive head of one, who, in the later stages of life, still had a very vigorous bearing, that repelled the infirmities of decay. The likeness is very accurate, and bold; the character of the mind speaks through it. At present it is but a model that is to be executed in marble.”

Despite much having been demolished, traces of George Dance’s work can still be seen across London. As well as an architect, he was an accomplished artist and one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, where he was also on the Council and was elected a Fellow.

And definitely not a contemporary actor.

St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster

A couple of week’s ago, my post was about the siege of Basing House, after reading a brilliant book about the subject and which encouraged a follow-up visit to what remains of the site. For this week, I have another random find when browsing the shelves of a bookshop. This is The Lost Chapel of Westminster by John Cooper:

The Lost Chapel in the title is St Stephen’s, a chapel that had been at the heart of royal, religious and political life from the time construction began in 1292 under Edward I, until it was destroyed in 1834, during the fire which devasted much of the Palace of Westminster.

The chapel was one of the most significant building projects of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, and took a significant time to complete, under the reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, finally being completed in 1348, with internal decoration continuing for a couple more decades.

St Stephen’s Chapel had two primary roles. As the private chapel for the King and the royal family whilst they were resident in Westminster. Secondly, the chapel maintained a daily routine to pray for the dead, including monarchs who had died as well as those who had left money and lands to the chapel. During this period in medieval history, the belief in purgatory was common, with the associated belief that the prayers of the living would hasten the purification of the souls of the dead, and speed their transition through purgatory.

The location of the chapel is shown within the red oval in the map of the Palace of Westminster prior to the 1834 fire:

(Unless stated, all prints in this section of the post are: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The building to the upper right of the chapel is Westminster Hall, so as this structure is still there, we can locate where St Stephen’s Chapel was, on a plan of the site today, where the 19th century structure on the footprint of the old chapel is now called St Stephen’s Hall:

Source and Attribution: It is probably an original drawing produced by Charles Barry’s office., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the above plan, to the right of the yellow oval there is the outline of a surviving medieval structure. These are the old cloisters of St Stephen’s Chapel / College, which did survive and can be seen today in the centre of the following Google map, just above the St. Stephen’s Hall label (this map will probably not appear if you receive this post via email, just the way custom HTML is handled. Click here to see the map on Google Maps)

Another medieval survivor is the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft. This was also built in the same sequence by Edwards I, II and III, and whilst the chapel was used by the monarch and members of the monarch’s family, the undercroft was used by the Royal Household.

Being below ground level, St Mary Undercroft survived the 1834 fire, and today it is available for use by members of the House of Commons and the Lords.

St Stephen’s Chapel survived as a chapel until the Reformation.

Up until the middle of the 16th century, the Commons did not have their own, permanent home. Debates would be held at different locations, with the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey being one of the places in use.

St Stephen’s Chapel became the long term home of the House of Commons in 1547 when Edward VI gave the chapel for use as their debating chamber.

The pews were removed and replaced by benches along either side of the old chapel. A speakers chair was installed, along with a table and raised platform in front of the speaker.

And so it remained until it was destroyed by the 1834 fire. The key challenge during the almost 300 years of use by the Commons was to accommodate the ever growing number of MPs.

Prints of St Stephen’s Chapel provide an idea of how impressive the chapel, and later home of the Commons was, within the overall Palace of Westminster:

The view from the Thames:

Inside St Stephen’s Chapel during it’s time as the House of Commons:

In the above print, we can see the changes made over the centuries to accommodate the growing number of MPs, with benches running around the back of the speaker’s chair, and upper galleries on either side.

St Stephen’s Chapel / House of Commons after the fire:

Another view of the destruction caused by the fire:

During the chapel’s use as the House of Commons, wooden panelling had been put up along the walls, which hid the medieval decoration. The original chapel was known to have been incredibly well decorated.

In the years before the fire, antiquaries had spent time looking behind the panneling, and also after the fire there was work to record as much of the chapel as remained.

The following illustration gives an idea of how richly decorated the chapel was:

The above print shows the remains of the paintings discovered on the wall adjoining the site of the altar, and the print below illustrates some of the other wall paintings:

The following print shows specimens of sculpture from St Stephen’s Chapel:

Although St Stephen’s Chapel was lost during the 1834 fire, when the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt, the new home for the House of Commons was moved to a new location within the overall site, but retained the same layout as the original House of Commons, as shown in the print above, with the opposing benches, and the Speakers Chair and central table.

The current House of Commons has the same problems as the original, as whilst the rebuilt structure is slightly larger, it still cannot accommodate all the MPs, which is why there is always a crowd of MPs standing at the entrance when there are the type of debates that the majority of members want to attend.

It is though remarkable, that the current House of Commons continues a format that was implemented in the 16th century to make use of the space of a medieval chapel.

Today, brass studs in the floor of St Stephen’s Hall mark the outline of the original chapel and the Speaker’s Chair.

Research by the University of York has been turned into a 3D visualisation of St Stephen’s Chapel, giving an idea of the impressive decoration. The home page of the project website is here:

https://www.virtualststephens.org.uk/

One of the 3D visualisations is of the 1360s medieval chapel, which can be found here:

https://www.virtualststephens.org.uk/sites/virtualststephens.org.uk/files/panoramas/1360s/tour.html

There is much to explore on the Virtual St Stephen’s website.

And again I highly recommend The Lost Chapel of Westminster by John Cooper for a comprehensive study of the origin of St Stephen’s Chapel, the medieval life of what was both a religious and royal establishment, the transformation into the first permanent home of the House of Commons, and how it developed until the fire of 1834.

Finding the book was one of the benefits of browsing and buying in a physical bookshop, rather than depending on the algorithms of online sellers.

I believe St Stephen’s Hall is still on the tours available of the Houses of Parliament, unfortunately the old cloisters are working offices, so not available for public access, and St Mary Undercroft does not appear to be publicly accessible. A real shame that these medieval survivors within the 19th century Palace of Westminster, are not available to visit.

A. Tattam, Shoe Repairs and Layers of London

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I have two new walk dates now available, if you would like to explore Limehouse and Wapping. These are, with links:

Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation on the 6th of June

Wapping – A Seething Mass of Misery on the 13th of June – Sold Out

This week’s post is rather short as I had to finish it quickly ready for the site to be migrated to the new hosting provider. In the post, I first trace the location of one of my father’s 1980s photos, and then look at another of the resources available if you are interested in researching the history of London.

A. Tattam – Shoe Repairs

Whilst many remain, there were once far more small, independent businesses to be found across the streets of London, and in the mid 1980s you could have had your shoes repaired at A. Tattam in Brodia Road, Stoke Newington:

The same location, forty years later:

I was initially not sure when the business closed, but it had been operating out of this small building for many years.

The Hackney Museum have an online image of a shoe mangle, made between 1900 and 1935. The object history states that it was “Mangle used for leather at Albert Morris Tattam Shoe Repairs which was based at 2A Brodia Road, Stoke Newington.”.

Whilst it was made between 1900 and 1935, it does not mean that A. Tattam purchased it when new, they may have bought it second-hand at a later date. The object number is 1991.1006, and can be viewed by clicking here.

I have emailed Hackney Museum to find out whether the first four digits of the object number – 1991, is the year when the object became part of the museum’s collection. If so, then this would confirm roughly when the business closed.

There is also an early 20th century sewing machine from A. Tattam, with object number 1991.1005, which can be viewed here.

Apart from these two objects, I can find no other references to the business.

A. Tattam was Albert Morris Tattam, and there is a reference to a marriage of an Albert Tattam of Hackney in 1936.

There is also a record of the death of an Albert Morris Tattam in Gravesend in 1990.

In the 1939 register, there is a record of an Albert Morris Tattam living at 59 Windus Road, Stamford Hill, Hackney. His profession is given as Boot Repairer Master, and he is living with his wife Rose.

The 1939 register gives a date of birth of 3rd of January 1914, which is the same date as in the record of death, and in the record of marriage, Rose is listed, so this is the same person.

In the 1921 census there is an Albert Tattam, aged 7 years and 6 months living at St Charles House, Brentwood, Little Warley, Essex. This would be the age of Albert who was born in 1914. He was living there with his older brother George Tattam who was aged 10.

Against both boys is the note of “Father Dead”, and they are classed as an “Inmate”. I suspect that given the year, their father must have died in the First World War, and they are living in a children’s home.

St Charles House was also known as St Charles School and was an orphanage for Roman Catholic boys, established around the year 1884.

The following extract from the OS map shows the town of Brentwood early in the 20th century. St. Charles School can be seen in the fields to upper left:

So, he was born in 1914 in Hackney. By the time he was aged 7, he was living with his brother George in a children’s home in Brentwood. His father may have died during the First World War. I can find no record of his mother. He married Rose Whiteland in 1936, and in 1939, he is living at 59 Windus Road and listed as a Boot Repairer Master. The house at this address is a short 15 minute walk from his shoe repair business in Brodia Road.

He was still working in his Brodia Road business in 1985, as there is an entry for him Kelly’s Post Office Business Directory, where he is listed as a Shoe Repairer.

He died in Gravesend in 1990. Whether he retired to the town, or whether he was visiting, there is no record. The probate record has a residence of Stamford Hill listed, so I suspect he was visiting, and still lived at Windus Road.

He would have been of the age to have served in the Second World War, but I cannot find any records of military service, which is more to do with information freely available online rather than the lack of any service.

Just as I was completing this post, I received an email back from Hackney Museum with the following:

“1991 is when the item was added to our collection. I’ve had a quick look at our paperwork and we actually received the shoe mangle and sewing machine in late July 1990. Albert Morris Tattam (1914-1990) and his wife Rose Elisabeth both died in 1990, Rose on 28 March and Albert on 12 June, so we received the items about 6 weeks later. As they married in 1936, I can’t quickly and easily find any records of them having children so I cannot say for certain if the Tattam who donated the items to us was a child or a relation.

However for your purposes, 12 June would be the final day of Albert trading. As the items were donated to Hackney Museum so quickly afterwards, I can only assume that there wasn’t somebody to take over the business.”

I wonder how many pairs of shoes he repaired for Hackney residents during his working life, and how many times he walked between his home in Windus Road and workplace at Brodia Road:

The small premises of A. Tattam today appears to be a single residence as it has a house number and an entrance.

It is fascinating to be able to trace a small part of the story of those who have lived and worked in London, and put some context to photos of a very different city.

There is much to discover in the local area, but this has to be a short post, so a short distance away from Tattam’s business, I found a cat enjoying the warmth of an early spring day:

And whilst walking along Stamford Hill towards Stoke Newington Station, I found a shop with a wonderful typeface used for the shop’s name:

In the 75th anniversary year of the Festival of Britain, the typeface does remind me of the type of lettering, use of colour, and layout used during the festival, and the Egg Stores does appear to date from 1951 (although I have also read that it dates from 1948), so perhaps the festival was the inspiration.

The Egg Stores was an egg dealing business, selling white shelled eggs to the Jewish community.

The shop is now a Kosher Supermarket, and the shop sign is an example of what can be done when some design effort is put into a such a common feature of a busy street.

Resources – Layers of London

Back in December of last year, in one of my posts where I cover some of the resources I use to help discover and explore London’s history, I featured the publication London Archaeologist.

In the Spring issue of their publication, they included a review of my blog. This was not expected, and for clarity, as it is important to me, anything I feature on the blog is because it is of interest to me. I do not feature anything for financial gain, an offer to publicise the blog etc. Having said that, it was really good to receive a review in such a publication.

In the same post I featured the Archaeology Data Service, and the review in London Archaeologist mentioned:

“As well as London Archaeologist, the blogger recommended delving into the ADS for more information on particular sites, However, it’s a shame that there was no mention of the Layers of London website where articles can perhaps be found more easily if one is curious about certain areas.”

I have long found Layers of London really useful, so to correct my omission from my Resources series, this is the Layers of London website, found at the following link: https://www.layersoflondon.org/

Layers of London has been developed by the Institute of Historical Research, and uses a comprehensive collection of maps as the basis on which an equally comprehensive collection of information has been added.

The above image is of the home page, and at top right you will see “Explore the map” which is perhaps the quickest way to start looking at what is available. This will bring up the following page, which has the base map shown, overlaid with circles containing numbers. You can zoom into the map for greater detail, and the numbers in the circle refer to the number of records available for that locality.

Just exploring these records reveals the wealth of information available.

In the above image, I have added a red arrow on the left pointing to an icon in the tool bar to the left of the screen. Clicking on this icon brings up the Overlays page:

Where a long list of the maps available are listed, including, for example, the Agas map, Inland Revenue Valuation Surveys, Bomb Damage maps, Geology and US Spy Satellite images from 1973, as well as maps such as J. Ogilby and W. Morgan map of 1676, Horwood’s map of 1799, and Greenwood’s map of 1828.

It is also possible to explore by theme, as shown in the following window:

It is also possible to make your own contributions to the resources on the site. This page has more information, including a link to a helpful User Guide as well as some YouTube videos: https://www.layersoflondon.org/get-involved

There is a wealth of information on the Layers of London website, and it is very easy to spend quite a few hours exploring the history of the city, and if you have not found the site before, I hope you will find it to be a fascinating resource.

Hopefully, by the time you read this, or by next Sunday’s post, the blog will be on a new, far more stable home.

