Battersea Municipal Mecca
I did a Battersea Municipal Mecca Walk starting at Battersea Town Hall and ending at The Falcon at Clapham Junction down Lavender Hill. I am grateful to Mark from Spectacle Media for videoing it and releasing seven excerpts of it. As usual, I tried to pack in too much information. I was glad of the help I got from Sandra as she showed my images. The lower photo is of a group of us protesting about the Trump visit outside Battersea Arts Centre.
Battersea became a London borough in 1900 and was subsumed into Wandsworth in the Greater London Council reorganisation into 32 boroughs in 1965, including 12 inner boroughs that constituted the ILEA – education authority. Surprisingly, the City of London isn’t a borough – and operates in a slightly different way and they have their own Lord Mayor. Sadiq Khan is Mayor of London and was a former Wandsworth Councillor and Tooting MP.
On the walk I will mention some of the early progressive politicians and activists. I have written separate blogs on them. When we were celebrating the centenary of some women getting the vote in 2018 I discovered that of the seventeen English Heritage /LCC plaques none were to women. This fuelled my determination to celebrate Inspiring Women of Battersea which became a booklet published by the Battersea Society and in commemorating them with plaques as the Battersea Society has its own plaque scheme. We also encourage others providers and collaborate with them, eg the one to singer, cabaret performer and actor Evelyn Dove 1902-1987 who was the first black woman to sing on BBC radio in 1925 was a joint enterprise with Nubian Jak. We now have ten plaques with more coming this year as we have a lot of catching up to do. Most of them feature in my book.
Jeanie Nassau Senior 1828-1877, first female civil servant, born Jane Hughes brother of Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Appointed by Local Government Board as Inspector of Workhouses reporting on the education of “pauper girls” lived at Elm House on the site of Battersea Town Hall. She died aged 48. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/jeanie-nassau-senior-first-women-civil-servant/
Olive Morris 1952-1979 came to Battersea from Jamaica in 1962, attended Lavender Hill Girls’s School, active anti-racist Black Panthers, co-founded Brixton Black Womens Group, co-founded with Liz Obi 121 Railton Road squat. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/olive-morris-black-activist/
Catherine Gurney OBE 1848-1930, born Normanby House Lavender Hill, non-conformist family, stenographers to Parliament. Via a bible class in Wandsworth Prison initiated the Christian Police Association, Police convalescent homes and orphanages in Brighton and Harrogate. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/catherine-gurney-obe-1848-1930-a-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 funded Battersea Labour Party HQ where her plaque is sited at 177 Lavender Hill. Her biography tagged ‘An Unhusbanded Life’- Suffragette Socialist and Sinn Feiner. She wrote 10 novels, after she waswidowed moved to Nine Elms Battersea, provided welfare facilities, suffragette with Women’s Freedom League, Labour candidate Battersea North. 1918.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/charlotte-despard-batterseas-socialist-suffragette/
Caroline Ganley CBE 1879-1966 came to Battersea 1901, pacifist, active in suffrage campaigns. 1919 elected Battersea councillor, appointed JP, represented Battersea on LCC, first woman president of the London Co-op Society, MP for Battersea South 1945-51. Battersea Society plaque on her home at 5 Thirsk Road https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/caroline-ganley-mp/
Deaconess Isabella Gilmore 1842-1923, Gilmore House 113 Clapham Common Northside when widowed trained as a nurse in Guys Hospital, asked by Bishop of Rochester to start a deaconate. Deaconesses were “a curiously effective combination of nurse, social worker and amateur policemen”. addressed the needs of the poor through working with girls and women. Her brother William Morris said whilst he preached socialism, she practised it. There is a plaque to her in Southwark Cathedral. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/deaconess-isabella-gilmore/
Marie Spartali 1844 -1923 The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens.Pre-Raphaelite painter, During a sixty-year career, she produced 170 works, contributing regularly to exhibitions in the UK and the US. She studied drawing and painting under Ford Madox Brown. Painted by DG Rossetti, Burne Jones, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/marie-spartali-pre-raphaelite-artist/
Laura Barker 1819-1905, composer and violinist Lavender Sweep House with husband Tom Taylor playwright and Punch editor.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/laura-barker-1819-1905/ and https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/tom-taylor-dramatist-editor-of-punch/
Diederichs Duval suffrage family lived at 97 Lavender Sweep. Emily and her children Elsie, Victor, Norah and Barbara were active and imprisioned. Emily 1861-1924 became Battersea Councillor Elsie WSPU,worked for Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement founded by her brother Victor. Tragically, Elsie, Barbara and Winifred died in the flu epidemic. Now got WBC plaque https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/duval-suffrage-family-of-lavender-sweep/?preview=true
Edith, known as Biddy Lanchester 1871-1966, lived at 27 Leathwaite Social Democratic Federation, by father, two brothers and psychiatrist hauled her off to the Priory Asylum. The supposed cause of her insanity was ‘over education’. She was a teacher and later secretary to Eleanor Marx
Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986, her daughter, trained as a dancer aged ten in Paris with Isadora Duncan, taught dance, set up her own theatre club Cave of Harmony, met and married Charles Laughton, moved to the US. Starred in Bride of Frankenstein(1935), made over a 100 films. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
Violet Piercy 1889-1972 lived at 21 Leathwaite Rd. first recorded female marathon runner, 1926, she ran from Windsor to London finishing at Battersea Town Hall at 3 hrs 40 mins. her record lasted until till Merry Lepper time of 3:37:07 Western Hemisphere Marathon Dec 1963.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/violet-piercy-marathon-runner-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/a pioneering athlete who did, indeed, run from Windsor to London in 1926 and became famous, speaking out repeatedly for women to engage in sport and take on endurance challenges, and eventually completed at least four marathons.
The three women authors Penelope Fitzgerald, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Ethel Mannin were the subjects of a talk and blog https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/three-battersea-women-authors/
Penelope Fitzgerald 1916- 2000 novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. Somerville College Oxford got a first in 1938, named Woman of the Year, included The Times list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. Her final novel, The The Blue Flower one of “the ten best historical novels’ lived at 25 Almeric Road (where plaque will be) when she wrote Booker prize-winning Offshore about houseboat dwellers in Battersea Reach.
Pamela Hansford Johnson CBE, 1912-1981 born 53 Battersea Rise, wrote 27 novels. This bed thy Centre, coming-of-age first novel was based in Battersea, commemorated with a Battersea Society plaque. Married CP Snow https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/pamela-hansford-johnson-battersea-born-novelist/
Ethel Mannin 1900-1984 born 28 Garfield Rd, a working class self-educated, prodigious author of a hundred books, including novels, memoirs, travel, childrearing etc. Political maverick, socialist, pacifist, anarchist and ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause. Twice married, had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell between husbands. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/ethel-mannin-1900-1984/
Hilda Hewlett 1864– 1943 first British woman to earn a pilot’s licence in 1911, ran first flying school and Omnia Works Aircraft factory Vardens Road 1912-14 with Gustav Blondeau. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/hilda-hewlett-first-female-licenced-pilot-and-aeroplane-manufacturer-based-in-battersea-1912-1914ions/
Wilhelmina Stirling 1865-1965author of 20+ books on lives/reminiscences of landed gentry, founder of the De Morgan Centre at her home, Old Battersea House until her death, now at Watts Gallery.
Ida 1904-1986 and Louise Cook 1901–1991 24 Morella Road SW12 were opera loving, civil servants who rescued Jews from Europe during the 1930s, funded mainly by Ida’s writing as Mary Burchill for Mills and Boon, honoured as Righteous among Nations by Yad Vashem.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/opera-loving-sisters-ida-and-louise-cook-civil-servants-who-rescued-29-jewish-refugees-funded-by-idas-earnings-as-a-mills-and-boon-author/
John Burns 1858–1943 MP Trade union organizer and exponent of ‘Lib‐Labism’, born in London, became an engineer, and involved himself in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, an accomplished orator, one of the organizers of the London dock strike of 1889. In 1884 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, and acquired a reputation as a socialist militant. But by the 1890s he had broken both with Marxism and with trade unionism, supporting instead the furtherance of working‐class interests within the Liberal Party. Elected as an independent Labour MP for Battersea in 1892. Opposed Boer War from virulent antisemitism> In 1905 he accepted office as president of the Local Government Board in the Liberal administration. Burns resigned from the government in 1914, apparently in protest against war with Germany, plaque at Alverstroke House Clapham Common Northside. Had suffragettes thrown out of Battersea Town Hall meetings. Charlotte Despard had no time for him!
Walter Rines a tailor was Mayor of Battersea in 1906, was even celebrated in an American newspaper. The San Francisco Call wrote: Although Mayor Rines is a militant democrat in politics, he is an aristocrat in his trade and one would not be surprised to learn that both the King and Joseph Chamberlain had congratulated him on his new won honor, for in his time he has caused both of them to be regarded as the best dressed men in England.
Thomas Brogan JP 1866-1973 son of John Brogan of Ballina, Co. Mayo an evicted Irish tenant farmer, was the first Irish nationalist and Catholic Mayor in London, was mentor to John Archer elected Mayor of Battersea the following year. They both had Irish mothers. Thomas was Chairman of the Workers Institute in Battersea, president of the United Irish League and a familiar and fluent speaker on Irish Home Rule. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/thomas-brogan-irish-nationalist-and-catholic-mayor-battersea-1912/
John Archer 1863-1932, born in Liverpool, first black Mayor of a London Borough as a Progressive, first president of African Progress Union formed in London in 1918. In 1919, he was re-elected as a councillor as a Labour candidate. It was Archer who ensured that, when Shapurji Saklatvala stood in the 1922, 1923, and 1924 elections, he would not have an opposing Labour candidate. In 1931, he was deputy Labour Leader on Battersea council. a governor for Battersea Polytechnic, president of the nine Elms swimming club, and a trustee of the borough charities. His work as a photographer was highly successful https://wandswortharchives.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/john-archers-battersea/
Shapurji Saklatvala1874– 1936) was a communist activist and British politician of Parsi heritage. He was the first person of Indian heritage to become a British MP for the Laboutr Party and among the few members Communist Party of Great Britain. to serve as an MP
Noreen 1910-2003 and Clive Branson 1907-1944 were communist party activists, who came to radical Battersea in the thirties, Clive, an artist, volunteered in Spain and Noreen, grandaughter of Marquis of Sligo became a communist and Labour Research Deptartment historian.
Battersea Borough history. A requirement for a town hall arose in Battersea in 1888, when the Battersea Vestry regained autonomy from the Wandsworth District Board of Works Wandsworth District Board of Works under the Metropolis Management (Battersea and Westminster) Act of 1887. The Wandsworth board had assumed powers of local government of Battersea in 1855 from the Battersea vestry, but prodigious population growth in Battersea over the subsequent 30-years provided a rationale for the reversion to vestry control. (The district was in the part of Surrey that was included in the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works.
In 1889 the Metropolitan Board of Works area became the County of London and the district board continued as an authority under the London County Council. The Wandsworth board had since 1858 operated locally from the small Georgian property, Mellersh House, at 68A Battersea Rise. In 1900, the London Government Act 1899 divided the County of London into twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs. The parish became the Metropolitan Borough of Battersea.
This is from the splendid website Municipal Dreams which also acknowledges our own Battersea historian Sean Creighton. https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/the-latchmere-estate-battersea-happy-healthy-homes-for-sober-and-industrious-workmen/
The Latchmere Estate, opened in August 1903, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour – by the Council’s own workforce. It remains a superb exemplar of the practical idealism of Labour’s first generation of municipal reformers. it safeguarded workers’ pay and conditions, it respected trades union rights and guaranteed better value and higher quality than any that could be delivered by private interest.
At the turn of the last century Battersea had become the ‘Municipal Mecca’ – a bastion of left-wing politics which reflected the powerful local presence and radicalism of the Progressive Alliance.
The radical politicians around at this time I want to mention are John Burns, Charlotte Despard, Caroline Ganley, Emily Diederichs Duval, John Archer, Thomas Brogan Walter Rines and Shapurji Saklatvala.
In 1972 a working group set up to consider a proposal by Councillor Martin Linton, later Battersea’s MP, to adapt the town hall for social, community and artistic purposes came to fruition in 1974, when Hugh Jenkins, Minister for the Arts, opened the centre.
The Shakespeare Theatre built by Charles Gray Hill to the designs of the prolific Theatre Architect W. G. Sprague on a site next to the Battersea Town Hall, opened 1896, bombed in WW11 and demolished. http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Clapham.htm
Sir John Lubbock laid the foundation stone in 1889 of Battersea District Library which opened 1890 The reference library was built by direct labour. The true designer of the outstanding Arts and Crafts reference library was Henry Hyams. Council’s motto ‘ NON MIHI, NON TIBI, SED NOBIS’ is carved over the entrance.
Post Office, Electric House and Pavillion Cinema.
Pavillion Cinema opened 1916, seating 1,500 closed during the Blitz ire-opened December 1940 and was bombed when 14 people died. Electric House very sadly was demolished in 1985 due to electricity privatization by the Thatcherism.
The Globe Cinema is where Wholefoods is at 309 Lavender Hill
Arding and Hobbs built in 1888 burned down Christmas 1909, temporarliy moved to Munts Hall, present building constructed in 1910., owned by United Draperies in 1948 Allders in the 1970s, in administration in 2005, became Debenhams and TK Maxx, 2020, Debenhams shut.
Clapham Junction Station
Clapham Grand
designed by Ernest Woodrow opened in 1900 Grand Hall of Varieties, consortium headed by Dan Leno, became a cinema bingo hall. Grade 11 listed remained closed until bought by the late lamented powerhouse of music venues and festivals Vince Power of the Mean Fiddler. Weatherspoons were refused a licence, it is now a night club with drag, pink and pride hosting parties, comedy, movie nights and bingo – many different forms of the 21st century night-time economy, with lovely Ally as manager and queues snaking up St John’s Hill past the Territorial Army HQ making the Junction abuzz at weekends.
I am glad to have lived here for over sixty years through the changes but lament the lack of affordable housing housing. I do take pride in its radical and fascinating history and enjoy sharing my enthusiasm Battersea especially as we now have a Labour Council in Wandsworth and three dynamic Labour women MPs serving in the constituencies of Wandsworth which is set to become the London Borough of Culture for 2025. This jolly video is by Sandra Munoz.
https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/culture
Bransons – Communists Clive artist and poet, Noreen writer and Rosa their artist daughter
The Bransons, Noreen 1910-2003, Clive 1907-1944 were communist party activists and their daughter Rosa born 1933 lived at 4 Glycena Road just off Lavender Hill, near Battersea Town Hall in the thirties. They then moved to 310 Battersea Park Road. Noreen and Rosa will be added to my walk of Notable Women of Lavender Hill and Clive will be included in Battersea Municipal Mecca walks.
I visited Rosa who is ninety in her wonderful home and studio in Highgate. it was a memorable visit which will stay me.
I did a Battersea Society talk on them on 15th November 2023 online as we have agreed to have talks online in Winter as our members do not seem keen to come to in person ones then! I am repeating it as part of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival in Battersea Library on Tuesday
However, I am delighted that we now have been offered the opportunity to hold Battersea book related talks in the Battersea Bookshop which is in Battersea Power Station thanks to the lovely manager Matthew as part of their community commitment and we can sell our own publications then. https://batterseabookshop.com/
Battersea Bookshop is a neighbourhood independent bookshop from Stanfords. Their aim is to provide aa bookshop that brings the local community together through book groups, collaborations with local schools and community organisations. I told them that Edward Stanford, the founder in 1853 lived in a house in the long demolished New Road which was taken over by Clapham Junction Station!
We held the first event on Inspiring Women of Battersea by me with readings from Hilaire and Joolz from their anthology London Undercurrents.Our next one will be on Open Spaces. Our books are also available through our online bookshop https://www.batterseasociety.org.uk/battersea-society-shop.
I did brandish a copy of my letter from Wandsworth Council dated 1987 which shows that there was an intention to have a community space in Battersea Power Station and I was on the panel for it representing Irish Women in Wandsworth! So, 36 years later I am representing Battersea Society there.
I was excited when I discovered that the communist activists Clive and Noreen and their young daughter Rosa lived in Battersea in the thirties, first at 4 Glycena Road and then at 310 Battersea Park Road, saw Clive’s wonderfully evocative Battersea paintings and that Noreen was one of the Browne’s of Westport House Co mayo.
Noreen and Clive both came from wealthy families and revolted against their privileged backgrounds as committed communists. They married soon after meeting as kindred spirits in 1931, moved from Chelsea to Battersea which was amenable to communists and socialists in 1934. Shapurji Saklatvala had been our MP during the 20s.
