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.
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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View Piers Feetham Gallery Website Copyright © 2022 Piers Feetham Gallery, All rights reserved. |
Violet Van der Elst
I first saw saw this striking photograph when I went to visit the Wandsworth Prison Museum where Stewart Mc Laughlin is curator. He is a warder and admirably runs the bijou museum voluntarily and wrote the history of the Prison in 2001. The photo is of a woman with a memorable name Violet Van der Elst whose birth name was Violet Ann Dodge. She funded activism against capital punishment and her own campaigns for election to Parliament. She was a strident woman who conducted public protests, wrote books and newspapers, composed music and symphonies, and practiced séances in an attempt to communicate with her deceased husband.
She was given a standing ovation in the House of Commons on the passing of the abolition of the Death Penalty in 1965 aged 84.

In her heyday Violet was regarded as one of the most colourful eccentrics of the 20th Century. According to wiki she was an ‘entrepreneur and campaigner best remembered for her activities against the death penalty’.
She was much more and I don’t think she is remembered and that is why I have decided to do a blog on her. The blurb on cover of her biography by Charles Neilson Gatley reads: ‘Back Street Girl to Millionairess, Anti-Hanging Campaigner, Occultist, Business Tycoon, Social Reformer, The Most Colourful Eccentric of the Century.’ How come this The Most Colourful Eccentric of the Century has been forgotten in the 21st century.

She was described as a ‘stout, golden-haired, cream-complexioned woman’ when she was 83 by the Church Times. In typical sexist terms she was called a battleaxe in one blog and a lioness in another. These blogs were about her role in the ending of the death penalty.
Mrs Van der Elst was born Violet Ann Dodge. She was the daughter of a washerwoman and her father is usually described as a coal-porter. (George Shearing’s Dad was also a coal -porter which got lost in translation in the US as a coal miner!) However, the blogger Chrissy Hamlin who writes the Hidden History blog wrote one on Violet and her extraordinary life. She found that census records actually show that Violet’s father John to be an Agricultural Worker in 1871, a Garden Labourer in 1881 / 1891 and a labourer in a Timber Yard in 1901 https://chrissyhamlin.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-extraordinary-life-of-mrs-violet.html

Not much of her early life is known. She was an ordinary working class girl from Feltham, West London and from a large Victorian family. She was the second youngest child. John and Louisa Dodge’s first two children had died in infancy in 1867 and 1868. Violet’s older sister Rosa Mabel was born in 1870, followed by Edward John in 1872, Samuel Robert in 1875, Lillian Florence in 1877, Charles William in 1879, Violet herself in 1882 and Ella Louise in 1887.
In 1903, when she was 21, Violet married 34 year old Henry Nathan, a civil engineer from Wanstead, Essex, who was known as “Harry”. Apparently she had began making and selling her own cosmetics, creams and lotions – using her kitchen to manufacture her products. She ended up founding a company that developed the first brush-less shaving cream for men. It was called “Shavex” and today the brand is worth millions. Violet became a very successful business woman and was especially concerned with the marketing of all her products.



was especially concerned with the marketing of all her products. She personally oversaw every single detail of any advertisements that were created .



As an employer and boss she was strict. She sacked her aristocratic young secretary Lord Edward Montagu for embezzlement, after he had been arrested. There is little information as to how the business became so successful as it transitioned from kitchen to factory.
Her husband Harry died on November 1927 and four months later she married Jean Van der Elst, a Belgian who had been working for her as a manager but who was also a painter, traveller and composer. In 1934 he too died suddenly and it was in his memory that she dedicated the rest of her life to campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment.

Mrs Van der Elst was born Violet Ann Dodge. She was the daughter of a washerwoman and a coal-porter. She became rich as a business woman and bought a magnificent manor house called Harlaxton Manor thus saving it from demolition and as vociferous campaigner saved the condemned from the gallows. Her name and story should be much better known.
Not much of her early life is known. She was an ordinary working class girl from Feltham, near Staines in West London and came Violet came from a large Victorian family. She was the second youngest child. John and Louisa Dodge’s first two children had died in infancy in 1867 and 1868. Violet’s older sister Rosa Mabel was born in 1870, followed by Edward John in 1872, Samuel Robert in 1875, Lillian Florence in 1877, Charles William in 1879, Violet herself in 1882 and Ella Louise in 1887.

In 1903, she married Henry Arthur Nathan, a civil engineer 13 years her senior. She developed cosmetics including Shavex, the first brush-less shaving cream and became a successful businesswoman. Violet had began making and selling her own cosmetics, creams and lotions – using her kitchen to manufacture her products. She ended up founding a company that developed the first brush-less shaving cream for men. It was called “Shavex” and today the brand is worth millions. As an employer and boss she was always a force to be reckoned with. Violet sacked her aristocratic young secretary Lord Edward Montagu for embezzlement, after he had been arrested.
Four months after her first husband died on 15 November 1927, she married Jean Julien Romain Van der Elst, a Belgian who had been working for her as a manager but who was also a painter, traveller and composer. Jean had been a Captain in the First World War, worked for Henry Nathan and lived with them at 30 Belsize Park. In 1934 he too died suddenly and it was in his memory that she dedicated the rest of her life to campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment.

She was an outsider not part of the official campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty. She tried to enter politics and stood three times, unsuccessfully, as a candidate to be a Member of Parliament. Firstly she fought for the Putney constituency at the 1935 General Election as an Independent, then she stood for the Southwark Central constituency in the 1940 by-election as the National Government candidate and lastly, she fought for the Hornchurch constituency at the 1945 General election as an Independent, no doubt hoping to achieve her goal that way. So she adopted her won way of campaigning. She wrote the book On the Gallows in 1937 as part of her efforts to eradicate the death penalty. As part of her campaign work, Violet fought to keep Ruth Ellis and Charlotte Bryant from being executed – to no avail. After Bryant was hanged, Violet helped find her children a suitable orphanage, and set up a fund to help children who had lost parents because of the death penalty.



There have been few blogs on her more recently. One was posted in 2019 by an MA at Leeds University student Joe Tollingtonhttps://livingwithdying.leeds.ac.uk/2019/10/25/violet-van-der-elst-on-the-gallows/ He notes that whilst her name has since faded into relative historical obscurity. On the Gallows presents the anecdotes and eccentric philosophies that propelled Van der Elst into the limelight and dozens of newspaper headlines. Most importantly, however, it is a source that sheds light on a neglected dimension of the abolitionist movement as well as the forms and approaches to protest in pre-war Britain.