The Treachery of Sir George Downing

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Along with streets and places such as Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Oxford Street, Downing Street is probably one of the more recognisable London street names, not just in the United Kingdom, but across the world, given the number of tourists who peer through the gates that separate Downing Street from Whitehall.

Number 10 Downing Street has been home to the Prime Minister (or more correctly the First Lord of the Treasury) since 1735, when the house was given to Sir Robert Walpole.

There have been many gaps in occupancy by Prime Minsters, however a central London house was considered a benefit of the role. It was only in the early 20th century that it became a full time residence of Prime Ministers.

Security has long been an issue. It was not so long ago that the public could walk down the street, with the street finally being closed to the public in 1982, and in response to ever growing threats, security measures such as physical defences and armed police have been added and enhanced.

So today, this is the best view of the street for tourists and members of the public who do not have official business in any of the buildings and institutions that line Downing Street:

The street has seen so many Prime Ministers, newly elected, arrive in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and expectation, only to leave having been rejected either by the electorate, or through the actions of their former colleagues.

For a rejected Prime Minister, perhaps the most difficult way to leave is when you have been rejected by former colleagues. Those who once supported and worked with you, and with whom you had a shared vision of the future.

Whilst this must be incredibility frustrating, it is not as bad as the treachery of the person who was once the land owner and who gave his name to the street, who through his treachery, condemned former colleagues to the worst death penalty that the State could impose, convicted of being a traitor and being hung, drawn and quartered.

For this, we have to go back to the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration of the 1640s, 1650s and early 1660s to explore the work of Sir George Downing:

The source of the above paining is from the Harvard Art Museum, and the image title is “Portrait of a Man, probably Sir George Downing (1624-1684)”. It is often difficult to be absolutely certain of those depicted in paintings of some age (see my recent post on the Gresham’s).

The record for the painting states that on the stretcher is written “Sir George Downing Bart./ born August 1623–Embassador [sic]/ to the States General 1659-Son of/ Emmanuel Downing & Lucy Winthrop/ 4th daughter of Adam Winthrop-/ The nephew of John Winthrop/ Governor of Massachusetts–His/ diplomatic services…[illegible]… are well known to history.”, which does add some confidence that this is Sir George Downing.

George Downing was born in Dublin around 1623 or 1624, His father was Emanual Downing, a Barrister and Puritan, and his mother was Lucy Winthrop, the sister of John Winthrope who was the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English settlement on the east coast of America which had been founded in 1628.

This family relationship with Massachusetts resulted in the family moving to the colony in 1638, where they settled in Salem.

Harvard College had been founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the 18th of October 1636, and was the first college set-up in the American colonies.

The name Harvard comes from John Harvard who was an English Puritan minister and benefactor of the college, which included leaving his library of 400 books and half of his estate to the new college.

George Downing attended Harvard College, and was one of the first group of nine who graduated from the college in 1642.

After Harvard, Downing moved to the West Indies where he became a preacher, and in the early 1640s he returned to England, where he found the country in the middle of a Civil War, and he quickly aligned with the forces opposing King Charles I, joining the regiment of Colonel John Okey as a chaplain.

Downing was fully supportive of the actions of Cromwell and the New Model Army in the defeat of the Royalist cause, and he was recognised and promoted quickly to become Cromwell’s Scoutmaster General in Scotland, a role that was basically the head of a spying and intelligence operation, attempts to infiltrate Royalist plots and to turn Royalist supporters to the Republican cause.

During the years of the Commonwealth in the 1650’s, Downing’s skills became valuable in the diplomatic service, and he became the Commonwealth’s ambassador to the Netherlands, where he also developed a network of spies, and passed information on Royalist plots back to John Thurloe, who was Cromwell’s main spymaster.

The later part of the 1650s were a difficult time for the Commonwealth, the main issue being what would happen to the Commonwealth after the death of Oliver Cromwell. Who would succeed Cromwell, how would such a decision be made, could Cromwell take on the role of a monarch and make the head of the Commonwealth a hereditary title?

Downing supported and urged Cromwell to take on the role of a monarch along the lines of the old constitution that had existed before the execution of King Charles I.

To those holding senior positions in the army and the Commonwealth, it must have seemed that the Commonwealth was in a strong position, the country would remain a Republic. Monarchist plots and uprisings had been supressed, and the future King Charles II seemed to be in a weak position in exile on the Continent.

It was then surprising how quickly after Cromwell’s death, that the whole structure of the Commonwealth collapsed so rapidly, and King Charles II was restored as the monarch of the United Kingdom in 1661, just three years after the death of Oliver Cromwell.

George Downing had been watching how sentiments towards the monarchy were changing and started to plan how he would survive and prosper after the restoration.

This involved actions such as ingratiating himself within the court of the future Charles II, passing information on to the Royalists and claiming that he had been drawn in to the Republican cause rather than being an active initiator of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I.

Whilst Downing had supported the trial and execution of the former king, he was not a judge or participant in the trial, and did not sign the execution warrant of the king:

Source: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Which is an important lesson if you are involved in any plotting or support of a controversial cause – never leave anything in writing.

Despite his involvement and support of the Republican cause, Downing’s efforts to show support for the monarchy were such that after the restoration of the monarchy, he was knighted, and continued in his role as the ambassador to the Netherlands, and it was in the following couple of years that he was to really show his ruthless streak and what he would do to further his own power, position and wealth.

Regicides

After the restoration, the monarchy turned their anger on those who had been involved in the trial of King Charles I, who had signed his execution warrant, or who had had a significant role in his execution.

Known as the Regicides, those who had been responsible in some way for the execution of the King were exempted from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, an act that gave a general pardon for all those who had committed a crime during the Civil War and the Commonwealth (other than crimes such as murder, unless covered by a licence from the king, witchcraft and piracy were also not covered by the general pardon).

A number of the Regicides had already died, including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton. Others gave themselves up in the hope of a fair trial and avoidance of a traitors death, whilst others fled abroad in fear of their lives.

Three of those who fled, and who would meet their deaths through the actions of George Downing, were:

John Okey

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by John Thane line engraving, published 1794 NPG D27161© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Okey had been born in St. Giles, and like many others who were part of the Parliamentary / Republican / New Model Army forces opposing the king during the Civil war, Okey had enlisted in the army, rising through the ranks to become a major, then a colonel, of a regiment of dragoons (mounted infantry).

George Downing had joined Okey’s regiment as a chaplain, and was well known to Okey.

When Charles I was brought to trial, Okey was one of the 80 who were actively involved in the trial, and attended on most days, and the action that would infuriate the restored monarchy was that he was one of the 59 who had signed the warrant for the execution of the king.

Miles Corbet

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by William Richardson
line engraving, published 1810 NPG D30024© National Portrait Gallery, London

Miles Cobet was the MP for Yarmouth and also a Lawyer.

The print of Corbet shown above has the abbreviation Coll. in front of his last name. This may have been an honorary titles, as he did not serve during any military actions during the Civil War. He was though one of the founders of the Eastern Association, which was a military alliance formed to defend East Anglia on behalf of the Parliamentary forces, and he also served as an army commissioner in Ireland, responsible for overseeing the affairs of the army, and with allocation of land within Ireland to soldiers as reward for their service, and often in lieu of wages.

His role in the trial of Charles I was as part of the High Court of Justice, and as one of those who signed the execution warrant.

John Barkstead

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist line engraving, published 1810 NPG D9319© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Barkstead was originally a goldsmith in the Strand, but who joined the Parliamentary forces, becoming a captain of a foot company in the regiment of Colonel Venn. He was Governor of Reading for a short time, commanded a regiment at the siege of Colchester, and was appointed as one of the judges at the trial of Charles I.

He also signed the Warrant for the Execution of Charles I.

He was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London, but used this position to further his own wealth by extorting money from prisoners and generally running a cruel regime.

He was rumoured to have hidden a large sum of money in the Tower of London, and in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he was busy in a discovery for Lord Sandwich and Sir H. Bennett of the cellars of the Tower for this hidden money.

By signing the warrant for the execution of the King, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead had also signed their own death warrants, as this would be their fate – a public traitors death in London.

Escape and Capture

In fear of their lives, with the restoration of the monarchy, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead fled to Europe, with Okey and Barkstead making their way to Hanau in Germany, where they were accepted by the town and given a level of protection. Corbet had made his way to the Netherlands where he was in hiding.

For Barkstead, Hanau seemed a natural, long term home, as the town was well known for the manufacture of jewellery, and Barkstead’s background as a goldsmith in the Strand would come in use.

As Hanau seemed to be a long term home for Okey and Barkstead, they wanted their wives to join them, and a plan was put together for them to meet their wives in the Netherlands, from where they would all travel back to Hanau.

They believed that they would be safe in the Netherlands and had assurances that Downing had not been given any instructions to hunt for them. The Netherlands was also known for tolerance and for putting commerce before any other concern.

They travelled to Delft, and met up with Corbet, who was keen to meet with some friends after his time in hiding.

Downing meanwhile had been putting together plans for how he would find and capture any regicides that were living or passing through the Netherlands. He was worried about the repercussions of capturing any regicides and transporting them back to London without the approval of the Dutch, and he had problems with getting an arrest warrant from the Dutch authorities.

After much persuasion, Downing received a blank arrest warrant, which he would be able to use against any of the regicides that he could discover in the Netherlands, and it would soon be put into use.

Through Downing’s network of spies, he discovered that Okey, Corbet and Barkstead were all in Delft, and just as they were about to split up, Downing and his men pounced on the house, and found the three sitting around a fire, smoking pipes. and they quickly rounded up the three regicides. They had their hands and feet manacled and were thrown in a damp prison cell, whilst Downing finalised their transport back to England.

Whilst they were in captivity, the three were visited by Dutch politicians who assured the three that they would be freed, however Downing used his skills to threaten and bully the Dutch on the possible consequences of such actions, and the Dutch conceded, and let Downing continue to hold the three and arrange their transport.

Another challenge was the Bailiff of Delft who was not cooperative and threatened to derail Downing’s plans. Downing’s response to this was another indication that he would do anything to have his way. He made inquiries about the bailiff and learnt that “he was one who would do nothing without money”, so Downing offered him a bribe – a reward if he would keep the prisoners safe until they were finally in Downing’s hands.

There were other problems. The magistrates of Amsterdam sent a message to the authorities in Delft that they should “let the Gates of the prison be opened and so let them escape “.

The bailiff warned Downing that the “common people might go about to force the prison and let them out”, and the authorities in Delft made efforts to provide counsel for the regicides.

Downing finally received an order from the Dutch authorities addressed to the bailiff in Delft to release the prisoners to Downing. The bailiff was concerned that there would be a rising “if there were but the least notice of an intention to carry them away”.

Downing had already arranged for an English frigate to be available, and with the aid of some sailors from the frigate, and a small boat, he:

“resolved in the dead of the night to get a boate into a litle channell which came neare behinde the prison, and at the very first dawning of the day without so much as giving any notice to the seamen I had pro
vided . . . forthwith to slip them downe the backstaires . . . and so accordingly we did, and there was not the least notice in the Towne thereof, and before 5 in the morning the boate was without the Porto of
Delft, where I delivered them to Mr. Armerer . . . giving him direction not to put them a shoare in any place, but to go the whole way by water to the Blackamore Frigat at Helverdsluice.”

The Frigate Blackamore carried the three prisoners back to England, where they were imprisoned in the Tower awaiting a trial, which was not really a trial as in the view of Parliament and the Monarchy, they had demonstrated their guilt by fleeing the country. The trial was a formality to confirm they had the right people.

Having been found guilty of treason, on the 19th of April 1662, the three men were transported from the Tower to Tyburn, each tied to a separate sledge as they were drawn through the crowds, with much mocking abuse from Royalists. Barkstead left the Tower first, a place where he had once been the Lieutenant, and raised his hat to his wife who was waving from a window.

On arriving at Tyburn, each man gave a speech to the crowd, and were then put on a cart under the gallows. When they were ready, the cart was pulled away, and they hung for 15 minutes, before being taken down, and were then drawn and quartered, all in front of a large crowd.

Barkstead’s head was placed on a spike overlooking the Tower of London, mocking his former role at the Tower.

Before his death, Okey had sent a message of obedience to the restored monarchy, and as a reward for this, his family were allowed to bury his mutilated body in a vault in Stepney, however a large crowd gathered around Newgate where his body was being held, and fearing that this was a show of support for a traitor, the King swiftly changed his mind, and Okey’s body was hastily buried in the grounds of the Tower of London.

After the Regicides

Downing appears to have shown very little if any remorse or regret for his actions in the capture and execution of his three former colleagues, especially Okey, in whose regiment Downing had once served during the Civil War.

He acquired large estates and properties across the country and in London. He was one of the four Tellers of the Receipts of the Exchequer. He inspired the Navigation Act: “the foundation of our mercantile marine, and consequently of our navy, and consequently of our colonies and spheres of influence. He was also the direct cause of the Appropriation Act, an Act indispensable in every session, for government at home and one which has been appointed by all our self-governing colonies,” and he was instrumental in persuading the Dutch to exchange New Amsterdam, their colony on Long Island, for the British colony of Surinam in South America. New Amsterdam was then renamed as New York.

George Downing owned land near Westminster, and when the leaseholder died in 1682, Downing developed a cul-de-sac of more than twenty plain, brick built, three storey terrace houses, and he petitioned Charles II for permission to name this new street Downing Street.