Graham Stevenson, the late communist, trade union leader and historian specialising in the history of British socialist and labour activists, has written one each of Clive and Noreen. Graham died in 2020. https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/19/clive-branson/
I do not want too reproduce all of his posts on them but recommend you read them. Obviously I loved reading the account of their lives in Battersea, how they rebuffed the fascists, their Spanish War campaigning and details of Clive’s paintings and Noreen’ s writings.
Clive Branson was born in 1907. He became a skilled painter and studied at the Slade School of Art. At the age of 23 he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy. He joined the ILP around 1927 but moved to the Communist Party in 1932. For a time, he managed a Communist Party bookshop with Noreen. Clive was a pioneer of working class education, was a National Council of Labour Colleges tutor, and spoke in this capacity to nearly every trade union branch in Battersea. He used his skill as a speaker and tutor to great affect at weekly open-air meetings on Clapham Common. For much of this period, Noreen was Secretary of the Battersea Communist Party, which had some fifty odd members.
Clive was a powerhouse of Communist agitation; the Party’s General Secretary, Harry Pollitt, described him : “Nothing was too much for him: selling the Daily Worker at Clapham Junction, house to house canvassing, selling literature, taking up social issues, and getting justice done – all those little things which go to make up the indestructible foundations of the movement”. (`Introduction to `British Soldier in India: The Letters of Clive Branson’ (1944).)
The Party headquarters at 16 King Street used his painting, “Selling the ‘Daily Worker’ outside Projectile Engineering Works” (1937), which shows a woman modelled on Noreen, selling copies of the paper outside the munitions factory which was in Thessaly Road up the Wandsworth Road end. The slogan ‘For Unity’ is displayed on the sellers’ aprons and the painting shows a deliberate rejection of the academic painting which was taught.
When Franco’s fascists staged a military coup in Spain, he was one of the first to throw himself whole-heartedly into the fight to rouse the people of London, speaking at numerous factory gate meetings, and at trade union meeting. He helped with the collection of money. In Battersea he was largely responsible for the formation of a strong Aid Spain Committee under the auspices of the Battersea Trades Council , the initial meeting had been organised by the Communist Party at the Railwaymen’s unity Hall in Falcon Grove on 31st July 1936 and was entitled “Support Spanish Workers Against Fascism”. The principal speaker were Branson and Tom Oldershaw, a local Battersea Communist who had been on a cycling holiday in Spain when the civil war had started.
Clive secured a large selection of instruments, which were sent out within the fist days, when the republican army desperately needed technical equipment. He was also instrumental in getting aeroplanes for the Spanish government when the British government refused it right to buy arms. He on also acted as a courier taking groups of international brigadiers to Paris and handing them over for safe passage to Spain, which in itself was illegal. He joined them in active service in the Spanish civil war. He was captured and became a prisoner of war at Calceite in April 1938.
On his release he returned to Battersea, continued painting and Rosa recalls her abiding memory of Daddy painting and Mummy writing. The painting, depicting a wartime barrage balloon which was pierced and deflated over Battersea Park Road/Home Road, the escaping gas turned the air green.
Now photos Oliver’s cafe Battersea Park Road on the corner of Home Road, across the road is the corner with Abercrombie Street. They went to live in 310 Battersea Park Road which got bombed when Clive was in Burma and Noreen was a fire warden. Number 310 was next to what is now Oasis Charity shop on the corner with Bullen Street. 4 Glycena Road owners have not responded to my letter seeking permission to install a plaque there. From the Survey of London I gleaned Glycena House is named after a Chinese wisteria by William Pamplin who set up his new Lavender Hill Nursery, his son producing catalogues of ‘rare indigenous plants grown in the vicinity of Battersea and Clapham’ and became a bookseller supplying the wants of botanists and collectors, partly a mail-order operation, older sisters Harriet and Sarah ran a school at Glycena House, advertising in 1838 for a lady to teach landscape
drawing, Italian and arithmetic in a ‘select establishment’
Clive Branson sadly was later killed in action fighting fascism as part of the British Army in Burma in 1944 and their family life was shattered. Noreen was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum on this. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009003 and Rosa has powerful memories of her brief time with her father and she too has been interviewed about this and her art by Africare Videos. https://youtu.be/xXsTnbPlbms
Noreen was granddaughter of the 5th Marquess of Sligo whose family home was Westport House, The Browne’s were descendants of Gráinne Ní Mháille, dubbed Pirate Queen, I remember visiting the house when my youngest son Fingal was a baby as my husband Dave had gone climbing the pilgrimage mountain in Co Mayo called Croagh Patrick. and I remember him wailing when we were in the dungeon.
Noreen Browne was born in London on May 16th 1910, the daughter of the Earl of Sligo,who was an army officer killed in First World War. Her mother also died in the same period, so she and her two sibilings were brought up by strict grandparents in Mayfair. Although they insisted on a very religious upbringing, she became an atheist when she was 16 years old.
Branson Noreen
Westport House Co Mayo former seat of the Browne family, who are direct descendants of the famous 16th century Pirate Queen – Grace O’Malley.
Noreen had been taught by governesses until aged about 12 years, and then attended Queensgate Girls Day School, (where incidentally Penelope Fitzgerald taught when one of her pupils was Camilla.) Noreen then studied at the Tobias Matthay Piano School. Matthay was then a highly prized theoretician of music teaching. and his many successful pupils established him as one of the greatest pedagogues of all time. Students from throughout the world sought his advice on artistic and technical matters. Alumni included Myra Hess Moura Lympany Harriet Cohen who also Vice President of the Women’s Freedom League, Clifford Curzon and composer Arnold Bax.
Queensgate Girls School Tobias Matthay
Noreen duly “came out” when she was 18 but was far more interested, however, in studying music and playing the piano than in the social round; she had a fine voice and joined the Bach Choir in 1929. (Her soaring voice singing the Red Flag or the Internationale was unforgettable.)
In early 1931, she took part in an East End charity concert, where she met Clive a painter and poet. hese two spent that night in an all night Lyons Corner House They agreed to marry within only a few days of meeting and did so within a month, and their life together centred on politics.
They initially lived in the poorer part of Chelsea before moving to Battersea, which gave Noreen’s concern about working-class conditions and the operation of social security laws a clearer focus – she was appalled, for instance, at the Poor Law requirement that claimants sell their pianos before receiving relief. this she discovered when they were canvassing in Peabody in Chelsea and two chaps were moving a piano out.
She had joined the Communist Party in 1932 becoming the Battersea Branch Secretary. She was also active in the Co-op Women’s Guild on the Battersea Aid Spain Committee. Late in 1934, Harry Pollitt asked her to take money and documents to the then illegal Communist Party of India in Bombay. Her social background was perfect cover. During one hunt for a Comintern messenger, she was dancing with the chief of police during a new year’s ball. She attended the 7th world congress of the Comintern in Moscow and spent several months engaged in the high risk task as a courier to underground parties in Europe.
Noreen was the representative of the Co-operative Women’s Guild on the Battersea Aid Spain Committee. In January 1938, Noreen began to work as a researcher for Pollitt at the same time as Clive had left for Spain. She then very quickly moved over to the Labour Research Department. Having been named in the deeds of Marx House as its purchaser, she was also deeply involved in its establishment and was its Vice-President up to her death for the next 65 years! A year after Clive was killed in 1944 she published his letters as “A British Soldier in India”.
Noreen and Margot Heinemann occupied adjacent flats at 99 Haverstock Hill NW3 later in the war. Jane Bernal., Margot’d dsughter said that the painting of the man selling the Daily Worker is her personal favourite of Clive’s paintings because it belonged to her and hung on the wall of her parents home when she was growing up. Noreen moved to her home in Highgate in 1955 and it is the wonderful home that Rosa still lives in.
She was Secretary of St Pancras Trades Council representing the clerical and administrative trade union from 1947. A member of the Communist Historians Group, she wrote on the struggles in Poplar, East London, from 1919-25 and on `Britain in the Nineteen Thirties’, the latter with Margot Heinemann and two volumes of the history of the CPGB covering 1927 to 1951, co-authored a book with Roger Simon, “Room at the Bottom” (1960) was a critique of the welfare state, published in 1971 as part of E.J.Hobsbawm’s History of British Society series, was a bleak analysis of, as the authors saw it, the failure of the Left to halt the slide into war. Poplarism, 1919-1925 (1979) was an account of the rates rebellion in the poverty-stricken East London borough of Poplar, led by its Labour Mayor, George Lansbury.
George Lansbury Margot Heinemann
She contributed to the History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, writing volume three in 1985 , which covered 1927-41, the fraught period from the aftermath of the General Strike to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Volume four, covering the ten years 1941-51, was published in 1997, by which time she was herself 87. She died in 2003,aged 93 on 25th October 2003 “still convinced of the need for a socialist transformation of society”.
Rosa was born in 1933 during the turbulent years of her parents activism. When she was born they named her Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg but Clive registered her as Mary which she only discovered when she was 21 because he thought it dangerous if Hitler invaded and she was the child of communists! Rosa laughingly showed me her mail that day addressed to Mary Hooper whom she said is a pensioner but she is Rosa Branson the artist.
She had a fractured childhood as she was sent away to school aged two and a half. All this I gleaned from Lynn Michell’s biography. The blurb states: “Rosa’s personal life is equally colourful with a wartime childhood with communist parents in Battersea, wretched years as a student, and a first marriage that ends in violence and madness. It is written in fictionalised scenes which highlight her formative early years. It captures the immediacy and drama of a life of turmoil and transitions, disappointment and despair, joy and security. Through all of this, Rosa painted on .. massive storyboards for charities to highlight their work and to raise funds.”
Rosa was taken from Battersea to Dora Russell’s school and felt abandoned. She asked her mother later why she always got others to care for her. With Noreen’s aristocratic background it was understandable and Noreen told her that experts said the worst person to bring up a child was the mother!
When she was four she was living at home with Clive and Noreen in Glycena Road which Rosa didn’t like at first as it was the upstairs flat and she anticipated a lovely home like that of her grandparents but it was now living again with her Mummy and Daddy. At home Clive painted, Noreen write using the typewriter and sometimes played the piano and they were busy going to meetings. She remembered their comrades coming and a lot of excited talking. But they also explained why she had been sent away when her Daddy was in Spain in prison and Noreen travelling even as far as India for the Communist Party. She said her Daddy was a big handsome funny bloke who made jokes and did lovely paintings of men in caps and women wearing aprons and working in factories.
He took her to the Tate and told her about the Old Masters and she said that is what she wanted to do too, to paint like them when she was older. For two years until the start of the war she had such a happy times and played on the street with other kids She was sent to a school Beltane when war broke out which had evacuated to Polperro. She was bullied there and she was there when she learned from her mother visiting suddenly that her beloved father had died. There house had been bombed and they moved out of Battersea.
After graduating from Camberwell School of Art, she realised that she hadn’t acquired the painting skill she needed to paint her visions. She joined the Slade, but found that the school teaching methods still did not meet her needs and went on to learn by. Noticed by the Chief restorer, Professor Helmut Ruhemann, she received guidance and tuition from him for the next six years. In her own words she is painting the ‘modern world using the Old Masters technique’. copying various works by artists such as Rembrandt, Turner, El Greco at the National Gallery. This was her real art training that she loved despite those who thought it all a waste of time. She was no longer lonely.
She has always been spurred on by her father as one of the last things he said to her was to urge her to be an artist. That has been the biggest inspiration to her own highly successful and productive career. Rosa tells of her great pride in her father – in his poetry, art, and more so in the qualities which shined through in his life and politics. She recalled that her mother once said how proud her father would be of her and her success as an artist – and that in turn gave Rosa a great sense of satisfaction.
She has worked in fabric collage design, watercolour and glass design. Her second subject in Camberwell was embroidery and when she had small children she stopped painting and applied her training at the National Gallery to creating fabric collages using the glazing technique of Old Masters. She completed over 100 collages.
But her speciality is the Old Masters oil painting technique of layering subtle glazes of translucent paint over each other. She has always been passing this on to others. She has mentored several rising artist such as Tanja Hassell and Heath Rosselli with whom she co-founded The Worlington Movement which seeks to promote classical drawing and painting for art students and young artists. https://www.theworlingtonmovement.co.uk/
In a career spanning over 60 years, she has covered a variety of topics, including portraiture, still life, landscape, as well as producing many large-scale charity paintings for organisations such as Oxfam, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, the Taxi Charity, Disability World of Inclusion, Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland and many more.
Rosa’s own painting – and she was painting for hours a day until her sight has deteriorated has completed more than 600 works – often draws on family history. The death of her husband Henry was a huge loss to her. A chance meeting on a cruise ship in Norway with Harold Sumption, who was a fund raiser for Oxfam and other charities after a career in advertising, led her to painting the large large-scale (5 feet by 8 feet) art works of her charity paintings.
Examples of Rosa’s paintings in publicly owned British collections can be found on the Art UK website. She has exhibited at the Royal Academy, The Royal Institute of Oil Painters and many other galleries.
There is a lovely chapter in Lynn’s biography of Rosa’s describing her Edwardian home in Southwood Avenue up a steep hill with a mature garden. It is four storied at the back with a large basement. There was a bicycle in the hall. It is such a joyous place to visit as it is her home, with lodgers, students staying and visiting but it has her studio and it is a gallery of her and Clive’s art. Family photos are in the mix, the artistic gene is evident. She now has lovely carers after she had a fall but still goes daily to the cafe down in Highgate village as part of her routine.
Inspiring Battersea Woman Elizabeth Braund founder Providence House
Elizabeth Braund MBE 1921–2013 was founder of Providence House which is a purpose-built Christian youth and community centre near Clapham Junction station on Falcon Road. A plaque was unveiled to her on 24th March 2024 on the front of their building. I had been in contact with them about commemorating her, as encouraging others to install plaques to Battersea women is part of my mission! They are celebrating their 60th anniversary this year. Hadas founder of Waste Not, Want Not was very keen to have the plaque. She is not in the group photo as she was responsible for preparing the food. She not only collects the food from Covent Garden Market and supermarkets but cooks it up for these community events. Hadas is in the photo of the youngsters holidaying on Shallowford Farm. Robert Musgrave in the white shirt and tie was the youth worker there from the 70s till he retired.
It declares quite clearly that it is a Youth and Community Christian Mission despite what many apologists have said to me! This was clearly evident at the unveiling event when prayers were said inside and at the unveiling ceremony. At least four of the earliest members were there and, one grandmother whose children and grandchildren attended the club.
It offers a variety of activities including arts and crafts, football coaching, photography group, badminton and much more. It is a place where young people can go to learn, have fun and relax. It is for children and young people aged 11-19 years old or up to 25 years old for young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
Although it claims to welcome all I think it important to acknowledge that no religious based institution can claim to be for everyone as the majority of people in this country have no religion. They are exclusive therefore of non-believers. No doubt, some non religious youngsters will use the facilities despite the Christian evangelical ethos because of the shortage of youth facilities.
An article in The Guardian in 2014 headed Providence House :from mods to rappers, a haven for London’s ‘little rogues’. Near London’s Clapham Junction, a home from home for young people charts the history of urban Britain and the teenager, and proves that the idea and value of the ‘youth club’ lives on. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/04/providence-house-clapham-junction-youth-club-50-years-little-rogues
When Tory Wandsworth Council made severe cuts to their funding Robert Musgragve retired, but still works as a full-time volunteer alongside Esther Clevely, a former social worker who has enough ideas for another 50 years. “Young people always need a safe space of their own that isn’t school or home,” she says. Today Providence House runs as it has always done, “on a shoestring, from day to day, month to month”. It offers courses in life skills, sports, cookery, canoe building, media, arts – and doing nothing while learning a great deal.
In an interview with the Evangelical Times in 2012 Robert Musgrave MBE who was a youth worker t Providence House for decades having started there in 1973 said : The positive side is having helpers who put back time and effort into their youth club and are hopefully influenced by the ethos of the work. But, without embracing Christ for themselves, they remain an impermanent answer to all our needs.
Nevertheless, it has been an important and long standing provider of youth facilities in Battersea.
In 1975 the new adventure to Dartmoor began, with the opening of East Shallowford Farm in 1976.
Elizabeth Braund was born in June 1921 into a privileged and intellectual family. Her father was a barrister and her mother a strong supporter of the Arts. She excelled at school but any intention of pursuing a career was thwarted with the outbreak of World War Two when she joined her parents who were then living in Burma and later India.