He continues: ” Whilst Van der Elst largely campaigned alone, the abolitionist movement had grown and broadened in Britain significantly from the 1920s. The National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (NCADP), led by Roy Calvert, was established in 1925. This organisation sought for abolition to be achieved through legal means and did produce a prolific amount of propaganda, although they did not engage in public protest…Instead of working with her, individuals like Roy Calvert derided Van der Elst for her exhibitionism and claimed she damaged the abolitionist movement with “futile emotion and sentiment” (Tuttle, 1961). Van der Elst cannot therefore be considered part of the mainstream abolitionist movement, but a fringe activist, determined to use her wealth to protest in a style that she believed was effective. She may have alienated other campaigners, but more importantly she captured significant public and media attention on an issue and a debate that had otherwise been largely contained to political circles in pre-war Britain.
He points out that Lizzie… Seal who is Professor of Criminology School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex and author of five books. She is one of the few scholars who has paid Violet any attention in her treatise Violet Van Der Elst’s Use of Spectacle and Militancy in her Campaign Against the Death Penalty in England https://core.ac.uk/

She wrote: “Violet van der Elst launched her campaign against the death penalty in the mid 1930s. She employed direct action tactics outside prisons on execution morning, such as leading the crowd in song and breaking through police cordons. These were not only designed to engage and
include the crowd that was present, but also to grab the attention of newspaper readers. Her approach to campaigning made deliberate use of spectacle and, coupled with her direct action techniques, can be understood as a form of post-suffragette militancy. This article explores the influence of the legacy of the suffragette movement on Violet van der Elst’s style of penal activism.”
Two other blog I came across examines
Another blogger Argumentative Penguin compares the roles that Violet and Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain, played in the abolition of the death penalty in two posts entitled The Lamb and the Lioness Two very different women who ended the 1000 year tradition of capital punishmen and The Bombshell and the Battle-Axe. “Two women who never met each other had a huge part to play in the abolition of the death penalty. Both from humble beginnings, their lives, their loves and their losses have been largely overlooked by history. But what was it about these two women that overturned a thousand years of tradition? And why has history largely forgotten them?” https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-bombshell-and-the-battle-axe-two-women-who-killed-the-uk-death-penalty-2f873cfdec23

The first was Woodingdean House which she and Jean bought in 1929. The history of the house, which was a large Georgian mansion situated in what is now Ovingdean Close, Ovingdean, is on the Brighton and Hove Archives which noted: ” The house was then sold to a rather colourful character, Violet Van der Elst, known as ‘the richest woman in Brighton’, who owned the house for the next ten years. She was reputed to have fifteen servants and three Rolls Royce motors cars. She was well known in Brighton as an eccentric. The next owner from 1939 until 1945 T.H. Sargeant – better known as Max Miller -the ‘Cheeky Chappy’ and it was demolished in 1965″.
After Jean had died Violet bought Harlaxton Manor in Grantham Lincolnshire which she renamed Grantham Castle .



She rescued the 1830s building when she bought it for £90,000 in October 1937, after seeing an advertisement in Country Life. It had become derelict and faced being reduced to rubble without a wealthy new owner. It had been rumoured that the Duke of Windsor had tried to acquire it, while his Grandfather, Edward V11, had also tried to buy it as a summer palace, but after failing, bought Sandringham instead. It is now a an American College
The existence of the modern Harlaxton Manor can be attributed to the Violet who saved the manor from demolition in 1937. Abandoned by 1935 she worked to restore and refurbish the manor as well as modernize the interior and had it wired for electricity.
During the Second World War, the manor was requisitioned and used as the officers’ mess for RAF Harlaxton nearby before housing the 1st Battalion of the British Airborne Division. She had based the Women’s Peace Legion at Grantham Castle, and took out advertisements in national papers claiming women could end war for all time.
She spent much of the Second World War living at her Kensington flat. There she showed extreme bravery, putting out incendiary bombs with buckets of water and driving through a blitz to deliver blankets to the needy and the homeless.
The estate was returned to Mrs Van Der Elst in 1943 who sold it five years later to the The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who used it as a novitiate. In 1965, the Jesuits leased the manor to Stanford University based in California, making it the first American university campus in Great Britain. Since 1970, Harlaxton Manor has been the home to Harlaxton College, part of the University of Evansville in Indiana, USA.
Its architecture, according to wiki, combines elements of Jacobean and Elizabethan styles with symmetrical Baroque massing, renders the mansion unique among surviving Jacobethan manors. The property currently serves as the British campus for the University of Evansville and partners with Eastern Illinois University Western Kentucky University. Harlaxton Manor is a Grade I listed building. There is a Pathe video from 1939 ttps://www.britishpathe.com/video/grantham-castleMrs.
Certainly, Violet’s hobbies and passions add character and an interesting layer of history to this beautiful manor and its surrounding gardens. It is also a sumptious wedding venue
Violet moved into to her flat in in Campden Hill Square, Knightsbridge, London, in 1959.
Violet would live to see the house of commons approve the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act in 1965. It was brought as a private members bill by Labour MP Sydney Silverman.The act was temporary and contained a ‘sunset clause’. Parliament had five years in which to change their mind. They didn’t and the bill was given a full ascent in 1969. Except in cases of High Treason the death penalty no longer applied. It was completely removed from UK law in 1998. This was a formality.
Very sadly, she died alone and forgotten in a nursing home in Ticehurst, Sussex, on 30 April 1966, aged 84. Her wealth was reduced to just ₤15,52. She had spent it all on campaigning and her passions. She had no children and no one to leave it to. I think it is so sad that this can happen to women.
Another inspiring woman of Battersea Evelyn Dove who was the first black performer to sing on BBC radio in 1925, had a great career touring in the US, Europe, Russia and India, stood in for Josephine Baker in the Casino de Paris, entertained the troops in WW11 alongside Vera Lynn and she also died after many years in a home with only one friend attending her funeral. Thanks to Stephen Bourne for writing her biography and I have blogged about her too, not only is it fascinating to read about these women but essential that we commemorate them whenever we can.