Royal approval was granted, but he did not live to see the completion of the street as he died in July 1684 when he was 60, two years prior to work was finished.

The general view of Sir George Downing was that whilst clever, quick to action, ambitious and a very hard worker, he was also self serving, would shift his allegiance depending on changes in political and royal power, and as demonstrated with Okey, Corbet and Barkstead, this would also include the betrayal of his former friends and colleagues.

After the restoration, there were many who recognised Downing’s true character. After the capture of the regicides, Samuel Pepys’s wrote in his diary:

“This morning we had news from Mr. Coventry, that Sir G. Downing (like a perfidious rogue, though the action is good and of service to the King, yet he cannot with any good conscience do it) hath taken Okey, Corbet, and Barkestead at Delfe, in Holland, and sent them home in the Blackmore.”

Downing – a name associated with self perseveration to the extent that former colleagues and the cause for which they all worked, were betrayed, and now recorded in the name of the street where the Prime Minister resides.

Sources: I have been reading a number of books about the Civil War recently which I will list in a future post. My main source for the actions of Downing in the Netherlands and the capture of Okey, Corbet and Barkstead is from “Sir George Downing and the Regicides by Ralph C. H. Catterall in The American Historical Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jan., 1912), and published by the Oxford University Press“.

Resources – The World Turned Upside Down

As today’s post is the first of a new month, it is a post where I cover some of the resources available if you are interested in discovering more about the history of London.

As today’s post has been about the fate of three of the regicides involved with the trial and execution of King Charles I, and George Downing, who supported both the Parliamentary cause and then swiftly converted to support the monarchy, today’s resource is a brilliant website full of resources covering everything Civil War, and events in London played a very significant role, not just during the Civil War, but the lead up to, the causes of the war, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the people, politics and religion, the restoration and later impact.

The website is The World Turned Upside Down:

The name of the website comes from the title of an English ballad published in the mid 1640s, when Parliament was implementing policies that tried to ban the more traditional celebrations of Christmas that the more Puritan and to an extent Baptist members of Parliament believed were associated with the Catholic religion, and that Christmas should be a more solemn event, without the drinking, feasting and joyous elements of the traditional Christmas:

Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The standout feature of the website are the podcasts. There are currently 112 on the site with more being gradually added (you can sign up for alerts). Each podcast explores a different aspect of the Civil War and is by an expert in the subject.

For each podcast there is also a transcript, glossary, timeline, maps and further reading.

The first four podcasts in the list are shown in the screenshot below:

There is so much in the news about the destructive elements of social media, AI and the Internet, but the World Turned Upside Down is one of those sites that restores your faith in what the Internet can deliver when a community of real experts put together such a resource – which is freely available.

Even if you have only a passing interest in the mid 17th century and the Civil War, the site and podcasts are well worth a visit, and again, the link to click for the site is: The World Turned Upside Down

New Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets, Horn Stairs and a Confusion of Greshams

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One of the challenges with the blog is that there are many updates I would like to add to previous posts. If I update the original post, then the update will be part of a post that could be from several years ago, so not very visible, therefore for this week’s post, I thought I would cover three very different updates to past posts.

The last two are based on feedback from readers, which is always greatly appreciated. The first is following a recent decision by the City of London Corporation, regarding:

The future of Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets

The City of London Corporation has been looking at relocating the Smithfield and Billingsgate markets for some years.

Smithfield Market is set to become a new cultural and commercial centre, with the new Museum of London already under construction in the old General and Poultry market buildings.

Billingsgate Market moved out of Billingsgate in 1982, when the fish and seafood market moved to a new location by the North Dock, between the northern edge of the Isle of Dogs, and the A1261 Aspen Way.

Originally, the City of London Corporation were planning to relocate both markets to Dagenham Dock, a location that was not popular with the market traders, and in November 2024, the City of London Corporation abandoned this move, and appeared to take an approach where traders would be helped to move to other locations, without having a single location available.

At the start of December 2025, the City of London Corporation announced a new policy, that the two markets would be consolidated and moved to a new location at Albert Island at the eastern end of the Royal Docks.

In the following map, the green arrow on the left shows the location of Smithfield market, the centre yellow arrow shows where Billingsgate Market is located today, and the red arrow on the right shows the future consolidated location of both markets, between the eastern end of the Royal Docks and the River Thames (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

In the following map, I have put a red line around Albert Island, the land which is planned to be used for the new markets (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The land is currently derelict, with the majority of the buildings that once occupied the site having already been demolished.

At northern and southern ends, the land is bounded by two of the old locked entrances between the Royal Docks (a small part of which can be seen to the left), and the River Thames, on the right.

On the left centre of the map is the eastern end of the runway of London City Airport.

The following image is taken from the book that was issued to commemorate the opening of the King George V Dock in 1921. This new dock had not yet been officially opened by the King, so could only use his name once he had declared the dock open, which is why it is labelled as the New Dock in the image.

I have outlined in red the area of Albert Island as it was, following completion of the King George V Dock, the final dock of the three “Royals”:

As the plot of land is bounded on all sides by water, and the Royal Albert Dock is to the west, the plot of land goes by the name of Albert Island.

This location for the consolidated markets is a rather inspired choice.

It is a challenging location. Being at the end of the runway for London City Airport means that you could not build residential buildings. Even if these were built, they would have to be low rise, and would have the sound of planes either landing or taking off a short distance overhead.

The location is well connected from a transport perspective. In the above map, there is a road crossing towards the left of the plot. Follow this road north, and it connects to the A13, and south to the Woolwich Ferry, and further west to the new Silvertown tunnel.

The land has been derelict for some years, whilst the land around the rest of the Royal Docks has been gradually redeveloped.

Relocating the market here, will also bring a different activity to this part of east London, and will break up the rows of residential towers which have and continue to be built here, particularly along the land to the south, between the Royal Docks and the Thames.

I explored the area back in 2024 in a number of posts on the Royal Docks and surrounding areas. If you have been on my walk “In the Steps of a Woolwich Docker – From the Woolwich Ferry to the Royals”, you will also recognise Albert Island.

Firstly, this is why the site would not be suitable for residential. This photo was taken from the road that runs over Albert Island and shows that the land is at the eastern end of the London City Airport runway:

Starting from the north, this is a walk along the road over Albert Island showing how the area looks today. In the following photo, the end of residential development to the north can be seen, as well as the old locked entrances between the dock and the river. The start of Albert Island is the undeveloped land to the right of the residential:

The original eastern entrances between the Thames and the Royal Albert Dock:

Heading south and this is the central part of Albert Island. The majority of buildings associated with the docks were demolished some years ago, leaving the outline of walls, paths, streets and the concrete floors of long lost warehouses and industrial buildings:

There are still a few old streets that thread across the site, generally bounded by large growths of vegetation:

The main entrance from the road that crosses the site to Albert Island:

At the southern end of Albert Island is the locked entrance between the Thames and the King George V dock. This photo is looking at the northern side of the lock channel, which will become part of the new market site:

Also back in 2024, I had a walk around Albert Island. This is one of the old streets that thread the site, along with the one remaining warehouse building on the left:

Some of the few roads across the site were fenced off:

The only route across the island back in 2024 was a footpath that ran alongside the Thames, at the eastern edge of Albert Island. This is the footpath heading towards the Thames:

At the corner:

In the following photo, on the left is the Thames, on the right is Albert Island. It was a hot day when I went for this walk, and my main memory of this stretch is the hundreds of butterflies that were in the bushes on the right. As you walked along the footpath, they would rise out of the bushes, before settling back after I had passed – it was a rather magical place, also with the Thames on the left:

At the end of the footpath, steps up to a short path that went up to the locked entrance to the King George V dock:

Crossing the lock, and looking back towards the King George V dock. This channel marks the southern boundary of Albert Island, and the new market area which will be on the right:

The above photos were taken back in 2024, last year, 2025, I went on another walk through the area whilst I was planning my Woolwich to Royal Docks walk. I had intended to walk through Albert Island, however this proved impossible, as the crossing over the locked entrance between the Thames and King George V dock was then closed, and there was no clear route through.

I did try some options, but every route ended in fencing, or some other obstruction.

In the following photo, I had just walked along the footpath shown to the left of the photo, and optimistically found this sign for a footpath:

I followed this apparent footpath, and it ended in a waterlogged channel with no way through:

The relocation of the two markets is subject to the passing of a Parliamentary Bill to allow the old markets to be closed at their current sites, along with planning permission from Newham Borough Council for the Albert Island site, and I suspect neither of these will be a problem.

The 3rd of December press release stated that the markets “will continue at Smithfield and Billingsgate until at least 2028”, and I suspect that clearing the current site, any remedial work that needs to be done on what was an industrial location, followed by the new build, will take more than a couple of years, so the “at least 2028” suggests the possible timescale.

When the two markets have moved to Albert Island, they will be called “New Billingsgate and New Smithfield”, although for Billingsgate this is the second move after the original 1982 move from the original Billingsgate in the City.

Regarding the existing market locations, an updated press release on the 2nd of January 2026 states that “at Smithfield, the Grade II* listed buildings will become an exciting international cultural and commercial destination to complement the London Museum, which is moving next door”, and that “Plans for Billingsgate will deliver up to 4,000 much-needed homes in an inner-London Borough, alongside a new bridge across Aspen Way to help address the social, economic and environmental disparities between Poplar and Canary Wharf.”

It is a shame that Smithfield is moving from its City location as it was the last City market in its original location, and ends an activity that has taken place in the City for hundreds of years.

Having said that, the new location is good. It makes use of an otherwise difficult to use plot of land, it brings diversity of function and employment to the area around the Royal Docks, and in many ways it continues the tradition of the Royal Docks, as a place where products were stored, traded and moved on to their eventual location.

Albert Island has a website, which does not yet mention the move of the Smithfield and Billingsgate markets, and still covers the original proposals for a commercial shipyard, marina, university hub, and with easy public access to the Thames river path. Hopefully some of these will be part of the overall development. Bringing a shipyard back to the docks would be good, and access to the Thames river path would be essential. The Albert Island website can be found here.

The City of London Corporation announcement on the move of the markets to Albert Island is here.

If you would like more photos of the area, and the construction and opening of the King George V Dock, my post “King George V Dock – The Last of the Royals” covering this can be found here.

It will be an interesting development to follow.

Horn Stairs

Horn Stairs are one of my favourite Thames stairs, as they lead down to a lovely part of the Thames foreshore. At low tide, a wide expanse of gently slopping foreshore, with superb view across to Limehouse and the northern part of the Isle of Dogs.

My last visit to Horn Stairs was in mid January 2024, and almost two years later, I walked to the stairs again following an update on the state of the stairs sent in by a reader.

The reader commented that the stairs had been closed as they had lost a couple of their top steps, had come away from the wall, and moved back and forth significantly with the tide.

They were in a poor condition when I visited two years ago, with rotting wooden steps, and their fixing to the wall not looking very robust, so I am surprised they have lasted for almost another two years.

When I went in January 2024, it was a bright, sunny day. My return visit in January 2026 was wet, overcast and raining.

On arriving at Horn Stairs, there was a footpath closed sign, and temporary fencing at the top of the access steps, which looked like it had been moved, or blown aside:

Very temporary fencing off of the stairs:

I walked through a gap and looked at the stairs and the remains of the causeway leading across the foreshore:

It was clear to see that the top steps are missing, the top section of steps do not look in great condition, and the fixings at the side have come away:

This was the stairs back in 2024, looking very dodgy, but not fenced off and it was possible to walk down:

Horn Stairs, and the area of foreshore to which they lead, has a fascinating history, which I explored in the post “Horn Stairs, Cuckold’s Point and Horn Fair”.

Some photos from my previous visit, when the weather was much better than January 2026. Firstly looking along the causeway across the foreshore:

At the end of the causeway is a navigation marker, shown on the PLA chart for this section of the river, with a wonderful view across to the towers that occupy the Isle of Dogs:

Looking back along the causeway, showing that during a low tide, there is a large expanse of dry foreshore:

Wooden stairs do not last as long as concrete or stone stairs, and there are a number of examples along the river where wooden stairs have not been replaced after they gradually fell apart (see this post on King Henry’s Stairs for an example). I am also not sure why some are concrete / stone whilst other are of wood. Whether the frequency of use, their importance or location along the river deemed some to be of a more permanent structure, or whether it just came to costs at the time.

I have emailed both the Port of London Authority and Southwark Council to see if there is any information on who would be responsible, are there any plans to replace the stairs etc.

It would be a great shame if the stairs at Horn Stairs were not replaced.

Sir John or Sir Thomas Gresham – The Trouble with Identifications

A couple of week’s ago, I wrote a post about the Greshams of Norfolk and London.

The post told the story of Sir John Gresham, the founder of a school in the town of Holt in Norfolk, a member of the Mercer’s Company and a Lord Mayor of the City of London, along with his nephew Sir Thomas Gresham who was also a Mercer and through his Will, in 1597, Gresham College was established, to be run and administered by the City of London Corporation and the Mercer’s Company.

I included images of both Sir John and Sir Thomas Gresham in the post.

One reader commented “A very interesting post. The picture of ‘Sir John Gresham’ and the engraving of ‘Sir Thomas Gresham’ are identical: the engraving is laterally reversed because of the engraving technique, but otherwise the images are the same, even down to the number of done-up buttons and the hand holding the gloves. It’s the same man! Either the attribution of the painting is wrong or that of the engraving – probably the latter, I think.”