With no career structure in place, Elizabeth, despite a short period of working for MI9, became frustrated with the social environment in which she lived and perhaps it was with some relief that she returned to England for health reasons. With no fixed abode, Elizabeth drifted between the hospitality of friends and eventually worked for the BBC, adapting broadcast with great success. After hearing a preacher Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in Westminster Chapel and through her work for the BBC which included research into “The History of The Bible” and she became an evangelical Christian and editor of “The Evangelical Magazine” and based herself in a disused chapel in Battersea for editorial meetings and it was here that she encountered a community that was being disrupted with new urban social planning. Old houses being pulled down in favour of blocks of flats. Youths were hanging around the streets aimlessly and Elizabeth decided to do something.
With the help of her friend Rosemary Bird, a youth club was started in the chapel. Again urban planning disrupted this project but she was able to negotiate for a new youth club to be built. It was called Providence House and still functions today on the Falcon Road next to Clapham Junction.
Whilst working with these youth groups and devising a fulfilling programme of activity, Elizabeth recognised the limits of living in a city environment and she decided to extend the provision of the youth club by buying East Shallowford Farm on Dartmoor which she described as “a lung for the city”. As with Providence House, the farm still continues to welcome groups to stay.
Since the 1950s, Providence House has served families of Battersea in London through its youth work. Robert Musgrave MBE joined Providence House on his gap year 38 years ago and is still there. Her legacy is in the lives of countless Battersea and Wandsworth families.
Elizabeth wrote many books, one of which The Young Woman who lived in a shoe. It tells the story of Providence House, “Ethelberta” a children’s story written for the BBC Children’s Hour and numerous articles for The Evangelical Magazine and other Christian periodicals.
Shallowford Farm came to Falcon Road in June. They said on FB ‘We had the best time taking the Farm to City – Dartmoor to You. We had visitors old and young, from all over the world, discovering Dartmoor and its farms. We even learnt some interesting facts about farming in other cultures whilst we were in London. We had amazing questions “why does moss smell like frogs?”, we had smiles, we had first experiences with real livestock, we had the BEST time. And when I popped down I met Hadas from Waste not Want not @wastenotwantnot_battersea providing food including Shallowford Farm sausages.
They were visited by Sophie Duchess of Edinburgh ( formerly Wessex) and they were honoured to have her support this event and all it aims to allow young people from inner city areas to experience farming and Dartmoor.
The school group pictured in strict uniform is the Thames Christian School located nearby in Grant Road, at the rear of the Clapham Junction station which is very new one. Of course, as a humanist and atheist I do not approve of divisive religious schools, especially the privileged position of C of E schools which constitute the majority of rural primary schools which is a reminder that the UK is a theocracy with the monarch as its head, bishops in the House of Lords and compulsory school assemblies of a Christian character! Just saying.
Evelyn Dove 1902-1987 cabaret singer lived in Battersea
I found another fascinating Battersea women Evelyn Dove 1902-1987. Evelyn Dove Britains’s Black Cabaret Queen is the title of Stephen Bourne’s biography of her. I learnt this from our lovely heritage librarian and archivist Emma Anthony’s blog as Evelyn had lived in Battersea when she was young at 25a Barnard Road SW11which I pass regularly to get to the shops in St John’s Road. Emma like me was delighted to read Evelyn’s biography which had been recommended to her. Of course, she has now been added to my roster of Inspiring Women of Battersea and Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk. Thanks to Stephen for writing her biography and to Jacaranda for publishing it. We recently had a talk by another trail blazing mixed race Battersea women Esua Jane Goldsmith whose autobiography was also published by them.
Evelyn Dove 1902 -1987 was a cabaret singer who was a popular performer from the 1920s. She was the first woman of African heritage to be broadcast on BBC Radio in 1925, only three years after it was launched.
Born in London in the Lying-in Hospital Endell Street Evelyn was the daughter of Francis Dove, a successful barrister and businessman from Sierra Leone and his English wife Augusta (née Winchester). References to Evelyn appear in a number of places at The National Archives. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20s-people/20-people-of-the-20s/evelyn-dove/
Francis was admitted into the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1888, and enrolled as a Barrister of the Supreme Court in 1897. He and Augusta married in 1896. While her Father provided for the education of Evelyn and her brother Frank, he ran his practice in Accra, while Augusta brought up Evelyn and Frank in Britain.
At the time of the 1911 census Evelyn was living at 25a Barnard Road SW11
This census entry also includes a servant, which attests to the Dove family’s middle class background – something which wasn’t entirely unusual among Britain’s Black Edwardian population. Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor provides one of the best known examples, born to a Sierra Leonean doctor and white British mother and he lived in Croydon.
Evelyn, along with her mother and brother, Frank, is listed in 1910 among the passengers on the ship, Zungeru. Frank was seven years older and was at boarding school then. He attended Cranleigh Boys School in Surrey, one of the first black pupils, from age 13 in 1910 and left in 1915. A notable master teaching there was Michael Redgrave, the famous actor. Frank was a successful sportsman playing football, cricket, gymnastics and boxing. He went on to Merton College Oxford to read law but was called up in 1916. He received the Military Medal for his bravery at the battle of Cambrai in 1917. He continued his studies on demob and boxed for GB in the 1920 Olympics and even as a barrister he was boxing to the age of 47!
Evelyn’s sister Mabel
Evelyn’s mother Augusta
The family were there for a relatively short time. They would later live in Sussex with Augusta’s second husband, Frederic Ram following Augusta and Francis’ divorce in 1920.
Evelyn was drawn to the performing arts, She studied voice, piano, and elocution at the Royal Academy of Music, graduating with a silver medal in 1919. She had hoped for a career on the concert platform and had aspirations to become an opera singer but despite her outstanding contralto voice, she found it difficult to break into the classical music scene as a woman of mixed race, so she performed at cabaret and jazz shows as it was much more welcoming.
She also became a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an ensemble featuring West Indian and African musicians that were invited to perform at Buckingham Palace. They were a favourite of King George V and the future King Edward V11.
According to the National Archives: By the time of the 1921 Census, she was performing in The Southern Syncopated Orchestra, a band largely comprised of Caribbean, West African and African American performers. Among their highlights was playing at the Royal Albert Hall for the first anniversary of the Armistice. Her name appears as Evelyn Augusta Luke, having married Milton Alphonso Luke in 1919. 1921 was also the year the ship that she was travelling on, the SS Rowan, sunk while travelling to Ireland. It was a three vessel collision. They had wowed crowds in Glasgow before setting off for Dublin. Thirty-five people, including nine members of the orchestra, tragically lost their lives. Despite the loss of lives, the orchestra would go on to complete its delayed dates in Ireland, but it would be disbanded soon afterwards.
Evelyn’s performances took her to many places, both in Europe and beyond. She wowed crowds in America, where she performed in New York at the legendary Connie’s Inn; dazzled audiences in Europe, including at The Casino de Paris, where she succeeded Josephine Baker; and even went as far as The Harbour Bar, at the Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai.
Many of these performances were problematic. Despite Evelyn’s remarkable talent, there was a distinct pressure for Black entertainers to act out stereotypical roles for white audiences. Titles like ‘Chocolate Kiddies’, gained worldwide exposure. She felt that she had to follow suit in naming her own song and dance troupe ‘Evelyn Dove and Her Plantation Creoles’, despite her being British and growing up in a middle-class family in Battersea.
She performed around the globe from Russia to Harlem and India, and even replaced Josephine Baker at the Casino de Paris. This was when both were young and aware of their sexual allure and willing to wear exotic costumes. Josephine had become an instant success in Paris for her erotic dancing, especially known for her Danse Sauvage wearing a banana skirt. However, I am not sure that it is right to describe her as the closest rival of the great Josephine Baker. They had very different trajectories. Josephine served in the war as as a special agent, adopted her ‘rainbow family’ and was still performing when she died in 1975 and is well rememebered.
Josephine Baker
Evelyn also found work on BBC radio, appearing in numerous productions. In 1939, she was also given her own music series, ‘Sweet and Lovely’. She co-hosted ‘Rhapsody in Black’ with African American singer Elisabeth Welch in 1940, before hosting ‘Serenade in Sepia’, with Trinidadian folk singer Edric Conner in 1945; ‘Serenade’ ran for forty-five weeks, proving so popular that it eventually became a TV show. She later starred in a 1958 West End production of Langston Hughes’s Simply Heavenly.
Evelyn when she replaced Josephine Baker at The Casino de Paris.
This is from the International Musician website https://internationalmusician.org/evelyn-dove/
In the early 1920s the all-Black jazz revues that were popular in America were being recreated in Europe. In 1925 the cast of The Chocolate Kiddies, starring Adelaide Hall, was sent to Europe to give overseas audiences an opportunity to see some of America’s top Black entertainers. Evelyn was invited to join them in Britain and with the company she toured western Europe for a year, then went to Russia, playing in Leningrad and Moscow, where the audience included Stalin. After replacing Josephine Baker as the star attraction in a revue at the Casino de Paris, she travelled to New York in 1936 to appear in cabaret at the famous nightclub, Connie’s Inn. This rivalled the Cotton Club as a showcase for top Black talent.
In 1937 her performance at The Harbour Bar in Bombay, to the mainly British colonials, was greeted enthusiastically. This review appeared in the Evening News of India : ‘She is an artist of international reputation, one of the leading personalities of Europe’s entertainment world. Evelyn didn’t get just the big hand. She got an ovation, a roaring welcome.’
Evelyn’s greatest professional success was her work with the BBC. From 1939 to 1949 she took part in broadcasts of many popular music and variety programmes, including Rhapsody in Black (1940) with Elisabeth Welch. She also made over fifty broadcasts with the Trinidadian folk-singer Edric Connor in Serenade in Sepia (1945–47). This series was so popular with listeners that the BBC produced a television version, with Evelyn and Connor, in the studios at Alexandra Palace.
After leaving the BBC to work in cabaret in India, Paris, and Spain, Evelyn found it difficult to find employment when she returned to London. The outbreak of the Second World War meant a change of focus for her as performing was by then within the UK music hall circuit.
Despite her experience and talent, in 1951 she was the understudy for Muriel Smith in the role of Bloody Mary in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Then, in 1955, short of money and desperate for work, Evelyn applied for a job as a Post Office telephonist, asking the BBC for a reference. and
More television work followed and she returned to the West End musical stage, not as an understudy, but as one of the stars of Langston Hughes’s Simply Heavenly. Also in the cast was the singer and actress Isabelle Lucas. Isabelle was a Canadian actress who had come to Britain in the fifties making her first West End appearance in the show The Jazz Train in 1955 and later starred in the seminal black family sitcom The Fosters as the mother of Sonny played by Lenny Henry. She became friends with Evelyn. She recalled that Evelyn had married her second husband an American Airman who was based at Greenham Common. He was in his twenties when Evelyn was 56 in 1958 perhaps hoping to go to America with him. He was packed of to the US without her.
Isabelle recalled: ‘We became friends, but Evelyn’s life took a bad turn. Her reputation as a singer faded, and she became very ill. She lost contact with her family. Her spirit was broken.’
In 1972 Evelyn was admitted to a nursing home in Epsom, Surrey, where she died of pneumonia in 1987. After Evelyn’s funeral Isabelle went to the nursing home to collect her possessions which was a small trunk of Evelyn’s possessions which included her scrapbook, about sixty photographs, theatre programmes and magazines which featured Evelyn. Sadly, her trunk of her magnificent costumes had been thrown away. So it is thanks to Isabelle for being a friend to her in her last days that we have these photos. Isabelle was the only other person at Evelyn’s funeral besides two people from the nursing home which was a said end to her life.
Stephen located her niece Olive Dove, eldest of Frank’s three children in 2002, who was fascinated to read what he had written about Evelyn, which was unknown to her as her own father had gone to Africa after the war. She remembered Evelyn as very grand , like her mother, Augusta, that she had the most beautiful skin, the beautiful dresses she had made with wonderful boned bodices and going to see her in South Pacific. Frank’s wife Amelia was given as next of kin for Evelyn when she went into the home but had died soon afterwards.
This clip is from the Antiques Road Show where Stephen is interviewed about Evelyn. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09dfdbx
Stephen’s biography of Evelyn documents some of these more painful elements of her career and life – she spent the last fifteen years of her life in a care home, with her death in 1987 undocumented in theatrical publications such as The Stage. The book contains several photos rescued by Isabelle.
She gained a following in the 90s as her work was highlighted by journalist and broadcaster Moira Stuart in part for the way it opened up new opportunities for black women in British entertainment. We just have to keep promoting these trail blazers like Evelyn for future generations.
https://www.google.com/doodles/evelyn-doves-117th-birthday.
“Today’s Doodle celebrates the life and legacy of British star Evelyn Dove, a classically trained singer, pianist, and actress known for her powerful vocals and glamorous image. Dove became the first black singer on BBC Radio, opening doors for women of colour in the entertainment industry.”
Of course, I hope that we will have a commemorative plaque to Evelyn in Battersea as a way of remembering black artists like Evelyn who blazed a trail in the glamour world of cabaret, radio television stage and recordings but against a climate of racism.
Perhaps, Nubian Jak Community Trust will install one! It was founded in 2006 and is the only commemorative plaque and sculpture scheme focused on memorialising the historic contributions of Black and minority ethnic people in Britain and beyond. It has installed more than 60 commemorative plaques around the UK including one in Battersea to John Archer who was a Pan-Africanist and first London Black Mayor when he was elected Battersea’s Mayor in 1913.
I will certainly keep trying on Evelyn’s behalf.
Inspiring Women of Battersea Book Launch
Inspiring Women of Battersea book has been launched with a jolly do at Battersea Arts Centre, appropriately as many of the women featured would have had occasion to visit Battersea Town Hall.
The launch was a sterling team effort with Sue our Chair introducing. It was Sue who encouraged me to produce the book as she knew I had led walks, presented talks and blogged about these inspiring women. As a trustee she persuaded the Battersea Society to fund it for which I am grateful as there is no way I would have even considered it. Decades ago when I was reshearching for an exhibition on Charlotte Despard at Battersea Arts Centre by Irish Women in Wandsworth I was contacted by The Manchester University Press who were publishing a series on women’s history and contacting researchers. I had been looking into the history of Irish women as nationalists and suffragettes especially Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and was told that a biography on her was due to be published but if I had a specific angle on her they would be interested. I contacted her daughter-in-law Jeanne which was lovely but decided I was not prepared to do proper research and wasn’t cut out for book writing. Four decades later I did a walk on Notable Women of Galway which included Hanna’s grand daughter Micheline Sheehy Skeffington who was was a lecturer in NUI Galway and had taken out a gender discrimination grievance against them and won. It was much easier than writing a book/biography.
Thanks to Penny ‘The Georgians’ Corfield for agreeing to interview me not an easy task as I monologued and rambled- about myself, my life in Battersea since I first came here in 1962 including performing Sheela-na-Gig and dancing naked in Trilogy at BAC and, of course, the inspiring women of Battersea who have become like friends.
Writing their pen portraits felt like writing a Humanist funeral/memorial script which I have been doing for the past twenty five years.
Thanks to our heritage committee Chair Sue for her support for it and persuading the Battersea Society to publish it and Battersea Poet Laureate Hilaire’s expert editing and introduction. Sadly, Hilaire got covid and unable to read her two poems inspired by Charlotte Despard and artist Marie Spartali. Thanks to Viv for stepping in so gracefully to read them and to Team Battersea Heritage for organising the launch.
The poems come from London Undercurrents which is a gorgeous book jointly written with Joolz writing about Islington women, known and unknown, and Hilaire on Battersea women.
We are so lucky to have Suzanne Perkins as designer to turn files into a lovely illustrated book and delighted that Guardian journalist Zoe Williams wrote the foreword.
Some of the inspiring Women I had known about for decades eg the Lanchesters and socialist activists Charlotte Despard and Caroline Ganley (not in the book as she has her own biography Battersea’s First Lady by Sue Demont).
I blogged about them, then the first talk was Significant Women of Battersea on International Women’s Day 2018 the centenary year of women getting the vote. This turned into a walk Notable Women of Lavender Hill and finally into Inspiring Women of Battersea. The twenty women I had blogged about got whittled down to twelve addresses as some doubled up – the Lanchesters, the extraordinary Duval suffrage family of Lavender Sweep and the opera-mad, Jewish refugee rescuers Ida and Louise Cook funded by Ida’s writing for Mills and Boon as Mary Burchell.
The book is available from the Battersea Society website at £8.60 inc p&p or £7.00 from me or at Battersea Society events. It has a map designed by Karen Horan at the back so that it can serve as a trail, the first eight are around Lavender Hill which is a shorter walk! I shall probably have to do another Notable women of Lavender Hill walk even though I find I can’t walk and talk simultaneously anymore.