O’Casey – Battersea plaque man

I did a talk on three Battersea men who are commemorated with English Heritage/LCC plaques. There are now seventeen of them since Sir Robert Hunter, one of the three co-founders of the National Trust, was unveiled at 5 Louvaine Road. As I have concentrated on celebrating the neglected inspiring women of Battersea in blogs, walks and talks I thought I would look at some of the men and, obviously, chose the one’s that interested me. The three were Charles Sargeant Jagger, the war memorial sculptor, Sean O’ Casey, Irish playwright and memoirist and the cartoonist and painter Henry Mayo Bateman who also featured in the south Battersea plaques walk that I did in August as the 150th anniversary of Wandsworth Common was being celebrated.
Jagger, David; Charles Jagger (1885-1934); Museums Sheffield; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/charles-jagger-18851934-72242
The piece on Seán included a section from his memoirs when he wrote about his time in Battersea when he lived at 49 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive SW11 which is opposite Battersea Park. The chapter was entitled Drive of Snobs and he talks of his neighbours and a previous resident of the block G K Chesterton whom he evidently did not admire.
Seán O’Casey 1880-1964 was an Irish playwright who is best known for his first three plays – Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Having suffered a number of personal attacks due to the content of the third, he left Dublin for London where he met 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.
Seán O’Casey was born in Dublin in 1880 and he grew up in poverty surrounded by the tenements of Dorset Street that would form the backdrop of his ground-breaking plays. He was born John Casey in 1880, the last of five surviving children out of thirteen of Michael and Susan Casey, staunch Protestants both. Sean was an active member of St Barnabas’ church at the North Wall quay until his mid-20s
Sean’s Homes
His 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. They were, nevertheless, Protestant which would have set them somewhat apart from their Catholic neighbours and with it some hostility to and snobbery about Catholics, including from his mother. His final home where he wrote his early plays at 422 North Circular Road is possibly to become a homeless shelter which would meet with Seán’s approval.
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, probably helped by his sister Bella.
The Caseys moved to to East Wall where spent next 30 years, in the parish of St Barnabas to, a close-knit working-class community between the docklands and the northern railway line He left school at fourteen and worked at a variety of jobs, including a nine-year period as a railwayman on the Great Northern Railway. He worked in Eason’s for a short while, in the newspaper distribution business, but was sacked for not taking off his cap when collecting his wage packet
Seán and brother Archie would act out little plays, and he saw his first professional play, Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun in the Queen’s Theatre in Pearse Street.
He joined the Gaelic League in 1906, learned to speak Irish, changed his name to Sean O’Casey, learned to play the Uileann Pipes and was a founder and secretary of the St Lawrence O Toole Pipe Band, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, became an ardent socialist, was general secretary of the Irish Citizen Army and, most importantly, began to write. He became involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union which represented the interests of the unskilled workers who lived in the Irish tenements. He was influenced by labour leader Jim Larkin. O’Casey wrote for the Irish Worker. By then he was also atheist as well as a committed socialist.
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 was involved directly with the Lock-out and Strike, starving with his fellow workers, he saw and was affected by the horrors of the Rising and the troubles that followed. He became disillusioned with the Irish nationalist movement because its leaders put nationalist ideals before socialist ones.
There was also great sadness for the Casey family, brother Tom died in 1914, and in 1918 his only sister, Bella, and his dearly beloved mother, Susan died.
After early rejections, his first play, ‘The Shadow of the Gunman’, was produced by The Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1923. It dealt with the impact of revolutionary politics on the working class people of Dublin. I played Mrs Grigson in 1964 with the University College Galway Drama Society, the photo of me is from the Evening Herald. Obviously, I had to use this opportunity to show this rare photo of myself when young!.
Seán’s next play was ‘Juno and the Paycock’ (1924) which deals with the Civil War. The success of Juno enabled him to give up his job as labourer.
This was followed by ‘The Plough and the Stars’ (1926) which dealt and the Easter Rising and depicting the lives of the slum dwellers. Some audiences greeted ‘The Plough and the Stars’ with derision as they rejected it and rioted, outraged by its less than reverential depiction of the Easter Rising. An equally annoyed WB Yeats famously arrived on stage himself and shouted at the protesters, “You have disgraced yourselves again!” obviously harking back to the reception that Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. These are tragi-comedies in which violent death throws into relief the blustering masculine bravado of characters such as Jack Boyle and Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock and the heroic resilience of Juno herself or of Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars.
In 1926 Sean had travelled to London to receive the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and also publicising The Plough and the Stars. It was during casting he met Eileen Carey who was also from an Irish background. Indeed, she had wanted to meet the celebrated playwright.
In 1929, his great anti-war play ‘The Silver Tassie’ showing the devastating impact of WW1 on an Irish footballer and his friends, it features a surreal battleground scene which shocked an unsuspecting WB Yeats, a director of the Abbey who now rejected the new play out of hand. Declaring that O Casey shouldn’t write about the trenches because he hadn’t experienced them and he also objected to the sundering of conventional dramatic conventions.

It was premiered at the Apollo Theatre London directed by Raymond Massey starred Charles Laughton (married to Battersea’s Elsa Lanchester) and set design by Augustus John.( John had spent time living and painting in Galway the previous decade). Shaw and Lady Gregory had a favourable opinion of the show. It was recently re-imagined as an opera by Mark Anthony Turnage.
These plays now stand with the great plays of the last century and he became known to an international audience. O’Casey was so disgusted with the reactions that he left Ireland to live in England for the rest of his life. He was visiting the US regularly promoting and being consulted on his plays.
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. Religious groups protested outside the Gaiety Theatre, inside there were cries of “Blasphemy”, “Sacrilege!” and “Get out, ye dirty Protestants!”