So I went back to the images and yes, they do look as if they are of the same person.

This is the image of Sir John Gresham:

I found the above image on Wikimedia, with the description “Portrait of Sir John Gresham (1495–1556)”.

As a general rule, I never take anything on Wikipedia / Wikimedia (or the Internet in general) as absolute fact, without finding supporting evidence, and in the search for evidence to support the Wikimedia description, I found the same image in the National Trust Collections website, where it is attributed as “Portrait of a Man, possibly Sir John Gresham the elder” I also found the same image at the Alamy website, (a stock image service company, where images are made available for a price, for use in other forms of media) where the image is described as “Sir John Gresham (1495 – 1556) English merchant, courtier and financier”.

So the image I found on Wikimedia was also described by the National Trust and Alamy as Sir John Gresham (in fairness to the National Trust they also included “possibly”), so I was happy to use the image from Wikimedia.

The following image of his nephew, Sir Thomas Gresham, is from the British Museum collection, and was an engraving by John Boydell of Cheapside, London and published on the 1st of May, 1779, and is described as being taken from “In the Common Parlour at Houghton”, which is presumably Houghton Hall in Norfolk, a county where the Gresham’s had property, hence the link with the town of Holt in my post:

To provide a good comparison between the two images, I converted the image of Sir John Gresham to black and white, and reversed the image (the reader commented that the image could have been originally reversed due to the engraving technique, therefore reversing again would get the image back to the original).

Now putting the two images side by side, we get the following (Thomas Gresham on the left and John Gresham on the right):

They look almost identical, down to the creases on the clothing, the number of buttons, the pose, the clothes, etc.

There are minor differences, however I suspect that these are down to the engraving (on the left) being made from the portrait (on the right).

I assume the process to create prints such as these, which were in wide circulation in London in the 18th century, was that an artist would visit Houghton Hall and make a copy of the original painting. As this was a copy, there would be minor differences to the original painting.

This copy was then used to create the engraving which John Boydell then published from his premises in Cheapside.

So is the image of Sir John or Sir Thomas Gresham?

I suspect it is of Sir Thomas Gresham, as the following image is from the National Portrait Gallery collection, and has the following reference: “Sir Thomas Gresham by Unknown Netherlandish artist
oil on panel, circa 1565″:

Attribution: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Source National Portrait Gallery, London

Although the clothes are very different, the likeness, facial expression, the beard all look very similar to the painting and print.

This would mean that the National Trust is incorrect to state that their painting is Sir John Gresham, although again, they do state “possibly”.

To add a bit more confusion, in the print of Sir Thomas Gresham from the British Museum, the “size of the picture” is stated as 2ft, 1inch by 2ft 9 3/4 inches. whilst the National Trust give the dimensions of the painting of Sir John Gresham as 36 x 26 in, and that the painting is located at Dunham Massey in Cheshire.

So the painting is larger than that given in the print, and today is in a different location.

This confusion of Gresham’s shows just how hard it is to be certain of the facts when identifying anything painted, engraved or printed from some centuries ago. If I had the time, I would want to track down more original artwork of both the Greshams and see if this could come to a consensus of appearance of these two, whose contributions to the City of London can still be seen today.

I always try and make sure that the images used, and the detail in my posts is as accurate as possible. I use visits to the sites I am writing about, books and maps (of an age as close to the time I am writing about the better), newspapers from the period, and where I use the Internet, it is from reputable sources such as the British Museum Collection, and anything else is cross checked with other sources.

As the Gresham images show, it is hard enough to be sure of the facts of what we see, whether an image is of who we are told it is, but AI, which always seems to be in the news these days, is going to make this much, much worse.

I will never use any AI generated content in my posts, whether text or image, and to demonstrate why, I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of Sir Thomas Gresham, and this was the result (ChatGPT made the decision to produce a portrait “in velvet” for some reason):

The above image shows the dangers of where we are heading with AI image creation. Without any context, this could easily be taken as a painting of Sir Thomas Gresham. It took less than a minute to create, and is why we are moving into a dangerous period where we have no idea whether what we see or read is real or not.

And for all the comments that my posts receive, two of which were used for today’s post, thank you. I learn much, and they add considerably extra context and information to the post, which is what it should be, rather than machine generated content.

Tindals Burying Ground (Bunhill Fields)

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Tindals Burying Ground was the original name of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, which today can be found between City Road and Bunhill Row.

The following extract from Rocque’s 1746 map of London shows Tindals Burying Ground:

The original name of the burying ground follows the setting aside of an area of land as a cemetery during the plague year of 1665.

Despite the pressure on space to bury the many thousands of victims of the plague, for whatever reason, the cemetery was not used, and in 1666 a Mr. Tindal took on a lease of the land, enclosed it with a brick wall, and opened the space as a cemetery for the use of Dissenters.

A wider view of the 1746 map, with the burying ground circled:

Old Street is running left to right along the top of the map, Royal Row, now City Road, runs to the east of the burying ground and Brown Street runs to the west. The name Brown Street has now been replaced by the extension of Bunhill Row along the western edge of the burying ground.

The use of the name Tindals Burying Ground was not confined to Rocque’s map, but was also in common use across multiple newspaper reports covering events in and around the burying ground, for example, from the Stamford Mercury on the 11th of February, 1768:

“On Saturday night last about ten o’clock, Mr. Hewitt, Watchmaker, in Moorfields, was attacked near Tindal’s Burying ground, by three footpads, who knocked him down, then robbed him of £32 and a dial plate, and beat him so terribly that his life is despaired of.”

Tindal’s Burying Ground was originally described as a place where Dissenters could be buried, and other terms such as Nonconformists were used to describe those within the cemetery. It was also described as the “Campo Santo of Nonconformity” as well as the “cemetery of Puritan England”.

These terms all described someone who did not conform with the governance and teaching of the established church – the Church of England. The 1662 Act of Uniformity defined the way that prayers, teachings, rites and ceromonies should be performed within the Church of England, and the 1662 date of this act explains why there was a need for a noncoformist burial ground four years later in 1666.

I cannot find out whether Mr. Tindal was a nonconformist, but it would perhaps make sense if he was.

The dead who would not have been welcome in a normal Church of England burial ground were buried at Tindal’s, for example in the following account of the burial of an executed criminal in 1760:

“Wednesday Evening, between Five and Six, the Body of Robert Tilling, the Coachman, who was executed on Monday last, for robbing his Master, was conveyed in a Hearse, attended by one Mourning Coach, to Tindal’s Burying Ground in Bunhill Fields, and there interred. The Rev. Mr. Whitefield attended the Corpse, and made a long Oration upon the Occasion, amidst the greatest Concourse of People that ever assembled in that Place; it is thought more than 20,000. The Corpse had been previously exposed in Mr. Whitefield’s Tabernacle near the Burying Ground.”

Robert Tilling was a nonconformist. After being taken from Newgate, he was hung at Tyburn on the 28th of April, 1760, along with four others convicted of burglary. In the report of his execution, he “made a long Speech, or rather Sermon at the Gallows, in the Methodist style”.

The origin of the name Bunhill Fields is interesting, and probably somewhat obscure. Most references talk about the name coming from the earlier name of Bone Hill, and that the site was used for informal burials and also for the 1549 dumping of 1,000 cart loads of bones from the charnel house of St Paul’s Cathedral.

The story of the dumping of bones is that there were so many, and after the following accumulation of the City’s dirt on top of the bones, a significant mound developed, on which some windmills were constructed.

If you go back to the larger extract from Rocque’s 1746 map, and look to the right of the Artillery Ground there is a couple of streets with names of Windmill Hill and Windmill Hill Row, so there must be some truth in the existence of windmills.

As usual, there are several variations of the name as well as stories of the area. There are a number of references that use the name Bonhill. In 1887, members of the East London Antiquarian Society were given a tour of the burying ground, where they were told that “The name was perhaps derived from Bon-Hill, a great tumulus which at one time stood on the Fen outside the City and marked an ancient British burying place, hence the name Bon-hill or Bone-hill fields.”

The City of London Conservation Management Plan states that in 1000 AD there were the “First corpses interred at Bunhill in Saxon times”.

The author Daniel Defoe in his “Journal of the Plague Year” implies that there may have been plague burials in Bunhill Fields, however that does not seem to be the case, and he was probably referring to the purchase of the burying ground which was later taken over by Tindal.

Bunhill Fields occupied a far wider area than just the burying ground, and earlier maps do show some hills spread across the fields.

As usual, there are many variations of names and stories, and it is impossible to be 100% certain of the truth of many of these. The fields were outside the walls of the City, for centuries much of the area was marshland, hence the name Moor Fields.

The entrance to Bunhill Burying Ground from City Road:

Gravestone to William Blake and his wife Catherine:

William Blake had some very complex religious views, and views of the roles of good and evil, human nature, sexuality etc. which were very different to those held by the established Church, hence his burial at Bunhill Fields.

The gravestone states “Near bye lie the remains of”, as Blake’s grave was the subject of damage over the years, as well as bomb damage in Bunhill Fields during the last war, so the exact location of his grave was lost.

Nearby there is a memorial slab which was installed in 2018 by the Blake Society following work by Portuguese couple Carol and Luís Garrido, who claimed they had identified the location of his grave:

Monument to the author Daniel Defoe (which dates from 1870):

As recorded on the monument, Daniel Defoe was the author of Robinson Crusoe. The date of his birth, 1661, shows that he was very much too young to remember, let alone to write a first hand account of the plague in his Journal of the Plague Year, which in reality he used the accounts and experiences of others to write the journal.

There are a couple of graves at Bunhill Fields which seem to have been the focus of attention over many years. The first is from the 1920s series of books Wonderful London, where the grave of Dame Mary Page is shown:

The focus of interest is not the front of the monument, but the reverse, where it is stated that Mary Page “In 67 months she was tapd 66 times. Had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining her case or ever fearing the operation”.

The front of the grave states that she was the “Relict of Sir Gregory Page Bart. She departed this life March 4 1728 in the 56 year of her age”.

Dame Mary Page was the wife of Sir Gregory Page. He owned a brewery in Wapping and was a Whig politician. He was also involved with the East India Company, including a period when he was a director of the company and this was the source of much of his wealth. He died in 1720 and was buried in Greenwich.

I cannot find any record of Mary’s religion, and it is strange that she was not buried with her husband. To have been buried in Bunhill Fields, she probably held some form of nonconformist views.

The rear of the monument today:

Bunhill Fields as a site is Grade I listed , and many of the individual graves are also listed, including the following grave of Joseph Watts, which is Grade II listed as: ” It is a well-preserved early-C19 chest tomb with still-legible inscriptions and high-quality relief carving”:

The land originally within Tindal’s Burying Ground is believed to have been extended in 1700 and again in 1788, such was the need for a site for nonconformist burials.

Following Tindal’s original lease, it remained a privately owned and managed burying ground until 1778, when it was brought into public management by the City of London.

Along with many other church yards and burying grounds in the mid-19th century, Bunhill Fields was closed for burials in 1854.

The King and Du Pont family monument which is Grade II listed:

The listing states that “It is a prominent and striking monument in an austere Neoclassical style, its polygonal form – derived ultimately from the Hellenistic-era Tower of the Winds in Athens – reflecting the late-C18 fashion for ancient Greek motifs”.

The vault beneath the plinth on which the monument stands holds a number of members of the King and Du Pont families from the late 18th century.

There is an interesting contradiction in attitudes during the 18th century (and indeed in later centuries), between those who were viewed as religious and displaying a range of admired personality traits and those who cost the state money.

Two different examples, both from the same newspaper on the 13th of December, 1754:

“Thursday evening was interred in Bunhill Burying Ground, the body of Mrs. Hannah Peirce, relict of that excellent Divine, Mr. James Peirce of Exeter. The Sweetness of her Temper, the exemplariness of her Behaviour, in every Religion and Condition, breathed a Spirit of a Religion, which is cheerful, patient, meek, and benevolent: Her whole Life was delightfully instructive, and in her 79th Year, she expired with remarkable Calmness and Composure”.

Meanwhile, on the same page as the above, there was an account of another who had just died, but this was very different where the person who had died was summed up by the amount they had cost the inhabitants of the parish:

“On Tuesday died Diana Nicholas, one of the Poor belonging to St. Nicolas Acorns in Lombard Street. In the Year 1691 she was found an Infant in a Basket in that Parish and taken care of: When she grew up she proved an Idiot, and forty years ago was got with Child, and, being unable to make known by whom, brought a further Charge on the Parish: So that it appears by the Accounts she has cost the Inhabitants near £20 per annum for sixty three Years”.

Two very different views of two deaths, where one was described with a range of perfect attitudes and character traits, whilst the other was down to simply how much they had cost the parish over their life.

Another of the graves that seems to be regularly featured when looking at Bunhill Fields is that of John Bunyan:

John Bunyan’s monument from the 1890’s book “The Queen’s London”:

John Bunyan was born near Bedford, and served with the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War. He originally followed the Church of England, attending services in his local parish church.

A chance meeting in Bedford resulted in Bunyan joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group.

Bunyan took his nonconformist views and preaching seriously, to the extent that he served many years in prison, And it was during one of his spells in prison that he wrote his best known work “A Pilgrims Progress”.