Hilda Hudson Mathematician and Inspiring Battersea Woman
I have been alerted to another inspiring Battersea woman by Philip Boys from the Friends of Wandsworth Common. She is mathematician Hilda Hudson 11th June 1881 -26 November 1965. She is another Hilda H with a Battersea connection. She lived in Altenburg Gardens with her family in 1901 when she would have been attending Newnham College. By then her mother had died. She went from Clapham High school with a Gilchrist scholarship in 1900 to Newnham.
Hilda Hudson was born into a family with great mathematical talents. Her father was William Henry Hoar Hudson 1838 – 1915 who had been educated at King’s College London and St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1862 he was appointed a Mathematical Lecturer at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge and later at St John’s College, Cambridge where he taught from 1869 to 1881. He was in his final year of holding the mathematics lectureship at St John’s College when his daughter Hilda Phoebe Hudson was born and shortly after the family moved to London. William Hudson was appointed Professor of Mathematics at King’s College London in 1882 holding the post until 1903. During this same period he was also Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College, London, holding this post until 1905. While he held these posts he published works such as Notes on the first principles of dynamics (1884); On the teaching of elementary algebra (1886); and On the teaching of Mathematics (1893).
Hilda’s mother was also a mathematician who had read mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, so perhaps it was not entirely surprising that William and his wife should have had children with outstanding mathematical talents who went on to study mathematics at Cambridge.
Her mother was Mary (born Turnball) and she died when Hudson and her three siblings were young. Apparently, Hilda was interested in the link between mathematics and her religious beliefs. Her father took on the parenting role and she published a simplified Euclidean proof aged ten in the journal Nature.
According to the 1901 census They lived at 15 Altenburg Gardens, William HH Hudson 62 Professor of Mathematics at King’s College London, Winifred 22 is at Newnham College, Edith 20 at Holloway College
Hilda 19 is a student at Newnham. The house has been demolished. Number 17 exists and what would have been next to is is number 9 which is one of four pastiche houses built in 2001 when the Victorian St Andrews Church was rebuilt which faces Battersea Rise. The grey door is number 17 Altenburg Gardens and the black door next to it is 9 and they were built over a hundred years apart!
Hilda had an older brother, Ronald, who was considered in his day to be the most gifted geometer in all of Cambridge. He attended a school which was run by John Condor one the campaigners for saving Wandsworth Common. His life was cut short when he died in a mountaineering accident at the age of 28, but his posthumously-published book Kummer’s Quartic Surface allows mathematicians today access to his work. He was Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge in 1898 while her sister was bracketed with the 8th Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1900. What pressure, then, on Hilda to shine when she arrived at Newnham in that same year. Like her family before, however,she rose to the challenge. At this time only the men were ranked in the Tripos Examination but women who took the examination were made aware of their place by being told they were placed between the nnth and (n+1)(n+1)st man or equal to the nnth man. The fact that Hilda’s sister was bracketed with the 8th Wrangler meaning that she had come 8th equal among the First Class students. A Wrangler is the name given to someone graduating with a first class degree in Mathematics from Cambridge University. The Senior Wrangler was the person with the highest marks, followed by the Second Wrangler and so on down the list. This method of classification lasted until 1909, since when the lists have been published in alphabetical order.
Hilda entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1900, the year in which her sister sat the mathematical Tripos. In the examinations of 1903 she went one place better than her sister when she was bracketed with the 7th Wrangler meaning that she had come 7th equal among the First Class students but, as was still the custom, her achievement was still not officially classed. In the following year, 1904, there was tragedy for the Hudson family when Hilda’s brother died in a mountaineering accident in Wales. This cut short what had promised to be a stunning mathematical career with his brilliant book Kummer’s quartic surface being published by Cambridge University Press in the year of his death.
After leaving Cambridge, Hilda went to Germany for a year spending the time studying at the University of Berlin with Schwarz, Schottky, Edmund Landau and others. According to Tony Royle It is likely that Schwarz and his colleagues were major influences in developing Hudson’s interest in con-formal transformations, a topic initially introduced to her by Arthur Berry during her time at Cambridge, and one that would eventually dominate her mathematical research. http://oro.open.ac.uk/56392/1/TONY%20ROYLE%20HISTORIA%20ARTICLE%20.pdf
She returned to Cambridge in 1905 when she was appointed as a lecturer at Newnham College. After holding this position for five years she was appointed Associate Research Fellow at Newnham. In 1912 the International Congress of Mathematicians Hudson was Associate Research Fellow at Newnham College until the end of the academic year 1912-1913, but she spent this last academic year at Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s college founded in 1885 in Pennsylvania in the United States. Charlotte Angas Scott, who had studied under Cayley and shared Hudson’s interests in algebraic geometry, was Head of the Mathematics department there. It was a remarkably productive period for Hudson who published her first paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society in 1911, followed by three papers in 1912, and six papers on topics such as Cremona transformations, nodal curves, pinch-points, and algebraic surfaces in 1913.
After spending the academic year 1912-13 at Bryn Mawr, Hudson returned to England. Trinity College Dublin awarded her an ad eundam MA (a process often known as incorporation) and later a DSc, in 1906 and 1913, respectively. She was appointed as a lecturer at West Ham Technical Institute where she worked for four years. One interesting monograph which she published during this time was Ruler and Compass in 1916. This was a work ]:… in which [Hudson] included a lot of elegant geometry in an exposition of the range and limitations of ruler and compass constructions.
She was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of mathematicians in 1912 at Cambridge UK.[2] Although Laura Pisati who had been invited to the 1908 ICM, but had died just before the start of the conference, so Hudson became the first female invited speaker at an ICM
World War I started during her years at West Ham Technical Institute where she prepared students for London University degrees. Although inspiring to the mathematically gifted, she was not an especially successful teacher and, while the War was still underway, she joined the Civil Service to undertake work for the Air Ministry. The government had been actively running recruitment drives to draw women into the vacuum created in the traditionally male-dominated professions by conscription, which had been introduced for men in 1916. She was immediately drafted into the Admiralty to mentor a group of women that would become an essential cog in the wheel of the Stressing Section of the Structures office. She was slightly older and more experienced than most of her female colleagues and had the presence and work ethic to set a fine example, soon earning herself the title of Sub-section Director. She also demonstrated her mathematical flexibility, temporarily casting aside her passion for, and expertise in, geometry to enter the applied world of moments, stresses and strains. In addition to acting as the linchpin between the key men in the department (Berry, Pritchard and Pippard) and the women assigned to assist them. Tony Royle’s article has interesting sections on the other women in the team Letitia Chitty and Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave.
It was after the war that Hilda published her two notable pieces. Already while at West Ham Institute she had worked on applied probability problems, and now while working for the Air Ministry she published two papers in 1920, one on The strength of lateral loaded struts in The Aeroplane, the other on Incidence wires in the Aeronautical Journal.
In 1919, after the war had ended, Hilda was appointed as a technical assistant at Parnell and Company in Bristol. After two years she retired from this position to devote herself to writing the treatise Cremona transformations in plane and space which was published in 1927. She dedicated this work to her brother who had been so tragically killed in 1904.
John Semple describes this book: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hudson/
This was indeed her magnum opus, the culminating achievement of many years of scholarly research, in which she gathered into one connected account all the essential elements of what had long been a fashionable field of research and supplemented it with an impressive bibliography (37 pages and 417 items) covering sixty to seventy years of publications on the subject.
Hilda published work with Ronald Ross on epidemiology and the measurement of disease spread. Sir Ronald Ross 1857 – 1932 was a British medical doctor who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria, becoming the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. “The classical susceptible-infectious-recovered model, originated from the seminal papers of Ross and Ross and Hudson in 1916-1917. In his preface to Part II Ross wrote:
In June last, the Royal Society was kind enough to give a Government Grant for providing me with
assistance in order to complete the paper, and for carrying on further studies upon the subject; and Miss Hilda P. Hudson, M.A., Sc.D., was appointed for the work from May 1, 1916. The continuation of the
paper has accordingly been written in conjunction with her; and I should like to take the opportunity to express my obligations to her for her valuable assistance, especially in regard to Part I I I. The maths she provided still underlies the modelling of epidemic diseases which is ever topical. It is interesting to note that Wandsworth connection as The Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, founded in 1926 and established at Bath House, a grand house with keeper’s lodge and large grounds adjacent to Tibbet’s Corner at Putney Heath. This was later incorporated into the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This is why a primary school nearby is named after him which I had wondered about when I worked in adult education in the 90s nearby with the late Teri Riley at the Wandsworth Centre in Southfields.
During the years in which she was writing her major treatise Hilda returned to publishing on Cremona transformations and algebraic surfaces. There had been a special meeting of a committee of the
Accademia dei Lincei, chaired by Luigi Cremona (1830-1903), whose birational transformations inspired Hudson’s defining work. Sadly, Cremona’s death coincided with Hilda completing her degree, so he would never witness her post-war homage.
She essentially gave up publishing mathematics after her treatise appeared in print, except for one notable exception which was an article on Analytic geometry, curve and surface in the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1929.
According to John Semple: Miss Hudson was a distinguished mathematician, of great erudition and integrity; and she was also, throughout her long life, a woman of high ideals and standards. She will long be remembered by the mathematical world for her contributions to geometry and by Newnham and Cambridge as one of their distinguished alumni.
where she prepared students for London University degrees. Although inspiring to the mathematically gifted, she was not an especially successful teacher.
In 1917 Hudson took a wartime civil service post, heading an Air Ministry subdivision doing aeronautical engineering research. Her work on the application of mathematical modelling to aircraft design was pioneering, and a tribute to her versatility. She continued this line of research with Parnell & Co. of Bristol until 1921, and then retired from salaried work to write the treatise for which she is remembered, Cremona Transformations in Plane and Space (1927).
Although she published several papers in applied mathematics (1917–20) and a well-received monograph, Ruler and Compasses (1916), most of Hudson’s work was in the area of pure mathematics concerned with algebraic surfaces and plane curves. Cremona transformation, an analytical technique for studying the geometry of these, was her special interest. Though now displaced by powerful tools of abstract algebra, it was then a subject of considerable activity. Her exceptional geometrical intuition led her by basically elementary methods to solutions of quite difficult problems (reported in seventeen articles, 1911–29), and her much-quoted treatise, the culmination of nearly two decades of scholarly work, presented a unified account of the major elements of the field, supplemented with an extensive annotated bibliography.
According to the Oxford A small woman, light of step and bright-eyed behind thick-lensed glasses, Hilda Hudson enjoyed hockey and swimming when young. Her life was simple, almost austere, though she had many friends. She never married. Deeply religious, she sought to unite her intellectual with her spiritual concerns, and increasingly found in mathematics an unending revelation of the glory of God. She was long a supporter of the Student Christian Movement, and honorary finance secretary of its auxiliary movement in 1927–39.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of National biography www.oxforddnb.com › view › 10 Hilda was a small woman, light of step and bright-eyed behind thick-lensed glasses, Hilda Hudson enjoyed hockey and swimming when young. Her life was simple, almost austere, though she had many friends. She never married. Deeply religious, she sought to unite her intellectual with her spiritual concerns, and increasingly found in mathematics an unending revelation of the glory of God. She was long a supporter of the Student Christian Movement, and honorary finance secretary of its auxiliary movement in 1927–39. She wrote: “To all who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology”.
As a distinguished mathematician she was one of the few women of her time to serve on the council of the London Mathematical Society, and in 1919 she was appointed OBE for her war work for pioneering the mathematical modelling of air flows over aeroplane wings.
Early onset of severe arthritis left Hilda Hudson progressively more disabled; latterly she moved into the Anglican St Mary’s Convent and Nursing Home in Chiswick, where she died on 26 November 1965, at the age of eighty-four.
There is very little about her private life and the long gap between her publishing in 1929 to her death in 1965. I really would like to know what happened to her in the intervening 36 years. It is mysterious.
Three Battersea Women Authors
There are three women authors featured in my Notable Women of Lavender Hill walks. Pamela Hansford Johnson and Ethel Mannin were born in Battersea and Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her Booker Prize winning novel Offshore, which is about houseboat dwellers in Chelsea Reach, Cheyne Walk, whilst living in Almeric Road SW11 with her daughter.
They are included in my book Inspiring Women of Battersea which will be launched at Battersea Arts Centre on 7th June 2022 as part of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival.
As a funeral celebrant one becomes intensely focused on the person being celebrated and remembered and they become like your new precious friend whilst you are researching and writing about them. Likewise with my Notable Women of Lavender Hill I am quite proprietorial and feel like I am their agent promoting and representing them! So, I would like to introduce you to these three former neighbours who happen to be authors. One has a Battersea Society plaque and the other two were not successful in the English Heritage plaques scheme which is a lottery. An application is put before the panel which meet three times a year and those not chosen are simply told interesting but apply again in ten years. They only unveil twelve each year. Although women are 50% of those considered by the panel each year they will never mange to catch up as in 2016 women were only 13% represented with plaques in London. I am now convinced that we need to have a women’s blue plaques scheme like the Nubian Jak scheme which was set up to memorialise Black and ethnic minority people in plaques and sculpture as they have been overlooked because white men predominate.
I have blogged on each of these women authors and attaching the link to the posts and it is their connection with Battersea that I am interested in and with Ethel Mannin also her Galway/Connemara link.
The first is Ethel Mannin 1900-1984. I had heard of her as one of her novels was popular in Ireland because it was a about a priest! Ethel was a popular novelist, travel writer, political activist and socialist born on 6 October 1900 in 28 Garfield Road off Lavender Hill which is in Battersea but online articles always claim she was born in Clapham. She was of Irish descent and had inherited her socialist values from her father Bob who was a postal worker. She was a prodigious author of over a 100 books! https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/ethel-mannin-1900-1984/#jp-carousel-13207
This working class self-educated woman was a lifelong political maverick, a pacifist, an anarchist and an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause. She was twice married and had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell who featured in Impressions as Portrait of a First Class Mind. These affairs were between husbands and this time and her views came back to haunt her later.
After leaving school she found employment as a typist for the advertising agency, Charles F. Higham Ltd and was soon promoted to copywriter. Having made connections with publishing she decided that she would aim to write two books a year one fiction and the other on travel and topics reflecting her interests and stages in life. Her first book launched her career. I bought it and discovered exactly where she lived and was brought up just off Lavender Hill.
She wrote a piece about Lavender Hill on a Saturday night, when she was in a little wooden pushcart, in her first memoirs Confessions and Impressions written in 1930. This is the only book of hers that I have read so far.
She talked of the ‘flairs on the street stalls, red as fire against the night-dark sky…..The crowds were more dense too which was an added excitement… the yellow glare of lights from the shop fronts, the warm smell of the people pressed close together, the bunches of wallflowers stacked on barrows, the pungent smell of oranges and the great glowing blaze of their colour, the bunches of grapes, white and black suspended like Japanese lanterns from the awnings, the white nakedness of the scrubbed celery heads gleaming wantonly in the flicker and shadow, the rhythmic rows of shining apples And the black shawled gipsy-looking women who sold these things and their rough men-folk and brass earrings in their ears… infinitely romantic….clutching string bags costers shouting prices, a din of traffic… myself safe being pushed through it all like a dexterously manipulated ship on a dark sea, in my little chair on wheels.’
There was a lovely post office opposite the library on Lavender Hill which got demolished.
Her father was a fan of John Burns MP and she writes about walking on Clapham Common with her Dad as a young girl and them meeting Burns with his son. And coincidentally she also has a chapter on actors Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton – Portrait of a Strange Pair. Elsa went on to become Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 when they had moved to Hollywood. She probably didn’t know that Elsa also grew up nearby in 27 Leathwaite Road (as it wasn’t mentioned in her interview with them) and also got excited at encountering Burns who lived on Northside. Of course, Elsa is one of my Notable Women of Lavender Hill. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
She attended Wix’s Lane School Primary saying it had litlle connection with real life, she failed to get a scholarship to secondary school but had begun writing stories and the first of these appeared in the Lady’s Companion in 1910. In 1915 she won a scholarship to attend a commercial school.
‘At sixteen I was writing advertisements, running two house-organs – business magazines – and when I was seventeen was publishing my own stories, articles, verses, in a monthly magazine which Higham bought and left to me to produce.” Her employer was to have a great influence on her career.
She soon married became John Porteous, the general manager at Highams and they married in 1919 and soon after gave birth to her only child Jean. She began to work from home writing advertisements and editing journals. Mannin was a supporter of progressive education and sent her daughter to Summerhill School.
In 1929 Ethel and John Porteous separated and that’s when she bought she bought Oak Cottage Wimbledon. In 1938 she married the Quaker pacifist writer Reginald Reynolds. He was a critic of British Imperialism in India, collaborated with Gandhi for his 1937 work The White Sahibs in India and was the New Statesman’s weekly satirical poet.
