Mary Tealby founder of Battersea Cats and Dogs Home
Mary was the founder of the Battersea Dogs Home and supporter of the RSPCA. Sadly, there is no photograph of Mary.
Mary Bates was born in 1801 in Huntingdon, the eldest of three children. Her father was a chemist/druggist, so her provincial life was probably not very privileged, although her younger brotherw as sent to Clare College, Cambridge, and could look forward to clerical livings. In her late twenties she was married on her 28th birthday, to a timber merchant named Robert Tealby. The family firm had a number of businesses in Hull. She settled into married life there The couple had no children. She had long been a supporter of the RSPCA in Hull, and continued to contribute to the work of the charity. http://jvc.oup.com/2015/10/05/philip-howell-mary-tealby-and-the-battersea-dogs-and-cats-home/
At some point they must have decided to separate. Mary moved from Hull to London in the early 1850s, probably in order to nurse her ailing mother, but temporary necessity became permanent separation by 1860. Mary lived at her mother’s home, 20 Victoria Road, Holloway now ( Chillingworth Road), Holloway,with her father and her brother the Reverend Edward Yates. She kept her surname for convenience after she she divorced and apparently she talked of herself as a widow.
She cared for an abandoned dog that had been found by her friend Sarah Major, but it died despite her nursing and she decided to set up a place where abandoned dogs could be cared for initially in her scullery but as the number of dogs delivered to her grew and the Islington Gazette reported her view, having found so many starving dogs in that district alone, that ‘the aggregate amount of suffering amongst those faithful creatures throughout London must be very dreadful indeed’.
The home was located in stables behind 15 and 16 Hollingsworth Street (now occupied by Freightliners Farm and Paradise Park) and was opened on 2 October 1860. It is lovely that it has not been built over and eradicated. Freightliners City Farm is a 2.5 acres green space in the very urban London Borough of Islington. It is a small community farm where a diverse range of people take part in farming and gardening and people can visit and spend time in a countryside type environment in the city. Experience a working farm in action. Freightliner’s Farm has an animal village, rare breed animals, solar dome, straw bale building, bee hive and sensory garden.https://www.freightlinersfarm.org.uk/
The home was where lost dogs could be retrieved by their owners. As the rules made clear the home was to be neither a permanent home for ‘old, worn out favourites’ nor a hospital, but a ‘temporary refuge to which humane persons may send only those lost dogs so constantly seen in the streets’. This was she called “The Temporary Home for and Starving Dogs” funded by herself, her brother and Sarah Major. The costs were met by asking for donations and Mary and Sarah Major found several generous backers. In 1860 the RSPCA agreed to assist and the committee meetings were held at the RSPCA offices at 12 Pall Mall.
The first meeting of the committee running the home was held on 27 November 1860 at the premises of the RSPCA in Pall Mall, with Mary Tealby in the chair. She was not a wealthy woman and much of the committee’s early work focused on essential fund-raising. By 1861 she had become a life governor of the home. She formed a group of like-minded individuals.
However, her enthusiasm for helping stray animals did not curry much favour with Victorian society whose moral concerns were waking up to the plight of the city’s many poor, considered to be a far more important issue than the fate of ‘dumb and unwanted’ animals. The home was also roundly mocked by elements of the press. The Times launched a scathing attack on 18 October 1860. While praising advances in animal welfare, it scorned the home as a step too far: “From the sublime to the ridiculous – from the reasonable inspirations of humanity to the fantastic exhibitions of ridiculous sentimentalism – there is but a single step… When we hear of a ‘Home for Dogs’, we venture to doubt if the originators and supporters of such an institution have not taken leave of their sober senses.”
It was Charles Dickens who helped turn public opinion in Mary’s favour. In 1862 he wrote an article for a magazine entitled All the Year Round in support of the home. Two Dog Shows played on the notion of the peculiar British love of animals and praised Mary’s initiative, comparing it with the forerunner of Crufts Dog Show. Such was Dicken’s standing in Victorian society at that time that public opinion began to turn. The home acquired Royal patronage through Queen Victoria – Queen Elizabeth is its patron today.