“It was a very exciting evening,” recalls Shivaun “Leaflets were thrown down on our heads from the gallery and my mother Eileen whispered to me, ‘They’re trying to make it like the Plough, dear.'”
Seán and Eileen settled in 49 Overstrand Mansions which he described as a five roomed flat. In all his volumes of his memoirs he refers to himself in the third person as Seán. It has been suggested that was to avoid any libel action. 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. My husband’s grandmother actually worked as a lived in nanny to the bbutler and housemaid’s children of a family in Overstrand Mansions and would recall using the gate across the road into the park.
Seán discovered that GK Chesterton had once lived in Overstrand Mansions. (Incidentially, names of blocks Overstrand, Norfolk, Cyril and nearby Roseberry are named by Cyril Flowers developer and Liberal MP who became Lord Battersea. Overstrand was where him and his wife Constance Rothschild had their beautiful Lutyens designed home The Pleasaunce).
Seán refers to a columnist in the Irish Press, ( De Valera’s paper whom he hated) in which he claimed that the great democrat Chesterton had lived in Overstrand Mansions plump in the middle of the workers and the poor. (GKC had left in 1909 for Beaconsfield). O’Casey obviously was not a fan of the Catholic convert GKC and used this to observe his fellow residents.
They may have occasionally glimpsed a poor woman or child coming to the park to play or rest but no fuller revelation of the workers life comes before the eyes of or enters the mind of the select residents of the flats of the select mansions of Battersea. These hoity-toity persons were far more selective of their chance acquaintances than were the proper persons of Park Lane. The livers in these flats were higher-low middle class a step or two down from the grade of the middle class who lived on the other side of the river in the Borough of Chelsea – so they had one more river to cross before the entered the land of Canaan. Battersea was almost wholly working class and so families of mansion flats shoved themselves as far as possible, bodily and spiritually, to the edge of the district. All they knew of workers was the distant glimpse of sooty roofs they got from the higher up windows of at the back of the flats . The name of the Borough rarely appeared on the notepaper of residents who hid the humiliation under the simple postal symbol of London SW11. It was if they innocently crossed the border of Chelsea and had settled in Battersea without knowing it.
The first floor flats had had a balcony going across the front of the façade, the 2nd floor a concrete jut-out on which one could stand, but couldn’t sit, and the upper floor had no balcony at all:- so the rents sank as the flats mounted.
As well as this distinction between the flats themselves there was also a distinction between the blocks Overstrand being ever so slightly more genteel than the York block and York was careful to await an advance from Overstrand before assuming an acquaintance with Overstrand for fear of a snub.for it is almost unbearable for one snob to be snubbed by another.
Once a Mrs Black almost next door to him, wife of a civil servant , was presented at court. She dipped the knees in a curtsy to kingship and returned to the flat creaking with exultation. Her kingdom had come and she stepped gallantly into it. for that night into her court dress feathers and all, her husband in a white tie and tails, with a few select friends, sat down in the flats dinnin groom to a five course dinner, done to a turn by a qualified chef, served by a footman in a coloured coat and plush britches and eaten by candlelight: a first class offering of thanks to God for his regarding of the highliness of his handmaiden who had now been magnified in the sight of all her neighbours.
There was a Mrs Green with husband and children Pauline and Peter all rigid with fear of touching person, place or thing beneath them and quivery with desire to acquaint themselves with person, place or thing they thought to be above them. Once a month mother, son and daughter went to ride in Richmond – all morning of departure there was a running up and down parade of hard hats, riding whips and jodphurs – each was taut with a constricting fear of canter and gallop from the time they got on the horses to the time they got off again. No said the mother once to Sean they had never been in a stable. They mounted of course, in the yard and she was shocked when Sean told her a horse wouldn’t know what to do with her till her nose had got used to the smell of dung and horse sweat.
Mrs Green gave her flat greater eminence by giving all the corks drawn from champagne bottles to the tune of a one a month honoured preservation. She fixed all the corks in a finely made walnut frame windowed with fine glass enclosing a soft bed of cramosie velvet on which cosy corks lay each crowned with tinsel with an ivory tinted card with the name of the wine, the district from whence it came and the vintage with the year month and day it was drunk. There they lay like dried up shrunken heads of enemies to be honoured and gloated over.
Here in the medley of dressing for dinner, creaking jodhpusrs, grades in flats and cars, in assembly of champagne corks in one maid or two maid establihsments, in first or second class convent school, in carat weight of collar stud or cufflinks here the Irish Press declared that Chesterton was living among the workers and the poor.
He goes on to say the residents of the flats spluttered with indignation when Battersea Council organised popular entertainments flooding the park with poorer children jostling the middle class children and transferring their surplus vermin thus providing breeding ground for louse and flea. The residents never raised a word against the conditions that inflicted these upon the children of others. Again when a rough and tumble crèche was a roped in patch of grass was founded to give working class mothers a snatch of rest from their labours by leaving their toddlers there for tuppence a head an hour a head, the residents as superior rate payers sighed a complaint and sent it to the Council complaining that the crying of the children disturbed and that the creche utterly destroyed the order and serenity of the park.
The residents having no gardens of their own treated Battersea Park as their own private one like the green squares in cities where residents are provided with private keys rigidly keeping others out. On fine days the benches around the bandstand were crowded with nannies or mothers with their own children on their nannies day off.
Seán recalled talking to a Mrs Mellor at the bandstand who was anxious because her husband who was editor of Tribune, was ill in hospital. She mentioned that she hoped that when he recovered that they would live and work in the constituency that he hoped to represent for Labour. Obviously she was someone that Sean would have respected.
I had wondered if the names Mrs Green and Mrs Black the real names of his neighbours but obviously Mrs Mellor was real. I checked up on William Mellor, first editor of Tribune founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and although married he had a ten year affair with the young Barbara Castle before she married Ted Castle!
The O’ Caseys moved to Totnes Devon in 1938 with his two sons Breon and Niall. This was on the advice of their friend Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw who suggested that the boys should attend Dartington Hall School. “That’s the only school for the O’Casey children,” he declared. Shivaun, was born a year later. Among the family friends who sent letters of congratulations were Shaw who congratulated Eileen on producing a girl after two boys, declaring: “Sisterless men are always afraid of women.”and future British prime minister Harold Macmillan.
According to Seán’s biographer: ‘Eileen and O’Casey’s marriage had become celibate by the time she was in her fifties, now a strikingly handsome woman, notable for her warm wit, who, on her own candid admission, fulfilled her sexual needs outside marriage … One ardent, lifelong admirer was Macmillan, who in later life gently broached to her the idea of marriage, which she declined.
Eileen’s obituary notice in the Evening Standard stated: ‘It was the death of Seán O’Casey in 1964, and of Dorothy Macmillan, two years later, that cemented Macmillan and Eileen’s intimacy. She became the light which illuminated his prime years, eventually even replacing Dorothy in his affections.’ O’Casey’s biographer notes that ‘Eileen was the first woman whom Macmillan asked to sit in Lady Dorothy’s place at table in Birch Grove; he also took her out frequently to dine at Buck’s Club.’ Eileen’s obituary in The Times records that ‘she became one of Harold Macmillan’s closest friends. The two grew even closer after the death of their respective spouses. That Macmillan never proposed marriage was a source of bewilderment to outsiders, although Eileen was understanding about his shyness….Her relationship with Macmillan, which only ended with his death in 1986, was a source of comfort to her in old age. For his part, he relied completely on her honest, outspoken Irish perspective.
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.
- Nannie’s Night Out, 1924
- Within the Gates, 1934
- The End of the Beginning, 1937
- A Pound on Demand, 1939
- The Star Turns Red, 1940
- Red Roses for Me, 1942
- Purple Dust, 1940/1945
- Oak Leaves and Lavender, 1946
- Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, 1949
- Hall of Healing, 1951
- Bedtime Story, 1951
- Time to Go, 1951
- The Bishop’s Bonfire, 1955
- A Sad Play within the Tune of a Polka, 1955
- The Drums of Father Ned, 1959
- Behind the Green Curtains, 1961
- Figuro in the Night, 1961
- The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, 1961
These, however, were less realist and more symbolic and expressionist. With the exception of ‘Within the Gates’, none of his later plays received either critical or commercial success. He also issued a six part autobiography known collectively as ‘Mirror in my House’.
Despite his failing eyesight, Seán continued to write until his death. ‘this gaunt fiery writer never abandoned his faith in the dignity of man.”
The New York Times suggested that he wrote his own epitaph in the last of his autobiographical books “Here with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down, and with only the serenity and calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!”
As O’Casey’s last surviving child, Shivaun feels both proud and protective of his legacy. In particular, she is keen to dispel the popular notion that he was a bitter, cantankerous man who ended up hating his native country.”The truth is that he always loved Ireland and kept in close contact with it,” she insists. “He just didn’t like the conservative political direction it had taken.”Shivaun is his executor and responsible for the website which has up to date information on productions, reviews etc of all things O’Casey and run by Shivaun’s son Ruben Kenig http://seanocasey.co.uk/author/rubken/
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. It had a stellar cast with Rod Taylor playing John cassidy, Maggie Smith as Nora, Julie Christie as Daisy Battles, Michael redgrave as W.B.Yeats, Edith Evans as Augusta Gregory, T.P. McKenna as Tom, Jack MacGowran as Archie, Sian Phillips as Ella and Flora Robson as Mrs Cassidy.
Very recently his great grand daughter Agnes O Casey, Shivaun’s granddaughter starred in Ridley Road. Her father is Ruben Kenig and so her grandfather was Jewish and this has been important to her in playing this role. The O’Casey theatrical gene continues. She was superb in it and, no doubt, she will play one of Seán heroine’s sometime.
I loved this piece about Marilyn Monroe and O’Casey by Mary Morrisey. https://marymorrissy.com/2014/04/14/marilyn-and-sean-fashion-icons/. Cleo is a knitwear and handcrafts shop on Dublin’s Kildare Street, opened by Kitty Joyce in the 1930s, and now run by her daughter. It’s the subject of a book and features photographs from the shop’s back catalogues of celebrity customers wearing its merchandise, including Marilyn and Sean. Mary Morrisey has also written a novel The Rising of Bella Casey about Sean’s sister Bella who was very much a mother figure to him and probably inspired his depiction of his celebrated female characters. . She had trained as primary school teacher and probably helped Sean with his schooling. but married beneath her and seems to have fallen out of the family narrative. Morrissey recreates for her a life that fills the gaps in her story. She had the ill-luck of becoming an early Irish victim of the Spanish ‘flu, over a hundred years ago and had married a British soldier who died of syphillis cavorting with prostitutes.
I went down so many internet alleys while looking into the life of Seán. I was interested in his relationships with people like Augusta Gregory whom he was very fond of and they got on well, even after the debacle with the Abbey. When she came to London, while he was living in Battersea in her quest to sort out her nephew Hugh Lane’s bequest of paintings after he died when the Lusitania sank Sean accompanied her. Lane had had lived at Lindsay House on Cheyne Walk just across the river in Chelsea.
I was very struck by the way Seán, frequently referred to the triumvirate of James Joyce,Yeats and Shaw in his memoirs as if he felt he was being compared with them. He certainly felt strong affinity with Shaw as both were Protestant, socialist and playwrights. It seems that Shaw and his wife were very fond Eileen.
This is a video of Sean reminiscing with Barry Fitzgerald and talk
I was delighted to just read that Galway’s Druid Theatre with Garry Hynes directing are staging three short plays of Seán’s. I led a walk of Notable Galway Women which included Garry Hynes. Serendipity!!