In the years after 1945, Ethel traveled around the globe for material for new books. She first spent time in Ireland and writing of Connemara Journal (1947). Ethel lived near Clifden in the late 1930s and early 1940s. My eldest sister Ida remembered our mother pointing out Ethel’s cottage on car trip.
Her other Irish connection was her affair with WB Yeats in the thirties, apparently [Norman] Haire had enlisted Ethel specifically to reassure Yeats about the success of the Steinach operation. Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: Secret Life of W. B. Yeats writes: ‘Ethel Mannin was a rationalist and skeptical, he mystical and credulous. … She was left-wing, his leanings were firmly the other way. But that hardly mattered when, as a companion, she was brilliant, fun, and full of the salty talk that Yeats adored.
A stay in war-ravaged occupied Germany resulted in German Journey (1948), while a number of other books were based on visits to Brittany, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, and Sweden.
Ethel was a woman with so many facets and phases to her life politically and as a writer. Her earlier life which helped inform her political views, early motherhood, her lifestyle and affairs in her thirties, her anarchist phase, her marriage to a pacifist Quaker, her socialism, Spanish civil war, the travel after the war and all the time churning out books and it seemed to have become a way of life for her. She could write about her cat, children’s books, she could speak at meetings, join Reg in his work, writing magazine articles. She must have spent so much of her time at her typewriter in her study in Oak Cottage.
At the end of her writing career, when she was in her 70s, she moved to “Overhill”, Shaldon, Devonshire, in the 1960s – a house found for her by Jean to be near her. In 1976, she published her last novel, The Late Miss Guthrie. The next year, she published her final book, a last volume of autobiography, Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977)
I admire her for her political convictions, for her self belief, her strong work ethic and prodigious output but I am not sure I would have liked her!
Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912-1981) was the author of 27 novels, a critic and a Proustian scholar.
She was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. The New York Times obituary described her as ‘one of England’s best-known novelists.’ Anthony Burgess, the novelist and critic, once described Miss Johnson’s novels as ‘witty, satirical and deftly malicious.’
As a child Pamela lived at 53 Battersea Rise SWII. Her absentee father was a colonial administrator who worked on the Baro-Kano Railway. He died suddenly when she was 12, leaving Pamela and her mother penniless. Her mother had been an actor and singer with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Their home had been bought in the 1880s by Pamela’s grandfather, who was Sir Henry Irving’s Treasurer. She described it in the first of the autobiographical essays in her book Important to Me as ‘a large brick terrace house’, filled with memorabilia reflecting the family’s theatrical background. By the time she was born ‘the railway had come, and the houses had been built up right over the hills between it and us. Not pretty, I suppose.’
Pamela attended Clapham County Girls Grammar School, where she excelled at English, art history, and drama. She left school at 16, took a secretarial course, and worked for several years at the Central Hanover Bank. She said ‘to a creative writer, a university education would have been nothing but a hindrance.’
She began her literary career by writing poems and was briefly engaged to Dylan Thomas. Her first coming-of-age novel, This Bed Thy Centre, was published in 1935 when she was 22 and is set around Battersea Rise and Clapham Common. The area has a Woolworth’s, a draper’s, a hairdresser offering ‘Perms from One Guinea’, and a set of traffic lights which, recently installed, are an innovation and a talking-point. There are cafes where you can enjoy ‘a hearty meal of kidneys on toast’ and the local workers push barrows, pull pints or work shifts in the candle factory.
In 1936 she married an Australian journalist, Gordon Stewart, with whom she had two children. She subsequently married C.P. Snow and had a son with him.They became a celebrated literary couple, travelling widely, fêted in academic circles in the USA and the USSR, but also seen as pretentious. Pamela remained a committed Labour Party member. She was also an influential and powerful figure in the world of literature. She was part of the British Council’s networks and a regular panel member on the acclaimed radio programme The Critics.
In 1957, dining with her second husband, C. P. Snow, at the Governor General’s residence in Malta, she recorded in her diary an ‘exceedingly glamorous’ evening; ‘lights in trees, beautiful garden—starry night—oh, a long way from Clapham Junction’. When visiting Eton after Philip, her son by Snow, had won a scholarship there, she observed: ‘O, a long way from Clapham Junction!’
The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy (Night and Silence, Who Is Here) and high comedy (The Unspeakable Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of cruelty An Error of Judgement. Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981. She was a critic as well as a novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her Six Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading Proustian scholar. She wrote a work of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967). She received honorary degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
There have been two recent biographies of Pamela Hansford Johnson. Wendy Pollard’s Pamela Hansford Johnson: Her Life, Work and Times was published in 2014, with the approval and cooperation of her children, using unpublished diaries and letters. In 2017 Deirdre David published Pamela Hansford Johnson: A Writing Life.
A Battersea Society plaque at 53 Battersea Rise was unveiled by her daughter Lady Lindsay Avebury.
Penelope Fitzgerald was an English Booker Prize -winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer.
In 2008, The Times included her in a list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. In 2012 , The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower one of “the ten best historical novels.
She was one of the most distinctive and elegant voices in contemporary British fiction. Her novels, spare, immaculate masterpieces divide into two sections; an earlier group loosely based on her own experiences, and a later group, in which she moves to other countries and periods. In 1979, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore.
She was educated at Wycombe Abbey and Somerville College, Oxford, to which she won a scholarship. Her father was son of the Bishop of Manchester, her mother the daughter Bishop of Lincoln.
There is a great lengthy review of her http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/04/victory-penelope-fitzgerald/ written by Alan Hollingsworth ‘Just before Penelope Knox went down from Oxford with a congratulatory First in 1938, she was named a “Woman of the Year” in Isis, the student paper. She wrote a few paragraphs about her university career, dwelling solely on what had gone wrong. She’d come to Oxford expecting poets and orgies, and had seen few of the one and none of the other…..I have been reading steadily for seventeen years; when I go down I want to start writing.”
There would be no biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, of course, if she hadn’t done so, and it’s part of the unusual interest of her story that the promised start was deferred by nearly forty years. She published her first book, a biography of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, when she was fifty-eight; her first novel appeared when she was sixty. She was, as she said, “an old writer who had never been a young one.”
She married Desmond Fitzgerald, an Irish soldier who she met at a wartime party, in 1941. He became an alcoholic. “A profile of Penelope Fitzgerald in these years,” Lee writes in a pivotal passage, “might describe her as a middle-aged teacher, recovering from a traumatic period of homelessness and deprivation, living in a dreary council estate in south London with a disgraced alcoholic husband.” But this, Lee cautions, was “only the bleakest version of the story. Something else was bubbling under the surface.”
In the early 1950s she and her husband lived in Hampstead. Soon afterwards Desmond was disbarred for “forging signatures on cheques that he cashed at the pub.” The end of his legal career led to a life of poverty for the Fitzgeralds; at times they were even homeless and lived for four months in a homeless centre. They lived for eleven years in a council flat. To provide for her family during the 1960s Fitzgerald taught at the Italia Conti Academy, a drama school, and at Queens Gate School where her pupils included Camilla Shand Duchess of Cornwall.)She also taught “at a posh crammer where her pupils included Anna Wintour and Helena Bonham Carter. She continued to teach until she was seventy years old. She also worked in a bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. For a time she lived in Battersea on a houseboat that sank twice and later with her daughter in Almeric Road.
She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of the artist Burne-Jones.This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a joint biography of her father and uncles in which she never mentions herself by name. Later in 1977 she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankamun mania earlier in the 1970s. The novel was written to amuse her terminally ill husband, who died in 1976.
She worked for the BBC during the war and began writing in the 1960s, although her first novel, The Golden Child, was not published until 1977. Her early fiction drew on her own life and working experiences, including a period running a bookshop, which inspired the Booker-shortlisted The Bookshop (1978); time spent living on a barge on the Thames at Chelsea Reach, Cheyne Walk which she wrote about in Offshore (1979), winner of the Booker Prize; and her experiences teaching at the Italia Conti stage school in London, which gave her the material for At Freddie’s, published in 1982.
She was regarded as an oddity and an outlier when she won the Booker. They didn’t know what to make of this other worldly older woman novelist. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady, but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. Of the three of these women novelist she is undoubtedly my favourite. As she lived yards from where I lived can wonder if I ever passed her in the street, waiting at a bus stop or in Arding and Hobbs. The application by the owners of 25 Almeric Road to English Heritage plaque scheme was unsuccessful – it is such a lottery and they suggest to try again in ten years! I do hope that she will receive a Battersea Society plaque.
North Battersea plaques walk
There are 17 EH/LCC plaques in Battersea – all commemorating men. There are seven blue plaques in north Battersea. The walk I have devised begins with the Short Brothers aviators at arch 75 Queens Circus, Sean O’Casey playwright at 49 Overstrand Mansions, John Archer Pan-Africanist and first Black Mayor in London 55 Brynmaer Road, Donald Swann musician 13 Albert Bridge Road, author Norman Douglas 63 Albany Mansions Albert Bridge Road, Charles Sargeant Jagger war memorial sculptor 67 Albert Bridge Road, Edward Wilson ornitholigist and arctic explorer 42 Vicarage Crescent and Wihelmina Stirling founder of the De Morgan Foundation at Old Battersea House Vicarage Crescent whose Battersea Society plaque is due to be unveiled September 24th 2022.
The Short Brothers
Oswald Eustace and Horace . The Short Bros early aviation history in Battersea began when Oswald and Eustace rented arches 75 and 81 from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in 1906. The plaque reads THE SHORT BROTHERS HORACE 1872-1917 EUSTACE 1875-1932 OSWALD 1883-1969 Aeronautical Engineers worked in arches 75 and 81 The arches are behind the petrol filling station on Queenstown Road roundabout opposite the Rosery Gate into Battersea Park. They had set up Short Brothers in 1897 when they purchased a used coal gas-filled balloon, with the intention to develop and construct other such balloons. The arches were situated next to the Battersea gas-works, making it easier to get gas for their balloons. known as “The Field”, for balloon launches. They were appointed as the Aeronautical Engineers to the Aero Club and made balloons for many well-known early aviators, a contract from the British Indian Army for three balloons, built the entry flown by Charles Rolls for the first Gordon Bennett international balloon race, began aeroplane construction when built a glider for the aviator and later cabinet minister J Moore-Brabazon, to his own designs.
When the American aircraft pilots Orville and Wilbur Wright came to Europe to demonstrate in Le Mans in France in 1908, Oswald exclaimed “this is the finish of ballooning; we must begin building aeroplanes at once, and we can’t do it without Horace.” who was their brilliant engineer elder brother. They obtained the British rights to build copies of the Wright design thus becoming the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world to undertake volume aircraft production.
They soon had to move to expand their aircraft production although their ballooning continued until 1919. They went on to become a world-famous name in aviation. Short Brothers was bought by Bombardier in 1989, and now owned by Spirit Aerosystems and is the largest manufacturing concern in Northern Ireland. Their plaque on arch 75 was unveiled by Jenny Body OBE, the first female President of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Sean O’Casey 1880 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist.
Here is the link to my blog on himhttps://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/sean-ocasey-battersea-plaque-man/
He lived at 49 Overstrand Mansions Prince of Wales Drive.
His plaque reads: SEAN O’CASEY 1880-1964 Playwright lived here at flat No 49. O’Casey was a committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes, best known for his first three plays – Shadow of a Gunman (1923) revolutionary politics on the working class people of Dublin, Juno and Paycock (1924), deals with the Civil War and The Plough and the Stars (1926). dealt and the Easter Rising and depicting the lives of the slum dwellers.Silver Tassie In 1929, his great anti-war play showing the devastating impact of WW1 on an Irish footballer and his friends.
He was the last of five surviving children out of thirteen of Michael and Susan Casey, staunch Protestants both, father worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions on Townsend Street. His father died when Sean was 6, leaving the family impoverished and living a peripatetic life thereafter. As a child, he suffered from poor eyesight, which interfered somewhat with his education, but O’Casey taught himself to read and write by the age of thirteen. He joined the Gaelic League in 1906, learned to speak Irish, changed his name to Sean O’Casey, learned to play the Uileann Pipes joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, became an ardent socialist, was general secretary of the Irish Citizen Army, and, began to write. He became involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union influenced by labour leader Jim Larkin. He lived through troubled and turbulent times; the 1913 Lock-out and Strike, the 1916 Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War. He became disillusioned with the Irish nationalist movement because its leaders put nationalist ideals before socialist ones.
Having suffered a number of personal attacks due to the content of the third, he left Dublin for London to receive the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and also give publicity for The Plough and the Stars. It was during casting he met and later married Eileen Carey and married Eileen Carey in 1927 and they moved to Battersea. Though consistently published, he struggled to match the quality of the output of his earlier career in Ireland and regularly upset audiences with the overtly Socialist content of his writing. He eventually left Battersea in 1938 and died in Torquay in 1964.
His daughter Shivaun, who became an actress and director can clearly remember the moment when she realised just how much some Irish people hated her father. It was 1955 and the 15-year-old had made her first trip to Ireland for the premiere of Sean’s new clerical drama, The Bishop’s Bonfire. “Get out, ye dirty Protestants!””It was a very exciting evening,” recalls Shivaun
The chapter heading on their life in Battersea is entitled A Drive of Snobs in which he writes scathingly about what he perceived as English class snobbery.
The O’ Caseys moved to Totnes Devon in 1938 with his two sons Breon and Niall,. on the advice of their friend George Bernard Shaw who suggested that the boys should attend Dartington Hall School. Among letters of congratulations were Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw and future British prime minister Harold Macmillan.
Niall tragically died of Leukaemia, aged 21. His son Breon became an artist, a jeweller, weaver, etcher, printmaker, engraver, painter and sculptor who had been apprenticed to Barbara Hepworth
Sean wrote a further 15 plays. These, however, were less realist and more symbolic and expressionist..Sean died aged 84 in 1964 was cremated at Golders’ Green Crematorium while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was filming ‘Young Cassidy’ (1965), a movie based on his autobiography,staring Rod Taylor. Shivaun herself had a cameo role as Lady Gregory’s maid in it and very recently his great grand daughter Agnes O Casey, Shivaun’s granddaughter is starring in Ridley Road. So the theatrical gene continues.
John Richard Archer (8 June 1863 – 14 July 1932) was elected Mayor of Battersea in 1913, becoming the first black mayor in London. He was a Pan African activist.
Plaque at 55 Brynmaer Road his former home. English Heritage plaque was unveiled in November 2013
He was a notable Pan –Africanist and the founding president of the African Progress Union. He was born in Liverpool in June 1863 to a Barbadian ship’s steward and an Irishwoman Mary Burns He moved to Battersea with his Canadian wife Margaret in the early 1890s. Margaret appears to have died in the late 1910s as Archer married Bertha White in 1923; there were no children of either union. Archer had many different jobs – the 1901 census records that he was a professional singer, and he may also have been a student of medicine.
Archer entered local politics after attending the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900, where he met leading members of the African diaspora. In 1918 he became the first president of the African Progress Union working for “advanced African ideas in liberal education”. In 1919 he was a British delegate to the Pan African Congress in Paris and two years later, chaired the Pan-African Congress in London.
He was elected councillor in 1906 and when he was nominated for Progressive candidate for Mayor in Battersea in November, 1913 the newspapers made something of a fuss, as the first Catholic and Irish nationalist mayor Thomas Brogan, had been John Archer’s mentor prior to his election -both had Irish mothers. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/black-atlantic/information/john_archer/
In 1918 he was election agent for Charlotte Despard. In 1922, he gave up his council seat to act as Labour Party election agent for Shapurji Saklatvala a Communist Party activist standing for parliament in North Battersea. He convinced the Labour Party to endorse Saklatvala and he was duly elected one of the first Indian MPs in Britain. He and Saklatvala continued to work together, winning again in 1924 until the Communist and Labour parties split fully. In the 1929 , Archer was agent for the official Labour candidate who beat Saklatvala. He felt somewhat betrayed by Saklatvala who wanted to eliminate the Labour Party!
Archer served as a governor of Battersea Polytechnic, president of the Nine Elms Swimming Club, chair of the Whitley Council Staff Committee and a member of the Wandsworth Board of Guardians.
He was again elected in 1931, for the Nine Elms ward. At the time of his death in 1932, he was deputy leader of Battersea Council. His legacy continues in Archer House, part of the Battersea Village estate, constructed in the 1930s. There is a John Archer Way SW18 and in Liverpool, a John Archer Hall. In 2004, John Archer was chosen for the 100 Great Black Britons list. In 2010, Archer was commemorated with Nubian Jak Community Trust plaque on his photographic premises in Battersea Park Road directly behind his home. In April 2013 Archer was one of six people selected by the Royal Nail for the “Great Britons” commemorative stamp issue.n March 2018 the Ark Academy Network renamed High View Primary school in Battersea as Ark John Archer Academy
I
Donald Swann Ibrahim Swann 1923 –1994) plaque is at 13 Albert Bridge Road.