When Mary became ill with cancer she went to stay with their cousin Mrs Robert Weale who lived with her husband at The Elms in Biggleswade (now demolished). It was a large Victorian House in extensive grounds at the corner of Dells Lane and London Road. Robert Weale was a poor law inspector and by all accounts they lived a comfortable life with five servants and two gardeners. She died in 1865 aged sixty-three so did not survive to see the home’s move to its now famous location in Battersea in 1871.
Her grave can be found in a secluded corner of the churchyard behind the Chapter House and is inscribed ‘Mary Tealby, widow born December 30th 1801 – Died October 3rd 1865’.. She and her brother were buried in the same grave in the churchyard of St Andrew’s, Biggleswade. The dogs’ home committee recorded their loss, declaring Mary Tealby to be a ‘kind-hearted and generous lady’. Her grave has been restored in 2011.
There is a plaque commemorating Mary in Islington. Mary came top of he poll to decide which former Islington resident most deserved a plaque in their honour. the plaque was was unveiled at Freightliners Farm in Sheringham Road, close to the original site of the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs in Hollingsworth Street. Members of Mary’s family, the Battersea Cats and Dogs Home and Freightliners Farm attended the unveiling the plaque on 2 October 2015 at Freightliners Farm.
http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/battersea-dogs-home-founder-honoured-near-spot-of-original-shelter-1-4260340 October 6, 2015
An Islington People’s Plaque to Mary Tealby
Edward Bates and Sarah Major continued with the home after its move to Battersea Battersea Cats and Dogs home has seen many changes and developments over the years. https://www.battersea.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/our-history
“Battersea has always been known for our work with dogs and was originally set up to help dogs living on the streets of London.In 1883 that all changed. Following a donation of £500 by Mr Richard Barlow Kennett, Battersea began to welcome cats as well as dogs. Mr Kennett’s generous gift was entirely conditional on the organisation agreeing to start taking in cats, so that’s what we did. In that first year Battersea took in a total of 48 stray cats in addition to thousands of dogs.
The original cattery, Whittington Lodge, the world’s first purpose built cattery, designed by the renowned architect Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis still stands at the London centre today and is a heritage listed building.
In 2002, in order to reflect our growing feline intake we changed our name to ‘Battersea Dogs and Cats Home’. In 2018 we went one step further and rebranded as ‘Battersea.’
In our 160 years of history Battersea has cared for more than 3.1 million animals. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the help of our supporters. From our 1,000th volunteer to Paul O’Grady, take a look at some of the other milestones which have helped us to become one of the UK’s oldest and most famous animal rescue centres.
The Queen unveiled the plaque on the Mary Tealby Kennels and paddocks which are for for the new dogs experiencing their first few days at in the dogs home. The new, world-class facilities are designed to minimise stress and infection and introduce a calming environment. These redesigned kennels help keep noise and anxiety levels to a minimum, have underfloor heating, lots of light, air and space and an outside run for each dog.
It is interesting to note that one of the only fields where women hold a a higher percentage of executive roles than men and dominate by sheer numbers is in animal welfare. Female legislators are also more likely support animal protection legislation, making women true allies of dogs on every front. Mary Tealby was a pioneer in animal welfare and challenging male cruelty to animals for gain as hunters, poachers and entertainment or sheer cruelty.
As we know Battersea has been prominent in animal welfare. Historian Dr Hilda Keen has written about Battersea and animal welfare and gave a talk for the Clapham Society on it. She is the former Dean of Ruskin College, Oxford.