South Battersea plaques walk
I thought I ought to organise some Battersea plaques walks. The first one covers the south of Battersea. I decided on this as it is the 150th anniversary of the Wandsworth Common Act which is being celebrated by the Friends of Wandsworth Common this year. The Battersea Society agreed to unveiling a plaque to John Buckmaster at the Brighton Yard entrance to Clapham Junction Station.

Buckmaster spearheaded the campaign to prevent further encroachments of Wandsworth Common and to hand it over to trustees from Earl Spencer. It was already half the size it had been. Viscount Adrian Buckmaster his great grandson, unveiled the plaque, Sue Demont Chair of Battersea Society Heritage Committee, Sir Peter Hendy Chair of Network Rail and Lucy Mowatt Wandsworth Council Deputy Mayor spoke and I was MC. Afterwards we headed of to St Mark’s Triangle under the willow tree for refreshments with me leading them with my Down with the Fences placard. John Buckmaster was a fascinating man going from farm labourer aged ten, to Anti- Corn Laws paid agitator, to St John’s Teacher Training College in Battersea, teacher, lecturer, Battersea Vestryman, Wandsworth Common saviour etc. He lived in New Road/Prested Road which was taken over by the station development.
We met at the corner of Clapham Common Westside and Nightingale Lane on a very hot Sunday 18th July at 11.00 close to Hightrees House. In the Summer of 1962 I was staying with my sisters in Manchuria Road nearby and used to place tennis on the courts with a man who had a flat here.

Mad dogs and Englishmen came to mind although we were mainly women! Walk down Thurleigh Avenue for Gus Elen, Music hall comedian, back down Holmside to Nightingale Lane to number 40 for Henry Mayo Bateman cartoonist, then to 99 Elizabeth House on the opposite side of the road for Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Prince of Preachers, on to Nightingale House for Lord Wandsworth who donated the house and grounds to establish the Jewish Elders Home with a plaque to Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis world champion boxer, crossover to go down Hendrick Avenue to 24 Morella Road the home of Ida and Louise Cook, opera-loving Jewish rescuers, who do not have a proper plaque as the owners won’t agree to having one yet, and on to 26 Bolingbroke Grove which is now Northcote Lodge School, formerly Linden Lodge School for the Blind, which has the plaque to Sir George Shearing Jazz composer who was a pupil there.
Gus Elen1862-1940 music hall performer and comedian lived at 3 Thurleigh Avenue from 1898. Plaque unveiled in 1979 by GLC. He achieved success from 1891, performing cockney songs including “Arf a Pint of Ale”, “It’s a Great Big Shame”, and “If It Wasn’t for the ‘Ouses in Between” in a career lasting over thirty years.
Born in Pimlico, he worked as a barman, a draper’s assistant and packed eggs for the Co-op before becoming a singer. He began busking at an early age and singing in a minstrel troupe. His solo success began in 1891 when he started performing in public houses, singing similar to costermongers, dressed in a coster uniform of striped jersey, peaked cap turned towards one ear and a short clay pipe in the side of his mouth, adopted a persona of being constantly bad tempered and pugnacious.
In 1907 he starred in a short film called Wait Till the Work Comes Round. He was scouted to go to the US around the time of the Music Hall strike where he was . He then made several appearances as a top attraction in music halls across London. He retired in 1914. He appeared on stage occasionally in the1930s, in the 1935 Royal command Performance. He was well known for his involvement in charity events, was a fiercely private person, bred poultry, took up photography, became a keen fisherman, and enjoyed shooting. He died in 1940 aged 77 and is buried in Streatham Park Cemetery. There are some videos and recordings of him.
Henry Mayo Bateman 1887 – 1970 20th century cartoonist and caricaturist at 40 Nightingale Lane
Plaque erected in 1997 by English Heritage. H M Bateman moved here from Clapham with his parents in 1910, at the age of 23. The area provided rich pickings for his satirical exposés of middle-class suburban manners. H. M. Bateman was noted for 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’.
Born New South Wales, soon returned to England, he was always drawing from an early age, consistently producing funny drawings that told stories, attended Forest Hill House School, studied at Westminster School of Art when 16 transferred his study to the New Cross Art school (Goldsmiths College).
In 1908 aged 21 nervous breakdown, changed from illustrated jokes to funny self explanatory cartoons. rejected by the army in WW1 he went depressed to a remote inn on Dartmoor prodigiously producing strip cartoons that immediately gripped the public and the attention of his fellow artists by 1921 developed into ‘Man who series’ becoming the most highly paid cartoonist in the country, sought after by advertisers, engaged in America and Australia, published in Europe. battle with the Inland Revenue, gave up humorous art before WW2.
Married Brenda, two children, Diana, Cartoon Museum co-founder, Monica artist as are Tilly and Lucy grand daughters. I got in touch with Lucy and bought one of her watercolours that I said reminded me of Heaney’s poem Girls Bathing at Salthill 1965. Lucy is a prolific artist and runs art tours and courses. http://www.lucywillis.com