His writing became more widely known after his death, and in the 18th century there were multiple editions of A Pilgrims Progress published, including cheap editions, and editions published in regular instalments.

The book was described as an allegorical writing, describing the journey of Christian from his home, the City of Destruction, to the Celestial City, which has been described as either Heaven or the Holy Land. There were also references to the Celestial City being London, and Christian’s Journey being Bunyan’s journey from Bedford to London.

The grave apparently belonged to one John Strudwick , in whose house in Snow Hill, Bunyan had died in 1688:

The gravestone of Thomas Rosewell. The gravestone is listed, not because of the gravestone (which I think is a later addition or replacement, rather as to who it commemorates, as the listing states *It commemorates a prominent late-C17 Dissenting minister, remembered for his infamous treason trial in 1684*:

The story of Thomas Roswell is one of religious persecution. He was born in Bath and arrived in London in 1645 where he trained as a silk weaver.

London in the middle of the 17th century must have been a hotbed of religious and political divide and conspiracy. Not just with the Civil War, but with the established Church, Catholicism and the many nonconformist groups.

Soon after his arrival in London, Roswell came into contact with the Presbyterians, which led him to train as a nonconformist minister. He became a private tutor and also served as a rector in parishes in Somerset and Wiltshire.

The years following the restoration of the Monarchy and Charles II were a time of persecution of nonconformists, and Roswell was forced out from his parishes in 1662, even though he was a firm Royalist.

Persecution continued and in 1684 he was put on trial for high treason, accused of speaking seditious sentiments during a sermon.

The judge at his trial was Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, also known as the Hanging Judge due to the high number of defendants who were found guilty, resulting in Jeffreys passing the death sentence.

Roswell was also found guilty, and sentenced to death, however there was a significant public outcry and early the following year he received a Royal Pardon.

A look across Bunhill Fields:

An Act of Parliamnet obtained by the City of London in 1867 preserved Bunhill Fields as an open space, and in 1869, the grounds were open to the public.

The burying grounds were not spared during the Second World War, and they suffered serious bomb damage, and post war there has been a continual series of restorations of both the grounds and the gravestones and memorials, enabling the listed memorials to be removed from the heritage at risk register.

Bunhill Fields was also the location for an anti-aircraft gun which probably did not help with maintaining the condition of the site.

The walls and railings surrounding Bunhill Burying Grounds are Grade II listed and date from multiple periods from the late 18th century through to the late 19th century, along with later repairs and renovations.

Apart from a few monuments and graves, the majority are within an area surrounded by railings. It is possible to gain access to graves within this area by asking an attendant.

I have only touched on a very, very small number of the graves at Bunhill.

According to City of London records, there are 2,300 memorials within the burying grounds, and there are believed to be around 123,000 burials.

Each tells the story of those involved in nonconformist and dissenting religious traditions, and many, including that of Thomas Roswell show the risks that having a different belief to the established Church could entail.

And the burying ground now commonly known as Bunhill Fields, almost certainly owes its existence to Mr. Tindal who took a lease on the land in 1665 / 1666, enclosed the ground and opened the burying ground.

alondoninheritance.com

Negretti & Zambra, Admiral FitzRoy, James Glaisher. From London to Orkney via Greenwich

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I have just put up the final dates until next summer for these two walks if you would like to explore these areas with me, using my father’s photos from the late 1940s:

The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain on Sunday 20th of October. Click here to book.

The Lost Streets of the Barbican on Saturday the 2nd of November. Click here to book.

This post was not in my long list of posts to write. It was a chance discovery that resulted in a fascinating set of connections that led back to London. (I am probably guilty of over using the word fascinating, but I really found this one so interesting).

And in a weird coincidence, shortly after, I found a related plaque and tree in London, that I have walked past hundreds of times and never noticed.

The story starts in early September, when we were in Orkney for a few days, the cluster of islands off the north coast of Scotland.

Orkney has long been somewhere we have wanted to visit – Neolithic stone circles, henges and standing stones, a Neolithic village older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, lots of walking and a stunning coast.

We had taken the ferry from Scrabster on the coast of the Scottish mainland, over the Pentland Firth and arrived at Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney.

At this point, London seemed a very distant place, and London and the blog were not on my mind.

Walking along the street that runs the length of the older part of Stromness, we reached a slightly wider open space in front of Stromness Parish Church:

And on the left as you looked at the church there was a large, rectangular white box:

The box held a barometer and thermometer of some age:

And this is where the London connection comes in as the instrument was made by the scientific instrument company of Negretti & Zambra who were based in London.

In 1864 Negretti & Zambra published a little book with the title of “A Treatise on Metrological Instruments”, and the book included details of the type of instrument installed at Stromness in Orkney, as one of their public barometers:

The barometer in Stromness was one of Negretti & Zambra’s Fishery or Sea-coast Barometers, and the book included the following description of the instrument, which is shown to the left of the above page from the book:

“The frame is of solid oak, firmly secured together. The scales are very legibly engraved on porcelain by Negretti and Zambra’s patent process. The thermometer is large, and easily read; and as this instrument is exposed, it will indicate the actual temperature sufficiently for practical purposes.

The barometer tube is three-tenths of an inch in diameter of bore, exhibiting a good column of mercury; and the cistern is of such capacity, in relation to the tube, that the change of height in the surface of the mercury in the cistern corresponding to a change of height of three inches of mercury in the tube, is less than one-hundredth of an inch, and therefore, as the readings are only to be made to this degree of accuracy, this small error is of not importance.

The cistern is made of boxwood, which is sufficiently porous to allow the atmosphere to influence the mercurial column; but the top is plugged with porous cane, to admit of free and certain play.”

Detail of the scale at the top of the column of mercury, which is in the glass tube in the middle:

The scales either side are marked with the height of the mercury column in inches of mercury – the way in which atmospheric pressure was, and still is, measured (although millimeters and millibars are also used instead of inches).

On the left are the forecast weather conditions for the height of mercury if the height of the column of mercury is rising, and on the right are the expected weather conditions for a falling column of mercury.

At the very top of the scale we can see the names of Negretti & Zambra as the manufacturers of the device, and on the right we can see their locations; 1 Hatton Garden, 122 Regent Street and 59 Cornhill, so this is a company with a considerable London heritage.

The top of the scale in more detail is shown below:

The company of Negretti & Zambra was founded in 1850 by Enrico Negretti and Joseph Zambra.

Enrico Negretti (who also used the first name of Henry) was an Italian, born in 1818, and who had emigrated to London at the age of 10. In London, he served an apprenticeship as a glassblower and thermometer maker.

Joseph Zambra was born in Saffron Walden in Essex in 1822, and also had Italian heritage as his father had emigrated from Como. Zambra learnt the skills he would later use in their company as his father was an optician and barometer maker.

Zambra moved from Saffron Walden to London in 1840, living within the Anglo-Italian community which was based around Leather Lane in Holborn, and it was here that he met Negretti, and with complimentary skills, they decided to go into partnership to form the firm of Negretti & Zambra on the 23rd of April, 1850, and operating from 11 Hatton Garden, where they specialised in the manufacture of barometers and thermometers.

Whilst they did make and sell barometers for home use, their reputation came from the design and manufacture of barometers and thermometers with an accuracy, ease of use, and robustness, that could be used in very difficult locations, and for measuring temperature and pressure where they had not been measured before, for example by taking deep sea temperature measurements.

They held a number of patents in both the design and manufacture of instruments, and they were the only English manufacturers to win a medal at the 1851 Great Exhibition and as recorded at the top of the scale on the Orkney barometer, they were appointed opticians and scientific instrument makers to Queen Victoria.

The range of instruments manufactured by the company expanded rapidly, and their 1864 Treatise on Metrological Instruments includes a catalogues of instruments for the home, for portable use , for use up mountains, marine barometers, storm glasses, botanical thermometers, brewers thermometers, instruments to measure humidity, instruments to measure the amount of rainfall, and others to measure steam pressure and to measure pressure in a vacuum.

Their catalogue included a drawing of their three central London locations at Cornhill in the City, Hatton Garden / Holborn Viaduct, and Regent Street:

So the Stromness, Orkney barometer was made in London, but why is it there?

This is where Vice-Admiral FitzRoy, the next name comes into the story.

Robert FitzRoy was born on the 5th of July, 1805 in Ampton, Suffolk and he had a very wide ranging career, being an officer in the Royal Navy, a Governor of New Zealand, and was interested in scientific matters, particularly the weather and the storms that were so dangerous to travelers on the sea.

He was the Captain of HMS Beagle, when Charles Darwin was onboard on their almost five year voyage around the world between 1831 and 1836.

FitzRoy became a member of the Royal Society in 1851, and three years later was appointed as the head of a new organisation within the Board of Trade that was tasked with the collection of weather data from ships at sea and coastal ports. This would evolve into what we know today at the Met Office.

Weather data was important, as in the middle of the 19th century there was no systematic method of weather data collection from across the country and also no weather forecasting.

Whilst this was a relatively small problem for those on land, it could often be a matter of life and death for those at sea, and there were numerous ship wrecks and deaths as a result of storms that hit without any warning.

An example from 1858 in the Inverness Chronicle covering the waters around Orkney shows the impact:

“MELANCHOLY LOSS OF SIX MEN – Early last month the herring-fishing boat Margaret, of Tonque, in the parish of Lewis, after prosecuting the herring fishing here, left for home, in company with hundreds of others, which were overtaken by a heavy gale of north-easterly wind soon after passing through the Pentland Firth. the boats fled in all directions, where there was the shadow of a chance of shelter.

Many reached the lochs of the west coast of Sutherland; one reached Skaill Bay, in Orkney; one crew was picked up by an American vessel and landed here, their boat being subsequently found and taken to Stornoway. meanwhile, intelligence of the safe arrival of the Lewis crews, with the exception of that referred to, has reached; and the appearance of a portion of the wreck of their boat, driven ashore at Birsay, in Orkney, leaves no room to doubt their sad fate.

When last seen the boat was about ten miles off Cape Wreath, making for the Minch of Lews, on the evening of Friday the 10th, when other boats in their company was parted from them by the violence of the storm.”

FitzRoy wanted to make weather information, including some indication of the forecast weather, available for fishermen, such as those in the above article, and for shipping in general.

His scheme was to distribute barometers to fishing communities and coastal villages around the country, and Negretti and Zambra were responsible for the manufacture of the barometers.

According to the Treatise on Metrological Instruments by Negretti and Zambia, FitzRoy was responsible for the wording on the barometer scale, with the predictions for weather based on whether the column of mercury was rising or falling and the height of the column. Fitzroy’s wording can be seen on the Orkney barometer.

Barometers were loaned free of charge to poor fishing communities, or were funded by a wealthy local, or through voluntary donations. This last method was used for the barometer in Orkney, which is recorded at the very top of the instrument, which can just be seen in one of the photos earlier in the post.

The barometer was sent from London to Orkney on the 27th of October 1869, and it was number 98 in the chain of barometers around the coast. The first barometers in the network seem to have been sent to their coastal location in early 1861, and the network expanded rapidly over the coming years.

The arrival of the barometer was recorded in the Orcadian newspaper on the 20th of November 1869:

“BAROMETER – The barometer, which we mentioned last week was to be sent here for the guidance of fishermen and others, has arrived; but as yet no suitable site has been obtained for its erection. The barometer is the gift of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and was consigned to their honorary secretary here – Mr. James R. Garriock – in whose shop window it is now on view. A register of its indications is, we understand, to be kept, and will be exhibited alongside the instrument. In front of the barometer is a thermometer.”

The Stromness, Orkney barometer was installed a couple of years after FitzRoy’s death, but became part of FitzRoy’s initial barometer network, where readings of the barometer were telegraphed back to Fitzroy’s Meteorological Office in London, where the collection of data was used to put out rudimentary weather forecasts.

These first forecasts were very basic, for example the following is from the Yorkshire Gazette on the 13th of February, 1864 – one of the first forecasts sent out from London:

“WEATHER FORECAST – Admiral Fitzroy telegraphs that a gale may be expected, most probably from the southward.”

A very simple, but very valuable forecast if you were a fisherman.

In the 1860s, problems within the Meteorological Office, and the many challenges with other organisations and users of the forecasting service (for example as the forecast came from the Met Office which was part of the Board of Trade, a Government department, it was seen to be an official pronouncement and therefore subject to far more criticism and challenge than a local forecast). FitzRoy also had financial problems and suffered from depression.

Possibly due to all these pressures, Robert FitzRoy took his own life on the 30th of April, 1865.

There were many, long obituaries in the newspapers of the time, with the following being typical of the first few sentences:

“ADMIRAL FITZROY – The public have lost a valuable servant and humanity a friend, unwearied in his efforts to save life, in the death of Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the head of the Meteorological department of the Board of Trade, who committed suicide on Sunday morning. The sad event took place at Lyndhurst House, Norwood, Surrey. The unfortunate gentleman had been for several days in a very low state; but nothing in particular was apprehended by his fronds, who considered the marked change in his manners owing to over study, and this, no doubt, has been the cause of the catastrophe.”

Robert Fitzroy’s legacy was the Met Office, that is still responsible for providing weather forecasts today, along with the few remaining barometers he designed and were installed in fishing and coastal villages around the British Isles, such as the one in Stromness, Orkney.

Negretti and Zambra continued to capitalise on their relationship with Robert FitzRoy, and the barometers that they had produced for him, after his death.