In the same year (1871) the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution was started, with funds from a trust set up in the will of Thomas Brown, on a site in Wandsworth Road, almost opposite the present Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms. This was a veterinary medical centre for the treatment (generally as ‘outpatients’) of all animals, but mainly horses in the early years. The centre survived until 1944. Under its pioneering first superintendent, Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, research was carried out into immunisation and rabies. The question of muzzling dogs, lest they spread rabies, was controversial and led to petitions and protests locally
The the anti-vivisection hospital was based here and it too as founded by a woman. Again there is no photo of her and we don’t know her first name. The hospital was founded in 1896 by Mrs Theodore Russell Monroe, secretary of the Anti Vivisection Society. It was based at 33 Prince of Wales Drive by the Sun Gate of Battersea Park at the corner with Albert Bridge Road.
The hospital was notable for not allowing animal experiments to take place in its facilities, and for refusing to employ physicians who were involved in or approved of animal research. It first opened for in-patients in 1903. It faced opposition from the medical establishment, who regarded the hospital’s existence as “a great slur upon the profession.” Because of difficulties attracting funding – its stance made it ineligible for grants from the King Edwards Hospital Fund – it lost its anti vivisection charter in 1935. It became Battersea General Hospital and absorbed into the HHS in 1948. Older Battersea folk recall visits to the anti-viv with cuts and bruises and treatment at the A&E.
Battersea was chosen as the location by the for the the statue of the Brown Dog.
http://www.self.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/Brown_Dog_affair
The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause celebre célèbre that divided the country. The little terrier had become the focus of an anti-vivisection campaign directed against Professor William Bayliss and UCL by The National Anti-vivisection Society accused of torture and illegal proceedings.
Irish feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society NAVS in London in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolitio of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898; the former sought to restrict vivisection and the latter to abolish it.
The barrister Stephen Coleridge secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society was the son of the former Lord Chief Justice of England, and great-grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His attention was drawn to the account of the brown dog. The 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act forbade the use of an animal in more than one experiment, yet it appeared that the brown dog had been used to perform surgery on the pancreas, used again by him when he opened the dog to inspect the results of the previous surgery, and used for a third time by Bayliss to study the salivary gland.. The protesters lost at trial. The brown dog statue was a memorial designed to help win the larger propaganda war.
The brown dog memorial in the Latchmere Recreation Ground, taunted scientists and medical researchers, provoking passions so high that thousands demonstrated against it. This eventually drew 24-hour police guards to prevent the memorial’s destruction.
On 10 December 1907, hundreds of medical students marched through central London waving effigies of the brown dog on sticks, clashing with suffragettes , trade unionists and 300 police officers, one of a series of battles known as the Brown Dog riots. Charlotte Despard and George Bernard Shaw avowed vegetarians spoke at a large meeting.
In March 1910, tired of the controversy, Battersea Council sent four workers accompanied by 120 police officers to remove the statue under cover of darkness, after which it was reportedly melted down by the council’s blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour
In 1985, a replacement memorial was installed in Battersea Park by Nicola Hicks based the statue on her own terrier, Brock, and it was erected in the Park in 1985, but not here.This was unveiled by Battersea resident actress Geraldine James. Once placed prominently in the park, it was quietly moved to an inconspicuous corner where it remains today. In 1992 it was removed, apparently due to a park renovation scheme, and then re-erected at its current site, in 1994. The sculpture is a thought-provoking piece that stands on its own. However, some think it is more submissive looking compared to the original. We had a lovely presentation on The Brown Dog Affair by Ian Mursell for the Battersea Society telling about the monster meetings in Battersea Town Hall.
The plinth carries the following texts on bronze plaques.The text on plaque 4 is an exact copy of the words on the original memorial.The memorial is beside a narrow path through a small wooded area immediately to the east of the Old English Garden.