Bateman lived at Curridge north of Newbury Berkshire. After he stopped doing cartoons Henry travelled andpainted around Britain and overseas pursuing his old dream of becoming a “serious painter”. He left for Gozo alone in the sixties. He died in his 82th year there, still painting every day. He lived simply and modestly in a quiet hotel, in a room with the finest view. Lucy went there with one of her groups and retraced and painted many of the scenes he painted and wrote an article about it. http://www.hmbateman.com/uploads/files/malta-and-gozo-in-my-grandfathers-footsteps.pdf
A centenary celebration of his work was exhibited at the Royal festival hall in 1987. I shall be doing a talk in November at St Mary’s Church of three male plaque recipients including Bateman alongside playwright Sean O’Casey who lived at 49 Overstrand Mansions Prince of Wales Drive opposite Battersea Park and war sculptor Charles Sargent Jagger who lived at 67 Albert Bridge Road. The last two will also feature in a north Battersea plaques walk and blog.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon 1834–1892) was an English Particular Baptist preacher Helensburgh, built around 1864 by William Higgs for the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, replacing an earlier house of the same name. drawn by the area’s ‘secludedness’
Now Queen Elizabeth House, twelve flats for sheltered housing. By today’s standards, the house in Nightingale Lane would seem quite large enough for a minister and his family, but Spurgeon’s status as leading evangelical preacher of the day demanded a considerable staff, moved to a palatial home called Westwood in what is now Spurgeon Road, Upper Norwood, where he employed two secretaries, a butler, cook, maids, gardeners and a coachman. Up high, its greater distance from the fogs of London helped to alleviate his chest problems. The site is now occupied by a girls’ school.
Spurgeon was pastor for 38 years of the congregation of the New Park Street Chapel later the Metroplitan Tabernacle an Independent Reformed Baptist church in the Elephant and Castle. It was the largest non-conformist church of its day in 1861in London, with a 6,000-seat auditorium., burned down in 1898, portico and basement survived, destroyed again in 1957. The Tabernacle rebuilt, much smaller with surviving original features.
By 1970 the congregation had fallen left the Baptist union again on Dr. Peter Masters became pastor, same issues as as 1887. Numbers increased, and hosts an annual School of Theology, part-time Seminary, five Sunday schools, live-streaming of services. controversies with the Baptist Union of Great Britain left the denomination.
Spurgeon authored sermons, an autobiography, commentaries, books on prayer, devotionals,his oratory skills spellbound , remains highly influential among Christians known as the “Prince of Preachers”.
Spoke unrehearsed and freely. “Dramatic to his fingertips,” ,wandered the platform, acting out bible stories with graphic, emotion-packed language, his sermons are never unduly complex or flowery, but immensely practical and encouraging. They are full of wit and concrete examples. Some were offended by his sentimentalism and charismatic sensationalism called him “the pulpit buffoon.”Pulpit Buffoon or Finest Preacher of His Day.
Marriage was a loving and mutually supportive partnership, both endured their share of physical and mental struggles. a difficult delivery left her house-bound for much of her life despite seeing the best consultants and surgeons. She remained active in ministry, publishing several of her own books and overseeing a vast book distribution ministry that was a huge blessing to many pastors.
He also founded Spurgeons College to train men who had limited formal education, no academic requirements for admission. More than 150 years later, the theological centre still exists today. It was only six years after his own conversion in 1850 at the age of 16 that he founded the college that bears his name. During his lifetime nearly 900 pastors trained at the College and almost 200 new churches were planted in Britain alone.
He also founded Stockwell Orphanage, which opened for boys in 1867 and for girls in 1879, and which continued in London until it was bombed in the WW2 became Spurgeons Children’s Charity which still exists. Now, each year we will typically have contact with around 30,000 children and young people and protect hundreds from harm, supports around 800 young people through our young carers services in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. These young people are caring for a family member with an illness or disability. They have to grow up too fast.
His opposition slavery, lost support from the Southern Baptists he received scores of threatening and insulting letters as a consequence. The “Prince of Preachers” final sermon June of 1891. Six months later Jan 1892 he died. at Menton near Nice where he often recuperated, France. His funeral procession was witnessed by vast crowds, with flags at half mast and shops closed. He enjoyed cigars and smoked a “F. P Del Rio y Ca.” in his last days according to his grandson. Spurgeon was survived by his wife and sons.

His remains were buried at West Norwood where the tomb is still visited by admirers, has a sculpted marble portrait and bible open at the text I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. This is directly in front of the entrance to the crematorium where I have conducted many Humanist funerals.
There are more titles by Spurgeon in print than any other Christian author/preacher living or dead.

Sidney Stern Sydney James Stern, 1st Baron Wandsworth, JP 1844 –912 was a British banker, Liberal MP, philanthropist and member of the Stern banking family. In 1907 The Home for Aged Jews moved to ‘Ferndale House’ which was bequeathed by Lord Wandsworth.