He was was a Welsh-born composer, musician, singer and entertainer. He was one half of, writing and performing comic songs with Michael Flanders
His father was a Russian doctor of English descent ( Muscovy Company mother, Russian nurse from Turkmenistan,refugees from the Revolution. His great-grandfather, emigrated in 1840 and married the daughter of the horologer to the tsars. The family moved to London, where Swann attended Dulwich College Prep and Westminster College was at the latter that he first met Flanders. In 1940 they staged a revue called Go To It. went their separate ways during WW2, later to establish a musical partnership, Flanders providing the words and Swann the music.
He registered as a conscientious objector and served with the Friends Ambulance in Egypt, Palestine and Greece.
After the war, Swann returned to Oxford to read Russian and Greek. Married twice. his second wife was the art historian Alison Smith. Donald continued to give solo concerts and to write for other singers. He also formed the Swann Singers and toured with them in the 1970s.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, performing in various combinations with singers and colleagues, then ‘discovered’ Victorian poetry and composed some of his most profound and moving music to the words of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and hymn tunes others. which appear in modern standard hymn books. It is estimated that Swann wrote or set to music nearly 2,000 songs. For many years Donald spent long retreats with the Quaker community at Pendle Hill, Philadelphia.
In 1992 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died at trinity Hospice in South London on 23 March 1994.
On 12th October 2013 The Battersea Society unveiled plaque hosted by Alison, his archivist Leon Berger and his daughter Natasha Etheridge, also present was composer Joseph Horowitz.
In November 2021 the Battersea Society held a delightful An Evening with Flanders and Swann with an exclusive performance by actor and pianist Stefan Bednarczyk at St Mary’s Church.
Norman Douglas 1868 –1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing. Unfortunately, he is now remembered as a paedophile.
He was born in Thuringen Austria, His mother was Vanda von Poellnitz. His father was John Sholto Douglas (1838–1874), manager of a cotton mill, who died in a hunting accident when Douglas was about six. He spent the first years of his life on the family estate, Villa Falkenhorst, in Thüringen. He was brought up mainly at Tilquhillie Deeside, his paternal home in Scotland, educated at Yarlet Hall and Uppingham School in England, and then at a grammar school in Karlshrue. He started in the diplomatic service in 1894 based in St Petersburg, but was placed on leave following a sexual scandal. In 1897 he bought a villa (Villa Maya) in Posillipo, suburb of Naples.
The next year he married a cousin Elizabeth Louisa FitzGibbon (two children, Elsa was two months pregnant and the marriage was arranged very quickly. They lived in Italy, where their first child, Archie, was born, and a second son, Robin, the following year. Douglas obtained a divorce in 1904 on the grounds of Elsa’s adultery and gained custody of their two sons.
He moved to Capri, began dividing his time between the Villa Daphne there and London, and became a more committed writer. Nepenthe, the fictional island setting of his novel South Wind (1917), is Capri in light disguise, worked for The English Review, met DH Lawrence through this connection. D. H. based a character in his novel Aaron’s Rod (1922) on Douglas, which led to a falling out between the two writers.
Douglas sent his sons to boarding-school in England. In January 1908 he moved to London where he successfully contesting his wife’s attempt to regain custody of her children on the grounds of her husband’s paedophilia. According to Mark Holloway, the author of Norman Douglas : A biography (1976), his wife claimed in court that he was involved in a “rather faunesque pursuit of young boys”.
In 1916, British prosecutors charged Douglas with sexually assaulting a sixteen-year-old boy, and in 1917 he was charged with indecent assault of two boys, one a 10-year-old and the other aged 12. Douglas was granted bail and fled the country for Capri, Italy. He was also forced to flee Florence in 1937 following allegations that he raped a 10-year-old girl.
Further scandals led Douglas to leave Italy for the South of France in 1937. Following the collapse of France in 1940 Douglas left the Riviera and made a circuitous journey to London, where he lived from 1942 to 1946. He returned to Capri in 1946 and was made a citizen of the island. His circle of acquaintances included the writer Graham Greene, the composer Shaourj Sorabji and the food writer Elizabeth David. Gracie Fields said she moved to Capri after reading his book.
https://evelynwaughsociety.org/2019/norman-douglas-forgotten-author/ There are other alleged child abusers who have died and whose works, once considered great, have faded into obscurity, in no small part because it is almost impossible to memorialize them without creating the impression of condoning their behaviour. The writer Norman Douglas is a prime example. When the truth about his sexual relations with children was fully exposed after his death he became an impossible figure to memorialize. The fact that Douglas has been ignored by biographers may have more to do with the fact that he was an unpleasant or, in the end, uninteresting person.
Douglas died in Capri, apparently after deliberately overdosing himself on drugs after a long illness (see Impossible Woman: Memoirs of Dottoressa Moore, ed. Greene). His last words are reputed to have been: “Get those fucking nuns away from me.
Charles Sargeant Jagger MC (Military Cross, ARA (17 December 1885 – 16 November 1934) sculptor who, following active service in the WW1, sculpted many works on the theme of war.
He is best known for his war memorials, especially the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner and the Great Western Railway War Memorial in Paddingron Station and a designed several other monuments around Britain and other parts of the world. The plaque erected in 2000 by English Heritage is at his home at 67 Albert Bridge Road. His biography is by Ann Compton. The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger.
Here is a link to my blog on him as he featured in a talk I gave for the Battersea Society on The Battersea Plaque Men alongside HM Bateman cartoonist 40 Nightingale Lane SW12 and artist and Sean O’Casey playwright 49 Overstrand Mansions https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2022/03/18/charles-sargeant-jagger-battersea-plaque-man/
Charles was the son of a colliery manager, Enoch Jagger and his wife Mary Sergeant and born in Kilnhurst South Yorkshire and was educated at Sheffield Royal Grammar School. His older sister Edith and brother David became artists and all studied together at Sheffield Technical School of Art.
There is also a plaque which was unveiled in his home village, Kilnhurst by the Rotherham District Civic Society in October 2018
A fascinating article written in Studio International. In 1915. Rising British Sculptor: Charles Sargeant Jagger written by I G Allister
He wrote: His first introduction to plastic art was an incident of his childhood which stands out in his memory very clearly. Wandering with his father on Whitby Sands one day they came across a man modelling a sphinx in the clay indigenous to the locality, and as they watched the process the idea arose in the boy’s mind that he must be a sculptor, and he distinctly remembers the thrill of happiness which accompanied a decision from which he never once wavered. His school-days however were an ordeal to him,
At age 14 in 1889 he became an apprentice metal engraver with the Sheffield firm Mappin and Webb who made beautifully crafted silverware and fine jewellery and had Royal warrants and commissions from Monarchs around the world, In 1887 Granted a Royal Warrant as Silversmiths to Queen Victoria.
He studied at the Sheffield School of Art, learnt drawing, then modelling in the daytime, and taught drawing at evening-classes, producing some remarkable work such as Man and the Maelstrom and Prometheus Bound, both of which were created before he was eighteen.
He won a scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art 1908-11 under Edouard Lantieri. National Art Training School at its new home in South Kensington.
In 1914 he won the British Prix de Rome scholarship in sculpture but couldn’t take up because of the war, he decided to enlist in the Artist Rifles instead. Other members of the regiment included Edward Thomas, Nash brothers, John Lavery and in 1915 he was commissioned in the Worsestshire Regiment. He served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and was wounded three times.
On 5th November 1915, he was shot through the left shoulder and evacuated first to a hospital in Malta and then back to England. Once recovered he married Violet Constance Smith in 1916 whom he met in 1911. Charles paid for singing lessons for her and she went on to become a concert singer and pianist they had a son Cedric and they divorced in 1924. He was sent out to the Western Front where he was wounded again in 1918.
Whilst convalescing from war wounds in 1919, he began work on No Man’s Land, a low relief which after being cast in bronze it was presented to the Tate in 1923.
Jagger’s sculptor style tended towards realism, especially his portrayal of soldiers, his figures were rugged and workman-like.
Royal Artillery Memorial (1921–25) at Hyde Park Corner in London is one of his best-known works. It features a giant sculpture of a howitzer surrounded by four bronze soldiers and stone relief scenes, and is dedicated to casualties in the British Royal Regiment of Artillery the war. When Jagger was commissioned he remarked to the Daily Express the “experience in the trenches persuaded me of the necessity for frankness and truth”.
He completed war memorials over the next seven years Manchester Britannia Hotel, in (1921); Southsea (1921); Bedford (1921); Great Western Railway War Memorial (1922); Brimington (1922); Royal Artilley (1921–5); Anglo Belgian War Memorial Brussels (1922–3); Nieuwpoort (1926–8 Port Tewfiq Egypt Crouching Lion (1927–8); commemorated 4,000 officers and men of the Indian Army killed during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign during the war at (1927–8) destroyed by retreating Egyptian troops during the Six Day War of 1967 and later relocated to the Heliopolis War cemetery in Cairo.
During this period Charles Jagger produced statues of the Duke of Windsor future King Edward V111 1922), Lord Hardinge Viceroy Governor General India (1928) and Ernest Shackleton (1932).
Alfred Mond the founder of Imperial Chemical Industries, commissioned four large stone figures symbolic of industries for the company headquarters in Millbank. construction (The Builder), marine transport, for agriculture (The Sower), and chemistry and figures – four directly associated with ICI and its predecessors, Ludwig and Alfred Mond, Harry McGowan Alfred Noble and Justus Vobn Leibig Joseph Priestly Antoine Lavoisier and Dimitri Mendelev.
This is a commission called Scandal in the V Bronze relief and cast-iron fire basket set, 1930, commissioned by Henry Mond (Baron Melchett;) son of his patron and his wife Gwen, for his drawing room at Mulberry House, Smith Square, and was an important feature of its celebrated Art Deco interior. It is about their ménage à trois with the author ( Gilbert Cannan), mocking the tittle-tattle. The firebasket, wall label, the “two snarling cats and a parrot apparently Jagger had a fierce macaw called and there is a photoofit on his shoulder while working’. This is in the V&A Museum.
As a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, he was twice a gold medallist for Royal Artillery and figures of St George and Britannia at the entrance to Thames House, Millbank.
Edith and David’s work. Edith Jagger (1880-1977) was an exceptionally gifted painter of flower subjects and still lives. However it is her work as chief designer for the ground-breaking charitable organisation, Painted Fabrics in Sheffield which proved offered occupational therapy for injured British servicemen, It went on to produce fabrics and clothing of fashionable design and high quality for decades. ‘Work Not Charity’ was the companies motto. Twenty-eight of her paintings were included in The Art of Jagger Family, an exhibition which toured to seven towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England during 1939-40.
David Jagger (1891-1958) was a skilled and successful portaitist which included Queen Mary, Lord Baden-Powell, Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh and Dame Nellie Melba and also worked in advertising for J Walter Thompson.
Gillian Jagger his daughter became a sculptor in the US. She was was only 4 when her father died suddenly of pneumonia in 1934. Her mother remarried an American and went to the States.
Being a workaholic, his relentless work rate and old war wounds probably contributed towards his untimely early death in 1934. His studio in Anhalt Road nearby Albert Bridge is now owned by the quirky artist Chris Orr RA.
Dr. Edward Wilson (1872-1912) BA, MB (Cantab.) physician, polar explorer, natural historian, painter and ornithologist was as an influential figure of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, being chiefly remembered today as the artistic scientist who died with Captain Scott.
He was born in Montpellier Parade, Cheltenham on 23 July 1872. His childhood was full of news from his Wilson and Whishaw relatives, from the far flung corners of Imperial Russia, the British Empire and beyond.From the age of three his parents noted that Wilson liked nothing better than to lie on the floor drawing. This resulted in his mother giving him drawing lessons. Described as “clever but boisterous”. At Cheltenham Proprietary College for Boys he excelled at games, art and in the activities of the Natural History Society, being secretary of the ornithological section for some time and whilst that he received the only systematic art lessons.
He was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge However, in the Oxford and Cambridge exams he obtained his certificate with honours in science. It was decided that he would enter Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge to pursue a career in medicine, like his father. Natural History and art were clearly seen as subjects for hobbies.
Later joined St. George’s Hospital, London which involved long hours of hard work and he was soon immersed in anatomy, physiology and surgery. Nevertheless, he found time to play football for the hospital and also to row. He took lodgings in Paddington and walked to and from St. George’s which was at Hyde Park Corner. His long hours of work and his experiments with asceticism soon started to take their toll. He moved his lodgings, taking up residence in the Caius Mission house in Battersea. Here he became engaged in youth clubs and Sunday school classes for the children of the slums. The children suffered from fleas, lice and numerous medical afflictions. He continued to walk the 3 miles each way, through Battersea Park and along the Thames to the hospital, every day. It was at the Mission house, one afternoon, that he first met Miss Oriana Souper in 1897. She was a friend of the Warden’s wife. After tea, Wilson excused himself to go and run his boys’ classes and then retired to his rooms to work. Later, he stole down the stairs to quietly listen to Miss Souper sing. Their friendship was to develop slowly.
He contracted tuberculosis from his mission work and had to recuperate taking time out from his studies and got engaged to Oriana. He recovered and was appointed as the Assistant Surgeon and Vertebrate Zoologist to the British National Antarctic Expedition (1901-1904) aboard Discovery, under Commander Robert Falcon Scott. Three weeks before the Expedition sailed, Wilson married Oriana. Their honeymoon was dominated by Antarctic preparations but they were blissfully happy.
Upon return he was appointed Field Observer to the Grouse Disease Inquiry and illustrated wildlife books. In 1910 he returned to the Antarctic with Captain Scott aboard Terra Nova as Chief of the Scientific Staff.
seated Bowers and Evans
One by one they became frost-bitten, Oates so badly that he committed suicide in a bid to save his companions, walking out of the tent with the words “I am just going outside and may be some time”. Badly frost-bitten, dehydrated and short of food and fuel, Wilson, Bowers and Scott perished in their tent 11 miles short of their main One Ton Depot. The following Spring they were buried upon the Great Ice Barrier by a search party, which also recovered their scientific specimens, their diaries and the final sketch books of Edward Adrian Wilson. He died with his comrades on the return from the South Pole in 1912.
‘Life has been a struggle for some weeks now on this return journey from the Pole… Today may be the last effort… I shall simply fall and go to sleep in the snow, and I have your little books with me in my breast pocket… God be with you – my love is as living for you as ever…’
Wilhelmina Stirling 1865-1965 author and De Morgan Foundation founder.
Wilhelmina Pickering was born in London, was the younger sister of Pre-Raphaelite artist Evelyn De Morgan and niece of the painter Rodham Spencer Stanhope.
In 1901 she married Charles Goodbarne Stirling. She assembled a substantial art collection that featured Evelyn’s work and that of Evelyn’s ceramicist husband William De Morgan. Wilhelmina was a significant art collector with a preference for paintings by Victorian artists such as William Holman Hunt and John Waterhouse, and decorative arts including a sizeable collection of furniture from the 16th and 17th centuries.
When she died aged 99, she bequeathed her collection in trust in perpetuity for public enjoyment. Her biography William De Morgan and his Wife (1922) is the starting point for all researchers interested in the De Morgans today. She also wrote reminiscences of the British landed gentry and on subjects such as spiritualism. The Merry Wives of Battersea is very entertaining, featuring the women who lived in the Battersea Manor House over the centuries.
In 1931 Wilhelmina and her husband moved into Old Battersea House, which had been threatened with demolition by Battersea Council. They were granted a life tenancy and used the house to display their art collection. Known as Terrace House until the 1930s, it was built for the naval administrator Samuel Pett and was most likely completed in 1699. It is the finest example of seventeenth century domestic architecture in Battersea. After a campaign to save the house, Battersea Council built St. John’s estate on its grounds in the 1930s.
Wilhelmina kept carefully documented records of all the treasures. One of these was a black oak cabinet by Morris and Co., hand decorated by William De Morgan in oils, depicting St George and the Dragon. This cabinet is currently at the National Trust property, Standen House and Garden, and is used to display some of William De Morgan’s ceramics.
In 1961, aged 96, she featured in a short documentary made by Ken Russell, Old Battersea House, and talks passionately about her support for the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. She loved giving tours and regaling visitors. She could talk for hours on the artworks and tell anecdotal stories about the house itself, for example about sleeping in the bed that had been slept in by the naughty Lord Rochester. Her butler, Mr Peters, carried around a large lamp to illuminate the rooms, as she spoke about the alleged sightings of ghosts.