The London Remembers website noted: We had some trouble finding this statue, and given the story of the original statue, we think that may be deliberate. http://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/brown–dog–statue
{Plaque 1:}
This monument replaces the original memorial to the Brown Dog erected by public subscriptions in Latchmere Recreation Ground, Battersea, in 1906.The sufferings of Brown Dog at the hands of vivisectors generated much protest and mass demonstrations. It represented the revulsion of the people of London to vivisection and animal experimentation. This new monument is dedicated to the continuing struggle to end these practices.
After much controversy the former monument was removed in the early hours of 10th March 1910. This was the result of a decision taken by the then Battersea Metropolitan Borough Council, the previous Council having supported the erection of the memorial.
{Plaque 2:}
Animal experimentation is one of the greatest moral issues of our time and should have no place in a civilised society.
In 1903, 19,084 animals suffered and died in British laboratories. During 1984 3,497,335 experiments were performed on live animals in Great Britain. Today, animals are burned, blinded, irradiated, poisoned and subjected to countless other horrifyingly cruel experiments in Great Britain.
{Plaque 3:}
Funded by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection and the National Anti-Vivisection Society.
Site provided by the Greater London Council.
Sculptor Nicola Hicks.
Unveiled on 12th December 1985.
{Plaque 4:}
In memory of the Brown Terrier dog done to death in the laboratories of University College in February 1903 after having endured vivisection – extending over more than two months and having been handed over from one vivisector to another till death came to his release.
Also in memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902.
Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?
Mary Tealby is one of the people responsible for Battersea becoming a globally recognised name.
Wihelmina Stirling Battersea House and De Morgan Collection
Wilhelmina Stirling was a a Battersea character, an author and founder of the De Morgan Collection and resident of Old Battersea House for decades and is one of my Inspiring Battersea Women. It was a such a shame that Wandsworth Council let go of the De Morgan Collection which it had inherited from the Borough of Battersea.
She was born in London in 1865, Anna Maria Diana Wilhelmina Pickering was the youngest daughter of Anna Spencer-Stanhope and Percival Pickering, Q.C. (1810-1876). She was the younger sister of Evelyn De Morgan. Over her lifetime Mrs Stirling assembled a substantial art collection that featured their work. When she died at the age of ninety-nine in 1965, she bequeathed her collection to be looked after in Trust for perpetuity.
Battersea House , the building was known as Terrace House until the 1930s. It was built for the “naval administrator”] Samuel Pett and was most likely completed in 1699. Battersea Council almost demolished the house in the 1920s and built St. John’s estate on the grounds of the house in the 1930s. In 1931 Mrs Stirling persuaded the council to lease it to her and to grant her lifetime tenancy of the building. She moved in with her husband Charles Goodbarne and she renamed it Old Battersea House.
Under her tenure the house served to house a collection of art by her sister, the Pre-Raphaelite painer Evelyn De Morgan and Evelyn’s husband, the potter designer William De Morgan and used the house to display their collection of paintings and pottery. This collection is now kept by the De Morgan Foundation.
Wilhelmina married Charles Goodbarne Stirling (1866-1948) in 1901, William De Morgan gifted the couple a leopard and stag dish as a wedding gift. Wilhelmina and Charles were huge collectors of art and antiques, with both delighting in hosting tours of their home Old Battersea House.
Wilhelmina kept carefully documented records of all the treasures, one of them being a black oak cabinet by Morris and Co. hand decorated by William De Morgan in oils, of George and the Dragon. This cabinet is currently at The National Trust property, Standen House and Gardens used to display some of William De Morgan’s ceramics.
Mrs Stirling was an accomplished and prolific writer. Her most well-known work is her biography William De Morgan and his Wife (1922) which is the starting point for all researchers interested in the De Morgans today. Her other books deal with various subjects such as spiritualism and the lives and reminiscences of the British landed gentry.
William 
Evelyn 
Flora
I thoroughly enjoyed he book The Merry Wives of Battersea which featured the women who lived in the Battersea Manor house over the centuries.