He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and was also admitted to the Inner Temple in 1874. He worked in his father’s firm of Stern Brothers. The Stern family traces its root back to the 17th century merchants of Frankfurt’s Jewish Quarter. In 1805, Jacob Stern converted the family business into a bank called Jacob S.H. Stern & Co., which became one of the most prominent banking institution in Germany. He sent his sons from Frankfurt to build banks in three of the most important European capitals, Paris, London and Berlin, where they prospered over the subsequent two centuries. David and Hermann Stern set up in London. Stern Bros. of 57 Gracechurch Street, London EC, were merchant banks and manufacturers of lubricating oils (suppliers of Sternoline). In 1869, King Luis 1 of Portugal conferred the noble title of visconde on David Stern in recognition of the work of Stern’s bank in floating Portuguese loans. In the United Kingdom, the family historically supported many causes, including social welfare in London’s East End, support for those affected by the First World War and other causes. Herbert Stern, Lord Michelham, bequeathed the quadriga Wellington Arch 1912. In 1883, Baron Herman de Stern acquired Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole’s gothic fantasy, in Twickenham, Herbert Strawberry Hill saw countless magnificent gatherings.
Sydney Stern decided he wanted to go into politics. He unsuccessfully contested the Middle Division of Surrey in 1880 and 1884, Tiverton in 1885, Ipswich in 1886 MP for Stowmarket in a by-election in 1891, 19 July 1895 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Wandsworth, of Wandsworth in the County of London (he also held a Portuguese viscountcy by right of his father). His elevation to the peerage was a quid pro quo for donations he had made to Gladstone. The then Liberal Prime Minister Lord Rosebery was only willing to fulfill that promise (given his own commitment to Lords reform) after receiving a written request from Gladstone that he honour the deal. He was a Justice of the Peace Surrey and London, was awarded the rank of honorary colonel in the 4th volunteer battalion of the East Surrey Regiment . He served as vice-president of the London and Counties Radical Union.
He died at his London home, 10 Great Stanhope Street, Mayfair, on 10 February 191T. He remained unmarried. There is no information on his private life so I suspect he was gay. The Barony became extinct. He left an estate £1,555,985 and bequeathed to charity, over a million being given to found the Lord Wandsworth Orphanage.
In 1920 (after delays caused by WW1) a preparatory school for boys and girls between 5 and 12 years old at Gosden House in Baramley Surrey was opened. Preference was given to the children of agricultural labourers of his Stowmarket Suffolk. Pupils would leave the school by the age of 13, the girls continuing their education in Guildfprd while the boys went on to the Lord Wandsworth Agricultural College in Long Sutton Hampshire, which is now known as Lord Wandsworth College Alumni are known as Sternians. The school became fee-paying for students in 1946. The 1,200-acre site houses the College buildings, facilities and Stern Farm.
Nightingale had its origins the Hand in Hand Asylum for Decayed Tradesmen (founded 1840), the Widows’ Home Asylum (founded 1843) and the Jewish Workhouse also known as the Jewish 1871.
In 1904 Lord Wandsworth purchased a large mansion called Ferndale and its grounds in Nightingale Lane Balham for £5,200 and donated it to the charity.
In 1907 the Home for Aged Jews moved from its existing premises in Hackney to ‘Ferndale’ at 105 Nightingale Lane, SW12. The plaque states: This freehold building and the land in which it stands were presented for the purposes of a home for the aged poor of the Jewish faith by the Rt. Honourable Lord Wandsworth in memory of his father David Viscount de Stern and his mother Sophia Viscountess de Stern. The lower plaque inscription : This stone was laid by the Right Honourable Lord Wandsworth on July 17th 1906.
Wm. Flockhart F.R.I.B.A. Architect.
Wm. Johnson & Co. Ltd. Builders.
In the 1970’s The Home for the Aged Jews officially became known as Nightingale House, in 1997 the Home was renamed Nightingale. The residents by then were much frailer and dependent requiring greater levels of nursing and paramedical staff. The average age of residents in 2001 was 88 years. There have been various additions – Clore Art and Craft Centre (1986) and Balint Wing (1987). In 1960s Nightingale House 105 Nightingale Lane, Wandsworth LB.
Ted Kid Lewis Ted “Kid” Lewis born Gershon Mendeloff 1893 –1970 in 2003 plaque unveiled by his son, Morton.
Born Gershon Mendelhoff in October 1893, he was the third of eight children, his Jewish parents having fled persecution in their native Russia. The family lived in a gas-lit tenement on Umberston Street in Whitechapel, forming part of a growing Jewish diaspora in London’s East End.
Like much of the area’s population, both native and immigrant, the Mendelhoff family was poor. The young Gershon suffered at the hands of local Irish boys who goaded him about his Jewish heritage, and he fought back with his fists. It is said that a local policeman first steered the youngster towards the fight game, spotting the boy in a street brawl and recognising his latent pugilistic ability. Gershon soon joined the Judean Athletic Club and began competing as ‘Kid Lewis’, supposedly in homage to the great welterweight champion and fellow Jewish fighter Harry Lewis (Ted was not added until years later, when he travelled to America).
Lewis spent much of his early career fighting at the Judean, as well as the newly opened Premierland venue on Whitechapel’s Black Church Street. He turned pro aged 14 and competed almost fortnightly throughout 1910 and 1911 as he sought to hone his craft.
His career soon took him overseas, with Lewis embarking on the long sea journeys to Australia and then on to America to find fights, his options having become scarce in Britain following the outbreak of World War I. When in Australia rather then returning home Lewis and Goodman headed off to America, the decision apparently made on the toss of a coin. “TK was later to wonder whether the coin that had been used was a double-tailed one”
It was in the U.S. that Lewis found his greatest success and, for a time, became a genuine celebrity. His breakthrough fight came in August 1915, when he headed to Boston to take on the Irish-American fighter Jack Britton, nicknamed ‘the Boxing Marvel’. Britton and Lewis were to fight another 19 times over the next 6 years, one of the great rivalries of boxing history Lewis emerged as the victor on points and thus claimed the world welterweight championship. In doing so, he became the first British boxer to win a global title on American soil. He met his future wife Elsie Schneider in New York, and became a close friend of Charlie Chaplin, who would act as godfather to Lewis’ son Morton.
He was in the US and encouraged by the British Embassy to remain as propaganda during WW1, signed up and became a boxing instructor with the US Army. He met and fell in love with Elsie Schneider and it was a very happy marriage of forty-five years until her death. They had their only child Morton who became a film maker and wrote his father’s biography referring to him as TK.

TK continued to fight until he retired in 1929, he served as a boxing referee, some acting roles, a bookmaker, a purveyor of wines and spirits, a security officer, a travel agent and he also made numerous personal appearances as a celebrity. He loved it all according to Morton, who often accompanied his Dad as he was involved as a film maker especially of boxing documentaries.
In the early thirties TK became involved with Oswald Mosley who was chief of the New Party. Naive TK was mesmerised by the charisma and oratory of Mosley when he said he wanted to fight for the poor of the East End. TK was flattered when he asked him to be the physical instructor to the bodyguards. He was persuaded to stand as a candidate in Whitechapel in 1931. When TK was warned by his friends that Mosley was anti-semitic so he went to confront him about it. The account by Morton is very funny. When Mosley admitted it TK, who had brought young Morton with him, sent Mosley flying against a wall and knocked out the two brown shirted henchmen flat and left but took Morton around the corner and went back and did the same for the two bodyguards at the entrance.