In 1957 she wrote the book Ghosts Vivisected. Sir John Beteman described her as reminiscent of Miss Haversham, surrounded by the objects of a past life, but a curator at the De Morgan Foundation observed that this wasn’t the image of Mrs Stirling that she had come to know and love.
In 2007 Wandsworth Council unfortunately let go of the De Morgan Collection, which it had inherited from the Borough of Battersea, and was based in West Hill Library. The collection was dispersed to the Watts Gallery, the De Morgan Museum at Cannon Hall, Barnsley, Wightwick Manor and collection displays at other museums.
After Mrs Stirling died the Forbes family took it over and restored it. Visitors included Liz Taylor and Ronald Reagan. When they sold it was bought by Pugachev who was accused by Russian government for embezzling loans from the government to his Mezhprombank. He fled Britain and his assets frozen. The new owner lives there with his young family. I was lucky enough to visit Old Battersea House before it was sold by the Forbes and again recently whilst organising the installation of a Battersea society plaque to Mrs Stirling in September 2022.
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize winning novel Offshore the houseboat-dwelling young sisters come over the bridge to St Mary’s foreshore and find De Morgan tiles to flog to a Chelsea antique dealer. They recount a ‘visit to the very, very old lady in Old Battersea House’.
So,that is the trail of the blue plaques of north Battersea for any one to enjoy, especially when the warmer weather comes. I shall be leading one in the Autumn after unveiling the Mrs Stirling one but will be organising a walk of Notable Women of Lavender Hill after my booklet Inspiring Women of Battersea is launched on 7th June at Battersea Arts Centre as part of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival.
Charles Sargeant Jagger Battersea plaque man
Charles Sargeant Jagger MC (Military Cross, ARA (17 December 1885 – 16 November 1934) sculptor who, following active service in the WW1, sculpted many works on the theme of war.
He is best known for his war memorials, especially the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner and the Great Western Railway War Memorial in Paddingron Station and he designed several other monuments around Britain and other parts of the world. The plaque erected in 2000 by English Heritage is at his home at 67 Albert Bridge Road. The Inscription: CHARLES SARGEANT JAGGER 1885-1934 Sculptor lived and died here. Charles Sargeant Jagger’s blue plaque was unveiled by the art critic, Richard Cork in February 2000 alongside Gillian Jagger, his daughter.
His biography is by Ann Compton. The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Prior to living on Albert Bridge Road, Charles and Connie, his first wife, lived at Tite Street, Chelsea in a property belonging to the American portrait painter, John Singer Sargeant.
Charles was the son of a colliery manager, Enoch Jagger and his wife Mary Sergeant and born in Kilnhurst South Yorkshire and was educated at Sheffield Royal Grammar School.
His older sister Edith and brother David became artists and all studied together at Sheffield Technical School of Art. There is also a plaque which was unveiled in his home village, Kilnhurst by the Rotherham District Civic Society in 2018.
David Jagger distanced himself from his Northern working-class upbringing and thrived as a society portrait painter in London. Unlike his brother he was a pacifist and did not fight in the war.
Edith’s work in 1940 was included in the ‘Art of The Jagger Family’ at the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield.
This photo of the two brothers was taken about 1910 at 21, Wentworth Road, Kilnhurst, when their father Enoch died and mother Mary had to vacate the tied Pit Manager’s house (Glasswell House). Enoch’s father David seems to have been in charge of sinking the pit but was killed in one of the many accidents. Charles 25 was already living in Sheffield then and Mary ran a shop at 70 Millhouses Lane.
A fascinating article written in Studio International. In 1915. Rising British Sculptor: Charles Sargeant Jagger by I G Allister
He wrote: The Royal College of Art is noted for the high achievements of its pupils, and this year it has again added to the triumph of Englishmen in Rome by producing the winner of the Grand Prix in the person of Mr. Charles Sargeant Jagger.
His first introduction to plastic art was an incident of his childhood which stands out in his memory very clearly. Wandering with his father on Whitby Sands one day they came across a man modelling a sphinx in the clay indigenous to the locality, and as they watched the process the idea arose in the boy’s mind that he must be a sculptor, and he distinctly remembers the thrill of happiness which accompanied a decision from which he never once wavered. His school-days however were an ordeal to him,
At age 14 in 1889 he became an apprentice metal engraver with the Sheffield firm Mappin and Webb who made beautifully crafted silverware and fine jewellery and had Royal warrants and commissions from Monarchs around the world, In 1887 Granted a Royal Warrant as Silversmiths to Queen Victoria.
He studied at the Sheffield School of Art and made rapid progress. He first of all learnt drawing, then he turned to modelling in the daytime, and taught drawing at evening-classes.
He was leading a very strenuous life at this period, for he was also learning to express and develop his own work and he soon produced some remarkable work such as Man and the Maelstrom and Prometheus Bound, both of which were created before he was eighteen.
He won a scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art 1908-11 under Edouard Lantieri. National Art Training School at its new home in South Kensington. Edouard Lantéri was Jagger’s Professor at the Royal College of Art, where he was revered by his students. In 1896 it became the Royal College of Art. The RCA was the birthplace of The New Sculpture movement in Britain whose early sculpture showed a fanciful treatment of classical and literary themes. Jagger worked as Lanteri’s assistant He speaks very gratefully of the seven valuable years that followed. Prof. Lantéri has a rare genius for teaching.
The essay by IG McAllister continues: My first impression of his work was received three years ago, during his student days under Prof. Lantéri. He was then busily engaged on a sculptural relief, illustrating Rossetti’s Blessed Damosel which struck me as possessing certain qualities quite apart from the ordinary, and when writing at the time on modem sculpture I expressed the conviction that Jagger was destined to occupy a high place amongst sculptors at no very distant date. This prediction is now being verified in a series of poetical themes, showing an individual and vigorous personality.
Mr. Jagger gained several prizes, and the Travelling Scholarship for a bronze door design, made for a private art collection. He spent some months in Rome and Venice, and one can imagine what a joy this visit must have proved to the young sculptor:
The illustrations show examples of Mr. Jagger’s skill in various mediums, for he does not limit himself to any one branch, but expresses his ideas in clay and marble, engraving on metal, drawings in pencil and chalk, in silver, as the Design for a Shield, and he delights in making jewellery but except as a pastime he is not likely to do much of this class of work, for larger and more serious things claim his attention.
Mr. Jagger has many things in his favour: it is an excellent sign that he delights in hard work — he is always learning. He will therefore do greater things yet, for he has not come to his full strength.
In 1914 he won the British Prix de Rome scholarship in sculpture but couldn’t take up because of the war. On the outbreak of the First World War he decided to enlist in the Artist Rifles instead. Other members of the regiment included Edward Thomas, Nash brothers John Lavery and in 1915 he was commissioned in the Worsestshire Regiment.
Jagger served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and was wounded three times. Awarded the Military Cross for gallantry, he was shot through the shoulder at Gallipolli and later gassed in the trenches and wounded once again in Flanders. Near the end of the Great War, he was appointed Official War Artist by the Ministry of Information. With this first-hand experience of war, he was commissioned to make the Great Western Railway War Memorial in Paddington Railway Station and the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.
On the 5th November 1915, he was shot through the left shoulder and evacuated first to a hospital in Malta and then back to England. Once recovered he married Violet Constance Smith in 1916 .
In 1917 David painted this portrait of his sister-in-law. She and Charles met in 1911. Charles paid for singing lessons for her and she went on to become a concert singer and pianist. They divorced in 1924 they had a son Cedric.
Charles was married twice, secondly to Evelyn Wade, the daughter of his tutor at RCA. He was sent out to the Western Front where he was wounded again in 1918.
“We have got many men who fought in France and I believe they would sell their souls almost to get back to Flanders again. You people at home have no idea what sort of Hell this is. It strikes me as being the home of the damned.”
Whilst convalescing from his war wounds in 1919, he began work on No Man’s Land, a low relief which after being cast in bronze it was presented to the Tate Gallery in 1923.
It depicts a “listening post”, a technique of trench warfare in which a soldier would hide among the corpses, broken stretchers and barbed wire of No Man’s Land, in order to listen for the enemy. He completed this work while he was at the British School at Rome. It had grown out of his own war experiences at Gallipoli and reflects his feeling that “sculpture could treat subjects previously dominated” by painters”
Jagger’s work as a sculptor tended towards realism, especially his portrayal of soldiers. When Jagger was commissioned he remarked to the Daily Express the “experience in the trenches persuaded me of the necessity for frankness and truth”. Monumental works of the period used symbolic figures rather than actual depictions of soldiers. Furthermore, during the war years, a government edict had banned images of dead British soldiers. The fashion at the time was for idealism and modernism in sculpture, but Jagger’s figures were rugged and workman-like, earning him a reputation for ‘realist’ sculpture. Although Jagger was commissioned as a sculptor of a variety of monuments, it is for his war memorials that he is chiefly remembered.
The National Army Museum has a small collection of drawings from his time in Gallipoli, depicting one of his fellow officers, Lieutenant Leslie Goold.
Royal Artillery Memorial (1921–25) at Hyde Park Corner in London is one of his best-known works. It features a giant sculpture of a howitzer surrounded by four bronze soldiers and stone relief scenes, and is dedicated to casualties in the British Royal Regiment of Artillery the war.
His obsessive concern for detail, shared by the regimental committee who commissioned the work, reached its zenith in the stone replica of a howitzer, which surmounts his vivid representation of war as hard and dangerous labour.
When Jagger was commissioned he remarked to the Daily Express the “experience in the trenches persuaded me of the necessity for frankness and truth”.
Monumental works of the period used symbolic figures rather than actual depictions of soldiers. Furthermore, during the war years, a government edict had banned images of dead British soldiers. Jagger defied both these conventions by creating realistic bronze figures of three standing soldiers and the body of a dead soldier laid out and shrouded by a greatcoat. The Gunner became the inspiration for a hero in the children’s fantasy novel Stoneheart by Fletcher where London statues talk and intereact.
He completed war memorials over the next seven years Manchester Britannia Hotel, in (1921); Southsea (1921); Bedford (1921); Great Western Railway War Memorial (1922); Brimington (1922); Royal Artilley (1921–5); Anglo Belgian War Memorial Brussels (1922–3); Nieuwpoort (1926–8he Nieuport Memorial commemorates 552 Commonwealth officers and men who were killed in Allied operations on the Belgian coast
Tewfiq Egypt Crouching Lion (1927–8); comemorated 4,000 officers and men of the Indian Army killed during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign during the war at (1927–8).( designed by Scottish architects John Burnetand Thomas Tait) destroyed by retreating Egyptian troops during the Six Day War of 1967 and later relocated to the Heliopolis War cemetery in Cairo.
Cambrai Memorial 1928 in the Louverval Military Cemetery, to the memory of 7,000 British and South African soldiers who died without a grave. (designed by H Chalton Bradshaw)
During this period Jagger produced statues of the Duke of Windsor future King Edward V111 1922), Lord Hardinge Viceroy Governor General India (1928) and Ernest Shackleton (1932).
Alfred Mond the founder of Imperial Chemical Industries, commissioned four large stone figures symbolic of industries for the company headquarters in Millbank. construction (The Builder), marine transport, for agriculture (The Sower), and chemistry.
ICI Building designed by (Sir Frank Baines)in the neoclassical style of the inter-war years, and constructed between 1927 and 1929a portrait carved into the keystone and their name carved onto a balcony – four directly associated with ICI and its predecessors, Ludwig and Alfred Mond, Harry McGowan Alfred Noble and Justus Vobn Leibig Joseph Priestly Antoine Lavoisier and Dimitri Mendelev.
Below was a commission called Scandal in the V Bronze relief and cast-iron fire basket set, 1930. V&A which is very different from his monumental sculptors. I love the story behind it.
The set was commissioned by Henry Mond (Baron Melchett;) son of his patron and his wife Gwen, for his drawing room at Mulberry House, Smith Square, and was an important feature of its celebrated Art Deco interior. It is about their ménage à trois with the author ( Gilbert Cannan), who was a former lover of Gwen’s but had precarious mental health. The work was mocking tittle-tattle. The firebasket, wall label states the “two snarling cats and a parrot’. Apparently Jagger had a fierce macaw called and there is a photo of it on his shoulder while working.
As a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, he was twice a gold medallist for Royal Artillery and figures of St George and Britannia at the entrance to Thames House, Millbank.
Whilst the Jagger’s lived at Albert Bridge Road, Charles had his sculpture studio nearby, on Anhalt Road (Anhalt Road Studios). Evelyn and (Sir) William Reid Dick (R.A.) acted as studio assistants. Both his daughters would play with clay in the studio and make their own little sculptures, which their father would place in the kiln and fire for them. Charles Jagger died young. Being a workaholic, his relentless work rate and old war wounds probably contributed towards his untimely early death in 1934 aged 48. A touring memorial exhibition was organised by two of his chief patrons in 1935–36 Freda, Lady Forres and Henry Mond 2nd Baron Melchett.
Edith Jagger (1880-1977) was an exceptionally gifted painter. Her oil paintings of still lifes and flower subjects were exhibited internationally throughout the 1930s
However it is her work as chief designer for the ground-breaking charitable organisation, Painted Fabrics in Sheffield which proved offered occupational therapy for injured British servicemen, It went on to produce fabrics and clothing of fashionable design and high quality for decades. ‘Work Not Charity’ was the companies motto. Painted Fabrics became a limited company in 1923, received national press coverage and the continued support and patronage of the Royal family. The companies wares were sold across the country, including Liberty’s and Claridges Hotel. Starting with small items such as tea cosies and table mats the range of goods was eventually extended to dresses, scarves, lingerie, furnishing fabrics and leather goods. Although hand stencilling using paints remained a mainstay of production, screen printing, block printing and spray painting with dyes were also used.
Twenty-eight of her paintings were included in The Art of Jagger Family, an exhibition which toured to seven towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England during 1939-40
David Jagger (1891-1958) was a skilled and successful portraitist which included Queen Mary, Lord Baden-Powell, Winston Churchill, Vivien Leigh and Dame Nellie Melba and also worked in advertising for J Walter Thompson.
David was a conscientious objector and this caused some friction between the brothers.
He regularly exhibited at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists His paintings brought him both critical and commercial success, which enabled him to set up his own professional portrait studio in Chelsea, south-west London. After the Great War finished, he met and fell in love with Katherine Gardiner, she immediately became his muse and features in many key work from the period. The couple married in 1921.
Throughout the 1930s his austere and highly finished portraits were in great demanded by London’s elite, for which there was often a waiting list. A major solo exhibition David Jagger was held at the J. Leger Galleries in London (1935). The display was an informal retrospective and featured sixty-six paintings. The exhibition received glowing reviews and was extended due to popular demand.
Cedric Jagger went on to be a leading authority on horology, writing several notable books on clocks and watches. Charles and Violet divorced acrimoniously, she took her divorce petition to the high court in 1924.
Gillian Jagger became a sculptor in the US. She was friends with Andy Warhol from their student days together.
She was was only 4 when her father died suddenly of pneumonia in 1934. Her mother remarried an American and went to the States. Together they had two daughters, Gillian Jagger, who forged a successful career as a sculptor in the US and . The Jaggers’ other daughter, Evelyn Mary died in Canada as a teenager, the result of meningitis.
Gillian Jagger was an artist guided by a deep-seated connection to nature and best known for imposing sculptures and installations that often incorporated tree trunks and animal carcasses. She died in 2019 in Ellenville, New York. She was 88. Her death was confirmed by her wife and only survivor, Connie Mander.
Jaggers studio was close by to his home around the corner in Anhalt Road. The building had been the coach house attached to The Albert Bridge Flour Mills.
I went to see it when I was checking out for my talk on Three Battersea Plaque Men. As I was talking a photo of it a man came out and it turned out to be Chris Orr but I didn’t know that at the time until a couple at the talk in St Mary’s Church told me afterwards. I mentioned to him what I was doing and that the studio had been Jaggers! He, of course, had attended the plaque unveiling and had met Gillian. I told him sadly that she had died in 2019.
Chris Orr was born in Islington London 1943. https://www.chrisorr-ra.com/about He was a student at the Royal College of Art 1964-1967. He subsequently taught in many Art Schools. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1995 and made Professor of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art 1998-2008. He was awarded an MBE and made Professor Emeritus in 2008. As Treasurer of the Royal Academy 2014-18 he was involved in the Burlington project. He exhibits annually at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the London Original Print Fair. I always enjoy seeing his busy paintings at the Summer Exhibition. His work is funny and distinctive. The Battersea Society is organising a talk with him for the Autumn which should be great. Perhaps we might have a visit to his studio.