Mrs Stirling also shared the progressive political ideals of many members of the Arts and Crafts movement. A letter from Emmeline Pankhurst in the archives of the De Morgan Foundation) to Mrs Stirling, written in May 1911, says
“We all feel very grateful to you for having unearthed and published such a valuable piece of evidence that women voted prior to the Reform Bill of 1832. Your help and interest lead me to think that perhaps you may some day ere long find time to come here and see something of our great organization. I am sure that you will be pleased to see what progress is being made not only in the getting of the vote but in the work of preparing women to use it wisely when it is won. I am very truly yours, E. Pankhurst”
Mrs Stirling loved giving tours of the house, during which she would talk for hours on the artwork she exhibited and tell anecdotal stories regarding the house itself. For over 30 years she was the custodian and curator and her tours of the house could last as long as five hours and she continued to welcome visitors to her home well into her later years.
Previous curator Claire Longworth said “Even now I regularly hear from people who have fond memories of trips to visit the eccentric lady and her wonderful home; descriptions of Mrs Stirling, frail, but elegant, bedecked in jewels and vibrantly dressed in purple or red velvet dresses”
In 1961, at the age of ninety-six, Mrs Stirling was featured in a short film made by the director Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor television series.http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1284993/index.html In the 17-minute long black and white film Old Battersea House, Mrs Stirling takes the visitor on a tour of the house and talks passionately about her support of the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. While her manservant, Mr Peters, carries around a large lamp to illuminate the dark corners of the house, she tells stories about the alleged sightings of ghosts and a toad who modelled for the devil in one of her sister’s paintings. The programme gives glimpses of Mrs Stirling’s eccentric character and the wonderful possessions with which she surrounded herself.
There is a charming reference to Mrs Stirling and De Morgan tiles in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker prize winning short novel Offshore about houseboat dwellers at Chelsea Reach on Cheyne Walk. She is one of my Inspiring Battersea Women. Fitzgerald had lived on one with her husband and children and it sank twice! This excerpt features two young sisters Martha and Tilda who, mudlarking on the shore near St Mary’s Church not far from Old Battersea House, find two tiles and take them to a Chelsea antique dealer. Martha knew they they were De Morgan tiles and their value!
The building was listed on 28 June 1954 and became derelict after her death in 1965. It was acquired by Malcolm Forbes in 1970 and housed some of his family’s valuable art collection.until 2011
I visited Battersea House just before it was sold to Forbes and I have spoken to Battersea people who remember her and have said what a wonderful character she was. The collection then moved to West Hill Library supported by the Hintze family hedge funders. The De Morgan Foundation opened the Centre to the public in 2002; however the local authority’s decision to terminate the charity’s lease as part of a cost cutting drive means that the Centre has to close. In 2007, Wandsworth Borough Council made the unpopular decision to close Wandsworth Museum and two local libraries due to a reduction in central government funding. The De Morgan Centre which was based in West Hill library was also given notice to leave. There was yet another campaign and objections by the local people and the amenity societies. It was shameful of the Council to lose such an asset. It then relocated to the Watts Gallery and we have seen it in all three places.
Sarah Hardy the Curator of The De Morgan Foundation came to give a talk in St Mary’s Church which is very close to Old Battersea House on the De Morgans. She currently gives and organises guest speakers talks on Fridays at 12.00 which are delightful.
This following is from the De Morgan website https://www.demorgan.org.uk/mrs-stirling-remembered/ Mrs Stirling was born in 1865 and during her near hundred year life span she saw many changes; politically, socially, and artistically. Sir John Betjeman described her as reminiscent of Miss Haversham, sitting in her faded pile, surrounded by the objects of a past life. However, this isn’t the image of Mrs Stirling which I have come to know and love over my ten years as Curator here at the De Morgan Foundation.
Mrs Stirling was an ambitious writer, publishing her first book of fairy tales by the age of 25, and she went on to author more than 30 other books during her career. She was an anti-establishment thinker and member of the Rationalist Press Association. A determined advocate for women’s rights – her efforts in this regard earned her letter of thanks from Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Suffragette Movement. She was an enthusiastic historian and passionate collector and propagandist for her sister and brother-in-law’s work.