The widowed TK lived from 1966 at Nightingale House and died there at the age of 76. after living there for four years. These were among the happiest years of his life, according to Morton, who unveiled the plaque in 2003.in Nightingale House, He is buried in East Ham Jewish Cemetery.
Ida 1904 –1986 and Louise Cook1901–1991 lived at 24 Morella Road, no plaque yet, rescued Jews from the Nazis during the 1930s, helping 29 people escape, funded mainly by Ida’s writing. In 1965, they were honoured as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel.
I have written a blog on them. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/ida-and-louise-cook/
Ida and Louise Cook had lived in Sunderland where their father was a Customs and Excise Officer was based, then they moved to Alnwick where they were educated the Duchess’ School there opposite the castle . Eventually, they settled in 24 Morella Road SW12 and lived there for the next sixty years. Louise started to work for the Ministry of education and Ida followed her as a copy typist. The two civil servants became avid opera lovers, started following their stars to US, Germany and Austria.
This began when Louise came home excited from a lunchtime classical music concert and they decided to buy a gramophone and ten records two of which were of sopranos and one was by Amelita Galli-Curci . They went to hear her sing at the Albert Hall in a concert and resolved to go to hear her at The Met in New York where she sang in opera. it took two years saving up from their salaries and they made their own outfits for it. This was the start of their decision to follow their favourite stars. They became groupies collecting autographs and taking photos as they hung about at the stage doors. American Rosa Ponselle was the next singer with whom they became friends with. They became friends with bass Ezio Penza, Tito Gobi with whom Ida ghost wrote his biography and the conductor Klemens Krauss and his wife soprano Viorica Ursuleac.
This was financed by Ida who had written occasional articles for Mabs Fashions, was persuaded to give up her day job to become as a sub editor with the magazine by Miss Taft the editor. Ida was then encouraged to write short stories, then a serial Wife to Christopher when she was introduced to Charles Boon.
Between 1936 and 1985, Ida Cook wrote 112 romance novels as Mary Burchell for Mills and Boon.
It was in the thirties that they were approached by Clemens and Viorica . to help Jewish people to leave Austria and Germany as the Nazis were beginning to persecute and exclude them jobs. The first was the musicologist Frau Mayer-Lissmann. They developed a modus operandi. Louise learned German and they began making frequent trips back and forth to Germany, flying out of Croydon Airport on Friday nights, in an era when commercial air travel was not at all common, and returning by train and boat from the Netherlands, in time for Louise to get to her office on Monday morning. verything you had, and when you came out you were checked again.” They adapted by entering at one checkpoint, wearing no jewelry, wristwatches, and leaving through another, positively glittering. That way, they wouldn’t see the same officials twice, “and there was no one to notice that we had become rather overdressed English girls with a taste for slightly too much jewellery.” If they got challenged they would claim to be two nervous eccentric opera lovers who didn,t trust their family to leave behind their jewelry.They also changed the labels for English ones on the fur coats that they wore. They organised paperwork, did a lot of fund raising and getting sponsors for the people they were rescuing. I was risky work but they got on with it. They got a flat in Dolphin Square Chelsea for people in transit.
Klemens would even allow them to choose what opera he would stage and they stayed openly in grand hotels often in close proximity to high ranking Nazis.
In 1966 to 1986 Ida was the second president of, the Romantic Novelists Association, in 1950 she wrote her autobiography, We Followed Our Stars, later re-edited as Safe Passage.
Between 1936 and 1985, Ida Cook wrote 112 romance novels as Mary Burchell for Mills and Boon, 1966 to 1986 was the second president of, the Romantic Novelists Association, in 1950 she wrote her autobiography, We Followed Our Stars, later re-edited as Safe Passage.
Film Donald Rosenfeld discussed plans to make a film of the sisters’ humanitarian based on a biography of the sisters by investigative journalist Isabel Vincent. Cate Blanchett Emma Thompson. I do hope that the owners of 24 Morella Road will agree to allowing a Battersea Society plaque on the home that Ida and Louise Cook lived in quietly for nearly sixty years.
Sir George Shearing, OBE 1919 –2011) jazz pianist and composerwho led a popular jazz group of over 300 titles, including the jazz standards Lullaby of Broadway had multiple albums in the charts the 50s-90s. The plaque was unveiled 2017 by Alyn Shipton at 26 Bolingbroke Grove Northcote Lodge School, Battersea attended by lots of George’s family with written tributes from Brian Kaye of the King Singers who was a neighbour of George and Ellie when they came in the Summer to stay in the Cotswolds and from David Blunkett MP and Roger Legate Head of Lindon Lodge now in Wimbledon.. Charlotte Kirwan pianist and organist played the duet she had played when George visited the school in 1962 when she was pupil. Two pupils played one of George’s compositions accompanied by their music teacher. I have written a blog on George. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/george-shearing/
George born at 67 Arthur Street, Battersea, blind from birth, youngest of nine, father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains in the evening. He started to learn piano at the age he attended Linden Lodge School 4 years received training in classical piano, learned to read music by Braille.
He was offered several scholarships, opted to perform at pub Masons Arms Lambeth, for 225 bob a week”. He joined an all-blind band, Claude Bampton’s Blind Orchestra. He was influenced by the records of Teddy Wilsom and Fats Waller. He played on BBC radio after being befriended by Leonard Feather, with whom he started recording in 1937. In 1942 he was recruited by Stephane Grapelli (domiciled in London during WW”) to join his band, which appeared at Hatchets Restaurant in Piccadilly in the early years of the war, toured as “the Grappelly Swingtette” from 1943 onwards. He won six consecutive Top Pianist Melody Makers polls. In 1947 he emigrated to the US with his then wife Trixie Bayes from 1941 to 1973 and his daughter, Wendy.
Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, his last years split between New York and Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, where he bought a house with his second wife, singer Ella Geifert, whom he married two years after his dovorce. He continued to give concerts in the UK. In 2004, he released his memoirs, Lullaby of Birdland with Alyn Shipton.
Classical music performances with concert orchestras in 50s/60s, solos drew Satie, Delius and Debussy. His piano technique known as “The Shearing Sound”Shearing and Tormé two Grammys, one in 1983 and another in 1984.
He was appointed OBE in 1996. In 2007, knighted. “”the poor, blind kid from Battersea became Sir George Shearing. Now that’s a fairy tale come true.
in 1992 he was the subject of This is Your Life with Michael Aspel at Ronnie Scotts.
George suffered a fall at his home and retired from regular performing. He died of heart failure in New York City, at the age of 91. He is commemorated in Battersea with the George Shearing Centre.
I think that is an interesting motley group remembered in that walk.
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