Thomas Babington took over the Meteorological Office after FitzRoy’s death, and wrote to Negretti and Zambra, complaining that their advertising was implying that all barometers used by Fitzroy were made by Negretti and Zambra and that they were using the “absurd title of storm barometer”, which implied that their barometers had an ability to predict storms.

Babington’s letter does not seem to have changed Negretti and Zambra’s marketing strategy, as they continued advertising in much the same way as before.

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy:

There is one other name I need to track down, along with the connection to Greenwich.

On the body of the Stromness barometer is the following label:

The statement that the barometer reads correctly with Greenwich Standard was signed by James Glaister, F.R.S.

Firstly why Greenwich?

If you were distributing a network of barometers around the country and receiving their readings centrally in London, and making forecasts based on these readings, it was essential that you could trust the reading from each barometer, and that they were correctly calibrated, so that if they were all in the same place, they would all have the same reading.

This is where Greenwich came in to the process. the Royal Observatory at Greenwich is well known for its astronomical work, but the institution was also responsible for many other scientific activities, and one of the departments at the Royal Observatory was the Department of Meteorology and Magnetism, and James Glaister was the Superintendent of this department for 34 years, including the period when the barometers were being dispatched across the country.

I assume the process must have been that they were manufactured by Negretti & Sambra in central London, then sent to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where they were calibrated and checked against a standard barometer reading at the observatory.

The label with James Glaisher’s signature was then attached, and the barometer shipped to the coastal location where it was to be installed.

James Glaisher was a fascinating character. Born in Rotherhithe on the 7th of April 1809, the son of a watchmaker which probably contributed to his interest in scientific instruments.

The family moved from Rotherhithe to Greenwich, and Glaisher’s first experience of the Royal Observatory came from a visit when he was aged 20.

His first job was working on the principal triangulation of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland. This was the process of measuring distances and heights, essential to producing accurate maps.

After this he worked at the Cambridge University observatory, under Professor George Airy, who would become Astronomer Royal at Greenwich in June 1835, and Airy bought Glaisher from Cambridge to Greenwich and the two continued to work together.

In 1838 Airy put Glaisher in charge of the new magnetic and meteorological department which Airy had established at Greenwich, and he would work in this role for almost 40 years. One part of his new role was making and managing the recording of meteorological observations, and he was also responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the instruments used, and by 1850 he was the recognized authority in the country for the verification of meteorological instruments, which is why his name is on the barometer in Stromness, Orkney.

He was one of the founders of the British Meteorological Society, and was elected as the society’s first secretary.

James Glaisher:

James Glaisher by Samuel Alexander Walker. albumen carte-de-visite, 1860s
NPG x22544© National Portrait Gallery, London

Although Glaisher’s work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory was important, and contributed considerably to the measurement and observations of the weather, and in the type and accuracy of the instruments used, to the general public he was best known for his ballooning exploits. These were carried out under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the intention of making observations and measurements at high altitudes.

The following is a report from the 18th of April, 1902 on James Glaisher’s 93rd birthday, and covers his ballooning exploits in some hair raising detail:

“SEVEN MILES IN THE AIR – NONAGENARIAN BALLOONIST’S REMARKABLE RECORD. Mr. James Glaisher, F.R.A.S, who made the highest balloon ascent ever recorded, has just celebrated his 93rd anniversary of his birthday. Mr. Glaisher will be remembered by the world’s scientists as the father of meteorology in England. He founded the Royal Meteorological Society in 1850, and from 1841 until the present time has supplied the quarterly and annual meteorological reports published by the Registrar-General. Now he thinks it is time he handed over the task to another. It was on September 5, 1862 that Mr. Glaisher, accompanied by Mr. Coxwell, a dentist and aeronaut, made the most famous of his balloon ascents.

‘I was a married man’ he said in the course of a conversation the other day, ‘and I did not think a married man ought to go ballooning, but I found that I must go up myself if I wanted observations properly taken, so I took to ballooning and made 29 ascents.

The September ascent was from Wolverhampton. The balloon soared up above the clouds and Mr. Glaisher, as was his custom, kept his eyes on his instruments and his notebooks until he recorded a height of 28,000ft. Then he found that he had lost the use of his limbs, and he saw Mr. Coxwell climb up to the ring and try to seize the valve rope, but Mr. Coxwell’s hands were so benumbed that he could not use them. He seized the valve-rope in his teeth and thus tugged the valve open.

Meanwhile Mr. Glaisher had fallen unconscious, with his head over the side of the car. He was unconscious for 13 minutes, and when he recovered, the balloon, which had been going up at a rate of 1000ft a minute, was descending at the rate of 2000ft a minute. During the interval it is calculated that the balloon rose to a height of over seven miles.

Another of Mr. Glaisher’s adventures happened at Newhaven. While he and Mr. Coxwell were high up the clouds parted, and they found themselves all but over the sea. Mr. Coxwell hung on to the valve-rope so long that the balloon lost all its gas, and fell two or three thousand feet to the earth. The car and the instruments were smashed, but the balloonists escaped with slight injuries.”

The wonderfully described “Mr. Coxwell, a dentist and aeronaut” was Henry Coxwell, who, as well as being a dentist was a professional balloonist and Glaisher partnered with Coxwell so he could takes scientific measurements during the ascent which Coxwell controlled.

Coxwell made a number of ascents across London, many for show, including from Cremorne Gardens (Chelsea), Woolwich and Mile End Road.

The Wolverhampton ascent is remarkable. Most commercial jet airliners will travel at somewhere between 5.5 and 7 miles at their cruising altitude. Just imagine looking out of an airliner’s windows at that height and seeing two Victorian balloonists in their wicker basket.

James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell illustrated in their balloon:

James Glaisher; Henry Tracey Coxwell by Negretti & Zambra albumen carte-de-visite, late 1862 3 1/2 in. x 2 1/2 in. (90 mm x 62 mm)
Given by John Herbert Dudley Ryder, 5th Earl of Harrowby, 1957
Photographs Collection NPG x22561

Surprisingly, both Glaisher and Coxwell both lived a long life, and both died peacefully, rather than in a balloonoing accident. James Glaisher lived to the age of 93 and Henry Coxwell reached the age of 80.

The 2019 film The Aeronauts was based on Glaisher and Coxwell’s highest ascent, with Eddie Redmayne playing James Glaisher, however Henry Coxwell was completely left out of the film, with the character of the balloon’s pilot being Amelia Wren, played by Felicity Jones.

The Great Storm of 1987

Robert Fitzroy founded the Met Office in 1854, and began the process of gradually producing more and more accurate weather forecasts.

By a rather strange coincidence, soon after returning from Scotland, I was walking past Charing Cross Station, somewhere I have walked hundreds of times, and noticed for the first time, a couple of plaques on one of the pillars outside the station which record one of the most dramatic weather events for a very long time. They also remind us how over 100 years after the founding of the Met Office, forecasting was still difficult:

The top plaque records the “Great Storm” that struck south east England in the early hours of Friday the 16th of October 1987, and that in “four violent hours London lost 250,000 trees”:

I well remember that storm. I got home late that evening after a leaving do for a work colleague at, if I remember rightly, the Punch & Judy in Covent Garden, and it seemed to be getting very windy.

Overnight, the chimney on our house came apart, brick by brick, but luckily no further structural damage.

After the storm, Angus McGill of the Evening Standard launched an appeal to replace many of London’s lost trees (McGill is commemorated on the lower plaque), and the oak tree at the eastern edge of the station boundary is one of the trees planted as a result of the appeal.

The tree is in the photograph below, and the two plaques are on the left hand pillar behind the tree:

Well over 100 years after Fitzroy founded the Meteorological Office, in 1987, forecasting the weather was still a challenge, and Michael Fish’s forecast on the Thursday before the storm has become somewhat infamous as an example of getting a forecast wrong (in reality, high winds were forecast, but the storm tracked slightly further to the north and was a deeper low than had been forecast):

The Orkney Islands

The Orkney Islands are really rich in history and natural landscapes. Probably best known for Scapa Flow, the large, sheltered body of water between the islands, where the German Navy High Seas Fleet was scuttled in the First World War, and used by the British Navy of the First and Second World Wars as a Naval Base, there is much else to discover.

Some examples;

The Italian Chapel

We left Kirkwall in bright sunshine and after a short drive to the chapel found ourselves in thick fog.

The Italian Chapel was built by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War, who were based on the main Orkney island, and were used to build the causeways between the main island and South Ronaldsway.

The chapel was mainly built and decorated using concrete, one of the few available materials at the time, and is really remarkable:

The Standing Stones of Stenness:

Four upright stones of an original twelve, that date back over 5,000 years.

Ring of Brodgar:

A 5,000 year old stone circle, originally of 60 stones, with 36 surviving today, and at least 13 prehistoric burial mounds.

Skara Brae Prehistoric Village:

A remarkable, 5,000 year old Neolithic settlement, first uncovered by a storm in 1850 when part of the site was revealed when some of the sand dunes that had been covering the settlement for centuries were blown away.

A number of the individual houses still have some of their stone furniture in place.

Brough of Birsay:

A tidal island, reached when the tides are right, across a causeway. The island has Pictish, Norse and Medieval remains.

Leaving Stromness (where the barometer is located), on the ferry to the Scottish mainland:

The Stromness barometer is number 98 of around 100 barometers installed around the coast by Robert FitzRoy’s project. It continued to be read until 2005, and was restored in 2014 using funding from the Townscape Heritage Initiative.

Stromness library includes a book about FitzRoy and his barometers, as well as the operators manual for the barometer.

Whilst the barometer aims to forecast the weather, it also tells a fascinating story of the mid-19th century, with Negretti and Zambra being London’s foremost scientific instrument makers. Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy founding the Met office, as part of the Board of Trade, and James Glaisher, who ran the Meteorological and Magnetic Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and who was a daring balloonist in his quest to measure temperature, pressure etc. of the atmousphere.

I know I overuse the word, but this is a really fascinating story, of which I have just scratched the surface.

alondoninheritance.com

Campden Hill Water Tower, an Observatory and Sir James South

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Before heading to Campden Hill, a quick reminder that if you are interested in discovering the history of the New River, New River Head, the Oak Room and Devil’s Conduit, there are a few tickets remaining for a walk by Islington Guides starting this coming week. I will be guiding on a couple of these walks and they can be booked at this link.

For this week’s post, I am in the area between Kensington Gardens and Holland Park, in Campden Hill Road, looking up the street towards the now demolished water tower as seen in this photo by my father, and dating from 1951:

Campden Hill Water Tower

The same view in August 2022:

Campden Hill Water Tower

The view nearest the camera has hardly changed. The buildings on either side of Campden Hill Road are the same. What has changed is the view in the distance where the water tower once stood is now a development of flats.

The Campden Hill water tower was built as part of the 19th century roll out of water supplies across an expanding London.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company purchased the land at the top of the road in 1843, and built a reservoir. This was followed by a pumping station and the water tower. (I have also read reports that the water works opened in the 1820s on land purchased from the Dowager Marchioness of Lansdowne, and that the water tower was built in 1847).

The water tower is unusual in that it did not hold a water tank. Instead, large pipes ran up the tower, and these would hold water, with the height of the pipes adding to the pressure of water supplied from the location.

I have shown the location of the water tower, and the associated water supply infrastructure, within the red rectangle in the following map:

Campden Hill

The map shows that the water tower was just over half way up Campden Hill Road, but we need to look at another type of map to understand why it was located at this point in Campden Hill Road.

The following map (from the excellent topographic-map.com) shows land height as different colours, with blue as the lowest height, up through green, orange, red and pink as the highest. I have placed a black star symbol at the location of the water tower, and as can be seen by the surrounding colours, this is the highest point in the area, and the natural height of the land would have given a pressure advantage to water from the site, to which the water tower would have added.

Campden Hill

The name of the road – Campden Hill Road – also highlights that the road runs both up and down a hill. Next to the original location of the water tower, we can see the road descending in both directions. Looking north:

Campden Hill Water Tower

And looking south:

Campden Hill Water Tower

There was a local myth that involved the height of the land where the water tower was located. Almost opposite the location of the water tower is a pub called the Windsor Castle, and the myth was that before the water tower was built, a keen eyed observer could see the real Windsor Castle from this high point, hence the name of the local pub.

This myth was certainly still going into the 1950s when a letter in the Kensington Post disputed that you could have seen the castle from this point, and it was even doubtful that you could see the castle from the top of the tower.

This source of the name is not mentioned on the pub’s website, which does though claim the 1820s as the age of the pub, so it does pre-date the water tower.

Windsor Castle pub

The water tower and associated infrastructure became part of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1904 when the MWB took over the assets of the many water companies operating in London, and brought these under the control of a single, London wide, water supplier.

The water tower was last used for the storage of water within it’s pipe in 1943, and was then redundant for a number of years. Plans to demolish the tower started in the early 1050s and in the 28th of March 1952 edition of the Kensington News and West London Times, there was an article with the headline “Goodbye to the Great Grey Tower”. The newspaper had asked local residents how they felt about the loss of the tower and reported that their general reply was that they would “Miss it dreadfully”.

The tower would though remain for many years, and during the 1960s it was leased to Associated Rediffusion who had equipment to relay television signals mounted on the tower.