I do need to organise a Battersea north plaques walk which will ,of course, include Charles Sargeant Jagger.
It will begin with the Short Brothers aviators at arch 75 at Queens Circus roundabout, playwright Sean O’Casey at 49 Overstrand Mansions, John Archer London’s first Black Mayor 1913 at 55 Brynmaer Road, Donald Swann composer performer with Flanders, 13 Albert Bridge Road, Norman Douglas author Albany Mansion and Jagger at 67 Albert Bridge Road, Edward Wilson naturalist and explorer at 42 Vicarage Crescent and finishing with Wilhelmina Stirling on Old Battersea House.
Henry Mayo Bateman, cartoonist and artist, Battersea plaque man
Henry Mayo Bateman 1887 – 1970 was a cartoonist, caricaturist and artist. His English Heritage plaque erected in 1997 is at 40 Nightingale Lane. Bateman was included in my south Battersea plaques walk in 2021 and in my Three Battersea plaque men alongside Sean O’Casey playwright and Charles Sargeant Jagger war memorial sculpture.
Bateman had moved there from Clapham with his parents in 1910, at the age of 23 till 1914. The area provided rich pickings for the satirical exposés of middle-class suburban manners that he was noted for in his ‘The Man Who…’ series of cartoons, featuring comically exaggerated reactions to minor usually upper-class social gaffes, such as ‘The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Royal Toast’.
He was amazingly prolific and inventive, everything he saw became material, so that his work can be read as a social history of Britain in the first half of the 20th Century and, to an extraordinary degree, as a kind of autobiography. His family and friends; his trips to the fair, to the seaside, abroad; his passions for the Music Hall, for tap-dancing, for boxing, for fishing, for golf; his desperate experiences in the First World War; his car, his house, his vacuum-cleaner; his triumphs and disasters over many years – all find their way in to his cartoons.
Henry Mayo Bateman, the son of Henry Charles Bateman, was born to an English family in Sutton Forest in New South Wales in 1887. His father owned an export and packing business in Australia but in 1889 the family returned to England. His parents were Henry Bateman and Rose Mayo. His father had left England for Australia in 1878, at the age of 21, to seek his fortune, then returned to England briefly in 1885 before going back with an English wife. Soon after Henry was born, his strong-willed mother insisted that they return to London ‘and civilisation’. He had one sister, Phyllis, three years younger. He attended Tulse Hill Primary School.
Bateman was always drawing from an early age, consistently producing funny drawings that told stories. He was inspired by comics, had a keen critical eye, and was enthusiastically drawing at every available moment. At the age of 14, he had already decided that he would draw for publication.
In 1901, the cartoonist Phil May (died 39), in response to a letter from Rose, showed interest in his drawings.
and that year he was inspired by an exhibition of black-and-white art at the V and A.
His father had initially decided that his son should follow him into business, but eventually, after many arguments between him and Rose, his father financed his study at the Westminster School of Art which he commenced at the age of 16 which had been encouraged by Phil May. He did well but was bored by the lifeless “life” classes. It was located at 18 Tufton Street, Deans Yard, Westminster, and was part of the old Royal Architectural Museum. Bateman described it in 1903 as:”… arranged on four floors with galleries running round a big square courtyard, the whole being covered over with a big glass roof. Off the galleries were the various rooms which made up the school, the galleries themselves being filled with specimens of architecture which gave the whole place the air of a museum, which of course it was.”After qualifying there he transferred his study to the New Cross Art School which later became Goldsmith Institute and then College.
The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of the most powerful of London’s ‘City Livery Companies’, purchased the site and buildings after the Naval School moved out in 1889. Two years later, The Goldsmiths’ Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute opened. For 13 years, the Company ran a hugely successful operation. At its peak over 7,000 male and female students were enrolled, drawn from the ‘industrial and working classes’ of the New Cross area. Nine of our alumni and staff have been Turner Prize winners and a further 24 have been shortlisted. Among these is Steve McQueen, the first Black director to win Best Picture Oscar for his 2014 film 12 Years A Slave.
This was on the recommendation of John Hassall illustrator known for his advertisements and poster designs and a key member of the London Sketch Club. J.In 1900, Hassall opened his own New Art School and School of Poster Design in Kensington where Bateman is listed among his students. Hassall also recommended that Bateman join the studio run by Charles Van Havermaet who was an artist and teacher for practical experience which was nearby.
Bateman’s first cartoons appeared in The Royal Magazine and The Tatler. He began contributing to Punch in 1906.
So what were his influences. The Bateman website states: There are certainly two major influences that are immediately apparent, as well as certain moments and developments in his life and work that help to point the way. The first of these influences was the fantastic proliferation of comic papers that sprung up in Britain when he was a child. He was an obsessive devotee of the halfpenny comics, of Comic Cuts and Chips and Larks and Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday and Fun and many others. http://www.hmbateman.com/
In fact, his earliest surviving drawing, done when he was perhaps eight or nine, was done in imitation of Fun, a title page with lots of funny little characters and the inscription: “You are requested to keep dirty fingers off the page – by order…”. From the very beginning, when he started to sell cartoons and sketches to the magazines in his early teens, there was a noticeable tendency for his cartoons to relate more than just a single incident, to have little additional strips appended under the main cartoon or to be made up of a number of separate scenes. He wanted to tell a story. And certainly, by 1910 or 1911, he can clearly be seen to be drawing proto strip cartoons, not quite yet the mature strip cartoon, still including some words and speech or text, but very definitely narrative and cinematic.
His first solo exhibition in 1901 was at the Brook St Gallery Mayfair. His first contract was in 1904, for ten drawings and two illustrations in a four penny monthly magazine called The Royal. At the age of 17, his style was already that of a mature artist.
His style developed and changed radically over the years. From the graceful and rhythmical lines of his earlier work to the stark brilliance of his strip cartoons and the furious energy of his “Man Who …” series, his essential qualities of superb draughtsmanship, astonishing observation and a profound appreciation of humanity’s foibles, are always married to a wonderful wit and narrative perfection. He told marvellously funny stories in pictures.
He then progressed to a contract with The Tatler and many other magazines besides, including the Illustrated Sporting News and Dramatic News founded in 1874, Pearson’s Weekly and Punch. Bateman was selected by Percy Bradshaw for inclusion in his 1918 The Art Of the Illustrator which presented a portfolio for each of twenty illustrators. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.
Bateman made three great and radical contributions to the art of the cartoon in this country. The first came in 1908 when, aged 21, he suffered a nervous breakdown probably caused by the dreadful choice he had to make between pushing forward with his career as a cartoonist, already much in demand, or trying to become a “serious” painter.
This derangement, coupled with an absolute devotion to the surreal madness of Music Hall comedians, seems to have given him a new intensity, a highly charged way of working. At a stroke he did away with the conventional stillness – not to say stiffness – of cartoon figures and, as he himself put it, “went mad on paper”. Until this time conventional cartoons had been illustrated jokes – drawings with a few lines of text or dialogue underneath. Take away the dialogue and the drawing becomes meaningless, the joke lay in the words. From 1909 onwards he drew no more illustrated jokes and so changed profoundly the art of the cartoon, invested it with a new freedom of line and expression.
The drawing became funny in itself, self-explanatory. He made emotion the subject of his cartoons and the characters became actors expressing feeling, rather than illustrations to an idea. This was a new, histrionic, hyperbolic creative method and its effects are still apparent amongst some of our greatest cartoonists today.
The second great and innovative contribution Bateman made to the art of the cartoon came during the First World War. He had enlisted with the London Regiment but after falling ill with rheumatic fever in 1915 he was discharged.
This rejection affected him and he retreated ill and deeply depressed to a remote inn on Dartmoor. But he worked prodigiously and started to produce, in 1916, astonishing strip cartoons that immediately gripped the public and the attention of his fellow artists. They dealt with life in the armed services and became immensely popular, especially with serving soldiers and sailors. Eventually, towards the end of the war, the War Office realised what a potent source of inspiration and morale these cartoons had become, and sent Bateman off to the Front, to gather material for his work and to entertain the troops with demonstrations of his drawing, making caricatures and cartoons of subjects they chose for him. This had a wonderful effect on Bateman, doing as much for his own sense of self-worth as it did for the troops.
Over the next few years Bateman had cartoons published in Punch, The London Magazine, ( England’s oldest literary periodical from 1732. The Bystander, (1903 until 1940, when it merged with The Tatler) The Strand Magazine (1891-1950) and the Humorist (1922-1940). http://www.magforum.com/general_weekly_magazines.htm
Comic strips till then had wonderful comic characters but relied again on the story underneath, or speech-bubbles within, and were childish and simple. What Bateman did was to create self-contained strip cartoons without words, brilliant, innovative, cinematic comic stories, adult, often harsh and macabre, and frequently – at this period – to do with themes of guilt, punishment, retribution and death. Cartoons like The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass at the British Museum, The Guest Who Filled his Fountain Pen with Hotel Ink or Mexicans at Play are all wonderfully humorous but also harsh and complex and they come as shock amongst the predictable pages of Punch or The Tatler. Nothing like them had been seen in this country before.
Sometime just before the beginning of the War, probably on one of his many trips to France, Bateman had came across the work of the great French cartoonist Caran d’Ache which was the pseudonym of Emmanuel Poiré, born 1858 in Moscow died in Paris. He was a 1909 a caricaturist and illustrator and early exponent of the episodic strip cartoon technique. The name Caran d’Ache transliterates the Russian word for pencil.
His work became the second decisive influence or source of inspiration for Bateman’s strip cartoons, Years later, in 1933, he wrote the introduction to a collection of Caran d’Ache’s cartoons published by Methuen (who had published Bateman’s own various collections. In the introduction he wrote that Caran d’Ache “combined perfection in telling a really droll story with superb draughtsmanship and an astounding observation and knowledge of humanity. For me he defies criticism. I simply admire. He was the most trenchant and illustrious of all designers of what we now call “the comic strip”.
His third major influence on the history of the cartoon came in 1921 and continued for many years. It is, perhaps, the most famous of all his contributions and profoundly changed the landscape of humorous art: he started on his great series of “Man Who” cartoons. Looking back through his work it is apparent that he had been playing with this idea for many years, but the publication of The Guardsman Who Dropped It by The Tatler as a full colour centre-spread caused a sensation and engendered a series of cartoons that lasted for the rest of Bateman’s career.
The majority of the Man Who cartoons describe some terrible social misdemeanour, some solecism or offence against accepted custom and behaviour.
They contain those repeated descriptions of anger, consternation and disgust that became the hallmarks of the Bateman cartoon: eyeballs popping out of sockets, contorted bodies, figures prone or airborne. The protagonist is shown recoiling in horror from his actions and the attention focused on him, or else blithely carrying on, innocent of the outrage he has perpetrated and the world’s indignant roar. The cartoons single out for scrutiny not only the individual who has caused such offence but, perhaps more interestingly, the society that condemns him.
Bateman became the most highly paid cartoonist in the country, sought after by advertisers, engaged in America and Australia, published in Europe. All this time, certainly until the late 1920s, he was producing his brilliant strip cartoons and a huge amount of other work in many different and interesting styles, but the Man Who cartoons came to define him, captured the public imagination and passed into the mythology of the nation. These are still in great demand and some older folk would be familiar with the phrase a Bateman situation. He was one of the first graphic artists to adopt a cinematic approach. One critic has argued that Bateman episodic format was “closely parallelled in the silent movie, such as the slow build up to a climax or denouement, and a new emphasis on gesture and facial expression”.
After the war Bateman became one of the highest paid cartoonist of his day and produced a considerable amount of work for advertising. This included campaigns for Wills Cigarettes, Guinness, Shell and Lucky Strike.. By the 1930s Bateman was recognised as one of Britain’s leading cartoonists and was earning over £5,000 a year for his work.
Bateman published several books including A Book of Drawings (1921), More Drawings (1922), Bateman (1931) The Art of Caricature (1936) and On the move in England (1940). During the WW2 he produced several posters for the government.
Bateman married Brenda Collison Wier and they had two children, Diana and Monica. Diana became a Cartoon Museum co founder. Diana was married to Richard Willis who was also an artist. His two granddaughters Lucy Willis www.lucywillis.com and Tilly Willis www.tillywillis.com are artists. I made contact with Lucy and bought one of her watercolour paintings of bathers.
Astonishingly, right at the height of his fame, still in his forties, a few years before the Second World War, Bateman gave up all humorous art completely and slipped off quietly, alone, to pursue his old dream of becoming a “serious painter”. In later life, Bateman carried on an increasingly acrimonious battle with the Inland Revenue.
His final years were spent on the island of Gozo Malta. He died in his 84th year, still painting every day, out walking in the sunshine on Gozo, where he had lived simply and modestly in a quietly in The Royal Lady Hotel, in the room with the finest view in Ghajnsielem, overlooking the quaint harbour of Mgarr and the splendid views of the Gozo-Malta channel.
When he reached the age of forty, at the height of his fame, he decided to retire from cartooning and fulfil his lifelong ambition to become ‘a real artist’, as he’d hankered to be since his early art school training. He took his painting equipment out into the English countryside and began to travel abroad in search of inspiring subject matter.
A genius in his own field of cartoons he struggled modestly for the rest of his life to master the art of colour and light. Not long before he died he wrote in The Artist “If you are a confirmed sketcher, as I am, you will have learned that it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive. I shall be out again tomorrow!”
Diana, his daughter wrote about his series the Colonel in 2007 November Oldie. A centenary celebration of his work was exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank in 1987.‘When he died in 1970’ said Diana Willis, ‘the Malta-Gozo ferry refused to allow his remains to be transported to Malta on their vessel for burial. However, a very kind Father Hili offered to convey the coffin on his boat and we were very grateful to him. Henry Bateman died whilst out for his daily walk and Diana found a small pencil in every jacket ready for use.
In one of her art based projects Lucy went In my Grandfather’s footsteps https://www.lucywillis.com/projects/21-in-my-grandfather-s-footsteps (published in The Artist magazine May 2012). ‘This year sees the 125th anniversary of the birth of the cartoonist. Arguably the most influential and widely published comic draughtsman of the early 20th century he was always just grandpa to me.’
Lucy met a fisherman who had found Bateman when he died and others who had known him: boat-builders who had chatted to him, out painting every day; his doctor who recalled the impromptu cartoon of the two of them, drawn on his prescription pad. Most rewarding of all was the response to the paintings themselves, which have been hailed in Valetta as a rare and precious record of a bygone era on the islands: the brightly coloured houses, the fleets of extravagantly painted fishing boats and the donkey carts, now all but gone’ .
Nicoline Sagona B.A. Manager Gozo Museums and Sites with Heritage Malta coordinated Heritage Malta’s exhibition on Henry Mayo Bateman’s sojourn in Gozo in 2012. Henry Mayo Bateman holds a special place in the Gozo art scene of the 1960s. His Gozo landscapes are all about light and colour, charming and delightful, portraying the pristine beauty of a yet unspoilt environment. A mere half a century later they have become nostalgic scenes of a landscape that has diminished in quality and beauty, giving way to insensitive construction. https://www.perry.com.mt/fine-art-malta-hm-bateman-perry-magazine-issue58/
Lucy wrote:’ Painting in all weathers During his last years there, having turned eighty, my grandfather wrote at least four articles for The Artist (I had no idea about this until recently and, having been writing articles for the magazine myself for 20 years, was amazed at the coincidence). One of his pieces discussed the hazards of painting out of doors. How many of us would recognise these sentiments’.
My grandfather’s out-put in his final years was as prodigious as always and his dedication to learning his craft was relentless. Not long before he died he wrote in The Artist “If you are a confirmed sketcher, as I am, you will have learned that it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive. I shall be out again tomorrow!”
Lucy has a London exhibition coming up 8-26 March 2022 that I am really looking forward to. I just love her colours, locations and they make me feel warm. It is entitled Memories of the Outside World and it is at the Piers Feetham gallery at 475 Fulham Road SW6 IHL
I do hope that you enjoyed the introduction this fascinating cartoonist and wonderful artist Henry Mayo Bateman and will do a bit more searching out of funny cartoons and evocative paintings of Gozo. I am writing this on Valentine’s day so I think he must be my valentine just for today. I am sure Dave won’t mind
PS I got an invite to Lucy’s solo exhibition in Fulham in March 2022. It looks sumptious and makes you feel warm as you bathe in the heat and shade of warmer climes.
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| The Alleyway, Tunisia watercolour 42 x 60 cm |
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