There were a number of proposals for what would replace the tower throughout the 1960s, many reported in the Kensington Post, who also sent a photographer to take some photos of the view from the top of the tower.

It would finally be demolished in the first months of 1970, and the site of the water tower and associated works is now occupied by the housing seen in the following photo:

Campden Hill Water Tower

As well as being part of London’s water supply, and a local landmark, the Campden Hill water tower is also unique as it is (as far as I know) the only water tower to feature in, and on the cover of a work of literature:

G K Chesterton

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesteron is a rather unusual book. Published in 1904, it tells of the story an alternative reality, where the country is ruled over by a randomly selected head of state, one Auberon Quinn who had been a clerk. Quinn decides to turn London into a form of medieval city. One man, Adam Wayne, takes this very seriously, and uses it as a means to support local pride. Wayne even went to the length of setting up a Notting Hill army to fight invaders from other neighbourhoods – hence the title of the Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Theoretically set in a London of the future, the book describes technology and the city as it was when the book was written.

The water tower features many times in the book, including in Chapter Three —The Great Army of South Kensington, where the various forces of different streets and local areas assemble and where battle takes place, for example:

“Morning winked a little wearily at me over the curt edge of Campden Hill and its houses with their sharp shadows. Under the abrupt black cardboard of the outline, it took some little time to detect colours; but at length I saw a brownish yellow shifting in the obscurity, and I knew that it was the guard of Swindon’s West Kensington army. They are being held as a reserve, and lining the whole ridge above the Bayswater Road. Their camp and their main force is under the great Waterworks Tower on Campden Hill.”

and:

“In the event of your surrendering your arms and dispersing under the superintendence of our forces, these local rights of yours shall be carefully observed. In the event of your not doing so, the Lord High Provost of Notting Hill desires to announce that he has just captured the Waterworks Tower, just above you, on Campden Hill, and that within ten minutes from now, that is, on the reception through me of your refusal, he will open the great reservoir and flood the whole valley where you stand in thirty feet of water. God save King Auberon!”

The reason why Chesterton set his book in the area, and uses the water tower as a key feature must be that he was born in Campden Hill on the 29th of May, 1874, so he knew the area very well, and the water tower would have been a very familiar feature.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a really strange book, but good to have the Campden Hill water tower recorded in a work of literature.

Walking south, down the hill from the location of the water tower is this terrace of large residential buildings:

Bill Brandt

One of which has a blue plaque recording that the photographer Bill Brandt lived here:

Bill Brandt

I felt rather guilty taking the photo of Bill Brandt’s plaque on a modern digital camera, when I should have been using my father’s old Leica film camera.

Brandt was a master of film photography. Born in Germany in 1904, he moved to London in 1933, and would spend the rest of his life in the city until his death in 1983.

I have no idea when, and for how long he lived in Campden Hill Road, however a number of his photographs were taken inside the building, many of which date around the 1940s, so he was there for some of that decade.

Brandt took a series of photos of London during the war, and his photos of the Underground being used as air raid shelters have become representative of that period in London’s history. Many of his wartime photos of London are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum:

Bill Brandt
AIR RAID DAMAGE (HU 672) Elephant & Castle Tube Station, 11 November 1940. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205059368

Christ Church, Spitalfields: Man sleeping in a stone sarcophagus in Christ Church:

Bill Brandt
SHELTER PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN IN LONDON BY BILL BRANDT, NOVEMBER 1940 (D 1511) Christ Church, Spitalfields: Man sleeping in a stone sarcophagus in Christ Church. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205194621

Continuing on down Campden Hill Road, and the area around the road is full of interesting architecture and plenty of history and interesting characters. I cannot cover everything I would like to in the space of a weekly post, so I will pick one small street which has plenty of interesting stories to tell.

In the map below, I have put a blue oval around Observatory Gardens, a small street that leads from Campden Hill Road to Hornton Street:

Observatory Gardens

I will come on to the origin of the name Observatory Gardens, however lets have a look at the buildings first.

Along the northern side of Observatory Gardens is a continuous terrace of brick houses with white painted detailing.

Observatory Gardens

By 1870, the land now occupied by Observatory Gardens had been purchased by Thomas Cawley, a local south Kensington builder. He subcontracted the construction of the street, however his subcontractors went bankrupt, so Cawley completed the work himself, and the street was finished in 1883.

The street suffered some severe damage during the last war when a German bomber crashed into Campden Hill Road, having taken off a large roof in Observatory Gardens, and the crater in the street causing additional damage. A report in the West London Observer on Friday the 18th of April 1941 tells the story:

“London experienced one of the heaviest raids of the War during Wednesday night and early Thursday morning and numerous heavy, high-explosive missiles as well as thousands of incendiary bombs were dropped. Damage was on a large scale and many people were killed.

The German radio yesterday (Thursday) declared that the raid was the heaviest ever on London and the biggest raid of the War, and that 100,000 fire bombs were showered down.

On Thursday morning thousand of Londoners made their way to work over hose-pipes and broken glass, while firemen, begrimed and exhausted, still dealt with the smoldering ruins. Many had to make extensive detours to reach their place of business and thousands found their offices and shops bombed out when they got there.

Altogether five Nazi planes were brought down, one of which crashed in Campden Hill Road, a turning off Kensington High street. Actually the plane hit the roof of a large house in Observatory Gardens before crashing into the roadway about 50-feet away. Bombs from the plane must have crashed into the road in front of this house as there is a very large crater.

The German plane finally came to rest by the side of a large Hostel, part of the University of London.

At the controls was a dead pilot. No traces of other members of the crew could be found, so it is assumed that they had jumped. Later the bodies of two Nazi airmen were discovered in the locality, badly mutilated.

Residents at Campden Hill Road heard the whistle of the approaching aircraft before it crashed. There was no engine noise. Wardens say that it was not on fire.

The bomber touched chimney pots and then disintegrated in small pieces. Its heavier parts, one of the engines and two propellers, landed on the top of a block of flats where some Maltese evacuees were billeted.

An oil tank burst at the same time, and two rooms of the top floors of the flats, which were being used for bedding and linen, caught fire.

During the day, thousands of people passed the spot to see the scattered remains of the bomber. By the afternoon there was little to see as army lorries had conveyed the debris to one of the various scrap bases set aside for this purpose.”

Observatory Gardens was left badly damaged by the crash of the bomber, and as with so many streets across London, the street would not recover for a couple of decades.

In the years after the war, Observatory Gardens became very run down, and it was not until the 1990s that the street we see today emerged. Whilst the exterior of the buildings were restored, much of the interior of the buildings appears to have been considerably rebuilt.

Before Thomas Cawley purchased the land and developed Observatory Gardens, the land was owned by Sir James South, a fascinating character who made astronomical discoveries and also appears to have spent a fair amount of time in the courts.

Sir James South purchased a house and land in 1827 from the Phillimore family, and set about building an astronomical observatory in the grounds.

He started a career as a surgeon in Southwark, and there established an observatory in Blackman Street. He worked with the astronomer John Herschel on the observation of double stars, but he was often difficult to work with, and was frequently drunk.

Despite this, he became President of the Astronomical Society in 1829, but after arguments with a number of Fellows, his involvement with what would become the Royal Astronomical Society faded.

He continued his observations from his house on the land that is now Observatory Gardens, and got involved in a number of disputes with the council who were proposing to extend Camden Hill Road. He believed that the vibrations from traffic on the extended road would impact his telescopes and his observations.

His legal disputes were not just about issues that threatened his observations, he would take legal action on many issues that he daily encountered. One was in 1855 when he took a conductor of a Paddington omnibus to court for deceiving him.

South had apparently hailed the omnibus near King’s Cross and had asked the conductor if it was the Royal Oak omnibus. The conductor confirmed that it was, so South boarded.

The bus continued to Chapel Street by when all the passengers had left the bus, with the exception of South. The conductor stated that the bus would not be going any further than the next stop, and South got into an argument with the conductor regarding the destination of the bus, and that the conductor had informed South that it would go to Royal Oak.

At court, the conductor denied that he had told South the omnibus was going to Royal Oak, stated that South had got on the bus without speaking. Despite this, the court sided with Sir James South and convicted the conductor with a penalty of 20 shillings plus costs.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the case of Sir James South and the conductor of an Omnibus shows that South would take an issue to court no matter how trivial it was, and with the unequal resources and reputation of an omnibus conductor and Sir James South.

Sir James South:

Sir James South

The Illustrated Times published an obituary for Sir James South on the 26th October, 1867:

“We have to announce the death of Sir James South, F.R.S. at an advanced age. He was the son of a dispensing druggist, who towards the close of the last century carried on in business in Blackman-street, Borough; but James South entered upon a higher branch of the medical profession, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. For some years he practiced his profession in Southwark, and in the intervals in business pursued the study of astronomy, in connection with which he made some extremely valuable observations. In 1822 and 1823, in conjunction with Sir John Herschel, he compiled a catalogue of 380 double stars.

After this he removed to Campden-hill, Kensington, where he constructed an observatory, to which he devoted the closest attention during the remainder of his life, and which has achieved European fame. He was one of the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society, and was for a time its president. In 1830, on the recommendation of the Duke of Wellington, who was then prime Minister, he received the honour of knighthood, and for several years past he has enjoyed a pension of £300 a year on the Civil List for his contributions to astronomical science.

The account of Sir James South’s astronomical observations during his residence in Southwark is published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1825, and is accompanied by a description of the 5 foot and 7 foot equatorials with which they were made. one of these instruments is still mounted and in excellent condition at the Campden-hill Observatory. There are also in the observatory a 7 foot transit instrument, and a 4 foot transit circle. Sir James South was born in 1785.”

The street name Observatory Gardens is therefore named after Sir James South’s observatory that once occupied the land. The following photos shows the end of Observatory Gardens, where the street meets Hornton Street:

Observatory Gardens

One of the newspaper reports I read about the water tower is that the arrival of the Grand Junction Water Works Company, and the resulting reliable supply of water, was one of the reasons why the area developed rapidly during the first half of the 19th century, and that much of that development was of large, ornate, houses.

At the eastern end of Observatory Gardens is Hornton Street, and this is the view looking north – of many of those large, ornate, houses:

Camden Hill

And the view looking south, as the hill which gave the area its name continues to descend towards Kensington High Street. Lots more red brick and white decoration:

Campden Hill

One thing I realised as I get towards the end of the post is that I have not explained the origin of the name Campden Hill. The Hill element obviously comes from the hill on which the area is built, and that resulted in the water tower being built here. Campden came from Campden House, a large house that was built here by Baptist Hicks, 1st Viscount Campden in the 17th century. The Camden in his title came from Chipping Campden in the County of Gloucester.

In the 19th century and much of the 20th century, there was a considerable amount of infrastructure supporting the provision of water, gas and electricity across London. As with the Campden Hill water tower, so much of this has disappeared, as the technologies used to distribute these services has changed.

Campden Hill is a fascinating area to explore, and I hope this post has provided an indication of what can be discovered across some of the streets.

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John Snow and the Soho Cholera Outbreak of 1854

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Epidemiology has come to public attention as one of the key areas of expertise needed to reduce the spread of Covid-19. The pandemic has come as something of a shock given the significant reductions in disease over the last 100 plus years, although in reality, such a global event was probably only a matter of time given the background transmission of new diseases, and the interconnectedness of the world in the 21st century.

Contagious disease has long been a very significant problem. Outbreaks would rise and fall, killing many thousands of people, often in limited areas. Prior to the mid 19th century, thinking was often that disease was caused and transmitted by a miasma – a form of “bad air”.

It took the work of a number of Doctors and Scientists to prove this was not correct, and to trace the real cause of disease transmission, and one of these was Dr. John Snow, often called the founding father of Epidemiology. His work on the transmission of Cholera in London would demonstrate conclusively how this killer of large numbers of Londoners was transmitted.

The British Medical Journal describes Epidemiology as “the study of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and why. Epidemiological information is used to plan and evaluate strategies to prevent illness and as a guide to the management of patients in whom disease has already developed.”

Although John Snow’s work on Cholera covered the whole country, including outbreaks across London, he is more widely known for one outbreak in 1854 in Broad Street, Soho, and a couple of weeks ago I had a walk around the area to find the focal point of the outbreak, and the pub that bears his name:

John Snow

The John Snow pub stands on the corner of Broadwick Street (originally Broad Street) and Lexington Street (originally Cambridge Street). A number of streets in this area of Soho have changed their names since the mid 19th century.

The pub building dates from the 1870s, and was originally called the “Newcastle-upon-Tyne”, The name changed in 1955 to commemorate the centenary of the work in the area of John Snow.

He traced the source of the local Cholera outbreak to a water pump that stood in the street outside the current pub. I will detail how he did this later in the post. Today, there is an imitation pump in the same spot:

John Snow

The pump was installed in its current position in 2018, having been removed three years earlier due to building work which included extension of the pavement. The replica pump had been installed in a slightly different position to the original, and a pink granite curb stone had marked the location of the original pump.

One of the fascinations of London is that historical reminders tend to accumulate, and the pink granite curb stone was retained, and can now be seen to the left of the plinth on which the pump is mounted, now in the correct position.

The pump is also unusual in that it does not have a handle – the reason for this will be explained later in the post.

And on the pub wall is a plaque by the Royal Society of Chemistry naming John Snow as the founding father of Epidemiology for his work in the area:

John Snow

The pump and pub in Broadwick Street:

John Snow

John Snow was born in York on the 15th of March 1813. A career in medicine seems to have been defined at an early age,. When he was 14 he started work as an apprentice for William Hardcastle, a surgeon in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

He had early experience with cholera outbreaks, and during 1831 he worked on an outbreak at Killingworth Colliery. It was here that he appears to have started making detailed notes on the outbreak – gathering the data that would be essential in understanding the root cause.

He moved to London in 1836 to study at the Hunterian School of Medicine, and a year later started hospital practice at the Westminster Hospital. The following year, 1838, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and in 1850 became a member of the Royal College of Physicians.

Doctor John Snow:

John Snow

Data gathering in 19th century London was actually rather good. The Registrar General published regular returns detailing the number of deaths by date, cause and location. Where possible, information also included age, gender and profession, so a mass of data was available for evaluation, however outdated theories often prevented the use of data to find the root cause of disease outbreaks.

London could be absolutely filthy. Much of London was not yet connected to the expanding sewer network. Houses often had cesspools directly underneath, raw sewage was pumped into the Thames, contaminated water would be dumped in the streets and ditches.

The city’s cemeteries were overflowing, with bodies piled high in crypts and churchyards.

One of the main theories was that disease was carried in dirty air. Air polluted by rotting vegetables, dirty water, the waste from industry, and from the city’s cemeteries.

There was also no real separation between drinking water and contaminated water. For example, raw sewage was pumped into the Thames, a short distance from where water was taken out for distribution to houses and pumps.

There were frequent outbreaks of cholera. 1849 being the year of the most recent outbreak, however there was also a background rate of cholera deaths happening every year.

Data recorded by the Registrar General identified the number of deaths per week, aligned with the source of water for the house where the person lived, or the death occurred. The following table shows a period of six weeks in 1854. The table focused on south London, an area where there were significant numbers of cholera deaths.:

John Snow

The table shows the source of the water supplied to each house where there was a death. The “Unknown Sources” column included a large number of houses where the residents did not know where their water came from as the landlord would pay the bill (and therefore they had no control of the source of their water).

The table implies significant problems with the supply of water by the Southwark Company, but this may have been down to a much larger population.

Much of the evaluation of the data was by John Snow. He obtained the addresses for houses where deaths had occurred from the Registrar General, and spent time going house to house to gather more information.

Evaluation of the data enabled a comparison of the mortality rate for each of the water companies to be identified, and this confirmed the issues with the Southwark Company, who had a mortality rate of 857 per 100,000 inhabitants compared with 169 and 194 for the Lambeth and Kent companies:

John Snow

The Lambeth Company had problems during a previous outbreak in 1849, but had since moved their intake from the Thames upriver to Thames Ditton, which was above the tidal limit of the river at Teddington.

At Thames Ditton, water flowed towards London and there was no wash back in of water due to the tide. This meant that water was less polluted. In central London, there was more inflow of sewage, and this was often swept back in on a rising tide, increasing significantly the level of pollution.

The Southwark Company were still drawing their water from the river at Battersea, not far from a number of sewage outlets at Vauxhall.

Lambeth was the only company to change where they took water following the 1849 outbreak. In 1854, the Southwark Water Company was classed as having the most impure waters, and would not change their water intake till later in the year.

John Snow investigated the source of water used by as many of those who died from cholera as he could find. Some of his records are truly appalling by modern standards:

  • At 4, Bermondsey Wall, on 23rd July, the daughter of a bookseller, aged 4 years, cholera 9 hours – Thames water, by dipping a pail in the water
  • At Falcon Lane, Wandsworth, on 3rd August, the daughter of a chemist deceased, aged 14 years, premonitory diarhoea 4 hours, cholera 24 hours – Water from a ditch into which cesspools empty themselves
  • At Charlotte Place, Charlotte Row, Rotherhithe, July 29th, the son of a barge-builder, aged 3 years, cholera 3 days – Tidal ditch
  • At 5 Slater’s Alley, Rotherhithe, July 29th, a labourer, aged 33, cholera 3.5 days – Thames Tunnel water, fetched from John’s Place

Rotherhithe was badly effected. and John Snow mentions Charlotte Row, Ram Alley and Silver Street as “places where the scourge fell with tremendous severity”.

He also states that Rotherhithe had been badly supplied by water for many ages past, and that people were forced to drink from old wells, old pumps, open ditches, and the muddy stream of the Thames.

Cholera deaths across London were increasing rapidly during the months leading up to the first week of September. I took the weekly total from the Registrar Generals report, put them in a spreadsheet, and created the following graph which gives a good visual view of the increase.

John Snow

So in the summer of 1854, cholera was causing deaths across the city, and John Snow was using methods that would become common in epidemiology to understand the impact, and to identify the cause. As well as the cases caused by infected water supplies, the case for which he would be remembered was an outbreak in Soho – a poor area where many of the residents were dependent on water from water pumps.

John Snow investigated the Soho outbreak, and he provided a comprehensive report to the St James, Westminster Cholera Inquiry Committee in July 1855.

Some houses in the area who could afford the cost were supplied by piped water from the Grand Junction and the New River Companies, and in houses that took this water he had found very few instances of cholera. His examination of the water pumps in the streets found the majority had impurities visible to the naked eye. Residents of Broad Street had also informed Snow that water from their local pump had an offensive smell.

At the start of his investigation, Snow requested data on deaths from the General Register Office. He found that the majority of these deaths had taken place near the Broad Street water pump, and after interviewing many of the residents found that those who had died from the disease had regularly drank water from the pump.

There was no other major outbreak in the area, and the common factor was the Broad Street water pump, so on the evening of Thursday 7th September 1854, John Snow had a meeting with the Board of Guardians of St James’s Parish and presented his findings. As a result, the handle of the pump was removed on the following day.

John Snow plotted cholera deaths on a map of the area, with the number of bars representing the number of deaths at each location. The Broad Street pump was close to the long dark line just to the right of centre of the map.

John Snow

Many of the street names have since changed. To show the number and spread of deaths on a street map of today, I have plotted the numbers on the map below. The dark blue star in the centre is the location of the pump. The numbers represent the total deaths listed for that street, so for example the number 44 to the right of the pump represents the total number of deaths in Broad Street to the left and right of the pump (Map © OpenStreetMap contributors).

John Snow

There were a high number of deaths in Poland Street (21), and many of these occurred at  the workhouse which is represented by the black rectangle in the above map.

Some of the deaths recorded by Snow at the workhouse are really sad, as often these would be recorded as “female unknown, age unknown”.

The workhouse is also shown in this extract from the 1894 Ordnance Survey map. The pump is again marked by the dark blue star. A short distance to the right is another building that demonstrated to John Snow that the pump was the source (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland’).

John Snow

None of the workers at the Lion Brewery caught cholera, despite being in the centre of the outbreak. On interviewing those at the brewery, it was found that “none of the workers drink water” – so perhaps they only drank beer.

John Snow wrote to the Medical Times and Gazette, describing his findings:

“I had an interview with the Board of Guardians of St. James’s parish, on the evening of the 7th, and represented the circumstances to them. In consequence of what I said, the handle of the pump was removed on the following day. The number of attacks of cholera had been diminished before this measure was adopted, but whether they had diminished in a greater proportion than might be accounted for by the flight of the great bulk of the population I am unable to say. In two or three days after the use of the water was discontinued the number of fresh attacks became very few.

The pump-well in Broad-street is from 28 to 30 feet in depth and the sewer which passes a few yards away from it is 22 feet below the surface. the sewer proceeds from Marshall-street, where some cases of cholera had occurred before the great outbreak. 

I am of the opinion that the contamination of the water of the pump-wells of large towns is a matter of vital importance. Most of the pumps in this neighbourhood yield water that is very impure; and I believe that it is merely to the accident of cholera evacuations not having passed along the sewers nearest to the wells that many localities in London near a favourite pump have escaped a catastrophe similar to that which occurred in this parish. ”

The lack of a handle on the replica pump we see today is a reminder of the work by John Snow to get the handle removed.

The affected area formed the sub districts of Golden Square and Berwick Street. The number of deaths for each street in these two districts are shown in the following tables:

John Snow

John Snow

There is other interesting data to be extracted from the Registrar General’s lists. They also include the age of each of those who had died (where known). I extracted these to a spreadsheet, sorted and created the following graph to show the numbers that died within each age range.

John Snow

The fall off at later ages is not a reflection of reduced impact of cholera, rather there were fewer people to infect in these age groups – London was a young city.

This is reflected in the high death rate of those aged between 0 and 9 years. The reduction between the ages of 10 and 29 was a surprise as there would be more people of these age groups in the area. Perhaps people of these age groups worked away from the pump, were not at the stage when they were in the workhouse, or perhaps being younger and stronger there was a higher survival rate.

The Westminster Cholera Inquiry Committee in July 1855 included a detailed investigation of the sewer and water infrastructure in the street and the house closest to the pump. The report produced by the Committee included the following drawing:

John SnowThe diagram shows how close the drains were to the well. The inquiry also examined the cesspool shown by the front of the house and the well. It found the cesspool in very poor condition, and that the mortar between the bricks of the cesspool had decayed allowing the contents to leak into the ground, only a very short distance from the well.

The report also includes the following drawing showing the front of the house, the vaults underneath the pavement, drain and well.

John Snow

The Westminster Cholera Inquiry Committee report of July 1855 includes a substantial section from the Reverend Henry Whitehead who was assistant curate of St Luke’s Church in Soho during the 1854 outbreak. Whitehead had assisted John Snow with many of the interviews of those living in the streets around the water pump.

Whitehead had initially been sceptical about the cause of the outbreak, being a believer of the miasma theory however he came to the same conclusions as Snow, and was very diligent in his research and interviews of the population.

In his report to the committee, Henry Whitehead  recorded the challenges of follow-up research as so many people had moved out of Broad Street, and that approaching the summer of 1855 there was a general feeling of uneasiness in the street – concern that cholera would once again return with warmer weather.

Henry Whitehead identified two houses opposite the pump. One had deaths from cholera and confirmed that they took water from the pump. The adjacent house used water from the New River Company and had no illness.

Although the initial findings to identify the source of the outbreak concentrated on deaths, the follow-up inquiry found that there were 50 cases where people had survived.

John Snow’s map shows the water pumps of the area. I plotted these on a modern day map to show where the water pumps of 1854 would have been located on today’s streets. Again, the Broad Street pump is the dark blue star, red stars the other water pumps:

John Snow

Comparing the above map with the map of deaths does again show the high values clustered around the Broad Street pump, with lower numbers as other water pumps became closer.

Broad Street is today named Broadwick Street. the name change happened in 1936 when the eastern section leading to Wardour Street was included – this small section had formerly been called Edward Street (named after Edward Wardour who also gave his name to Wardour Street).

Much of Broadwick Street has changed since the cholera outbreak of 1854, however almost opposite the John Snow pub is a terrace of houses that were there, having been built between 1718 and 1723 as part of the westwards expansion of Broad Street. The terrace is shown in the following photo:

John Snow

The following photo shows the view looking west along Broadwick Street from close to the Berwick Street junction. The Lion Brewery, which did not have any cholera deaths as none of the workers drank water, occupied the block on the left which now has the brick facing to the upper floors. The brewery was demolished in 1937.

John Snow

On the corner of Broadwick Street and Berwick Street is the Blue Posts pub. The current rather attractive building dates from a 1914 rebuild, however there had been a pub on the site since the original development of the area, and it is shown on the 1894 OS map.

John Snow

A rather obscure claim to fame for the Blue Posts pub is that a model of the pub was destroyed by a brontosaurus in the 1925 film Lost World. The following clip shows the pub just before the brontosaurus crashes in and demolishes the building.

John Snow

Apparently the animators, who created a rather impressive animated film for the 1920s, drank in the pub they chose to destroy for the film.

Lantern over the corner of the Blue Posts pub:

John Snow

View down Berwick Street showing how a present day pandemic has effected the restaurant trade in Soho:

John Snow

North western corner of Broadwick Street and Berwick Street with demolished building leaving only the corner façade for inclusion in whatever comes next:

John Snow

Further back towards Wardour Street, and the following building is on the corner of Broadwick Street (the part that was Edward Street), and Duck Lane, which being towards the Wardour Street end of Broad Street “only” suffered two deaths during the outbreak of 1854.

John Snow

The ground floor of the building is occupied by the Sounds of the Universe record store:

John Snow

John Snow’s work was not only around research into the causes of cholera. He was a practicing physician at the Westminster Hospital, and also worked on the technique of anesthesia including how different doses of anesthetic effected the human body.

When Queen Victoria gave birth to Prince Leopold in 1853 and Princess Beatrice in 1857, it was John Snow who administered the obstetric anesthesia.

During the 1854 outbreak he was living at 18 Sackville Street, off Piccadilly. He was a teetotaler and vegetarian for much of his life. He died in 1858 at the young age of 45.

For further reading, the report on the cholera outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854 can be found in the Wellcome Library collection here.

The second edition of John Snow’s “On the mode of communication of cholera” can be found on Google Books here.

Reading these publications really does make you appreciate the engineering, rules and regulations that are behind the clean water when you do something as simple as turn on a tap.

And the next time an epidemiologist comes on the TV or Radio to talk about the current pandemic, think about John Snow, knocking on doors across London, gathering data on the many cholera outbreaks of the mid 19th century.

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