Mrs Stirling’s voice is still strongly heard here at the De Morgan Foundation. The main remit of our charity is (as per her wish) the “provision and maintenance of the collection for a public audience”. Her plummy clipped Standard English pronunciation (as heard on the infamous Ken Russell documentary filmed in Old Battersea House) often reverberates through my head as I relay her anecdotes to new visitors to the collection. Mrs Stirling’s hand written catalogues which detail her collection are invaluable in tracing the provenance of the works of art and bring to life her dedication as a collector. What I often find surprising, is not the lengths to which Mrs Stirling went to purchase pieces, but that so much of her collection was donated to her by others who supported her vision to create a collection of national importance. For instance a series of Peacock and Thistle tiles were given to Mrs Stirling by a Mrs Bullivant whose husband had acquired them over a number of years from an antique dealer and a gold lustre Peacock Plate was given to her by the Earl and Countess of Bathurst. Hand written labels also adorn many of the actual objects, giving further anecdotal information – for instance on the back of a ruby lustre plate decorated with bees Mrs Stirling writes “Said to be one of the first… if not the first plate made by William De Morgan and given to his Uncle Henry Frend” and on a palate knife she inscribes in indelible ink (a curatorial no-no today) that it was given to her sister by the Royal Academician G.F. Watts.
Mrs Stirling’s visionary efforts to preserve her sister and brother-in-law’s work during the 1920s to 1960s, when appreciation of Victorian art was at an all-time low, means the nation owes her an extraordinary debt and it is a great honour to continue her legacy of preserving the collection and facilitating public access to it.
The published books of A.M.W. Stirling include:
- The Adventures of Prince Almero (1890, as A. M. D. Wilhelmina Pickering)
- Queen of the Goblins (1892, as A. M. D. Wilhelmina Pickering)
- A Life Awry (1893, as “Percival” Pickering)
- A Pliable Marriage (1895, as “Percival” Pickering)
- The Spirit is Willing (1898, as “Percival” Pickering)
- Toy-Gods (1904, as “Percival” Pickering)
- Annals of a Yorkshire House, from the Papers of a Macaroni & His Kindred (1911)
- Coke of Norfolk and His Friends: The Life of Thomas William Coke, First Earl of Leicester of Holkham (1912)
- The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope (1913)
- Macdonald of the Isles: A Romance of the Past and Present (1914)
- A Painter of Dreams, and Other Biographical Studies (1916)
- The Hothams; Being the Chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton from Their Hitherto Unpublished Family Papers (1918)
- Pages & Portraits from the Past, Being the Private Papers of Sir William Hotham (1919)
- William De Morgan and His Wife (1922), called “biased, limited and sometimes erroneous” despite its “valuable insight”[2]
- Life’s Little Day: Some Tales and Other Reminiscences (1925)
- The Richmond Papers from the Correspondence and Manuscripts of George Richmond … and His Son, Sir William Richmond (1926)
- Fyvie Castle: Its Lairds and Their Times (1928)
- The Ways of Yesterday; Being the Chronicles of the Way Family from 1307 to 1885 (1930)
- Life’s Mosaic: Memories Canny and Uncanny (1934)
- Victorian Sidelights (1954)
- The Merry Wives of Battersea and Gossip of Three Centuries (1956)
- Ghosts Vivisected: An Impartial Inquiry into Their Manners, Habits, Mentality, Motives and Physical Construction (1957/58)
- A Scrapheap of Memories (1960)
Here is a list of her books.
Mrs Stirling died in August 1965, just a few days before her one hundredth birthday.
20 Inspiring Battersea Women
This is a handout for a talk I gave on International Women’s Day 2021 for Battersea Place Retirement Village opposite Battersea Park. Emma from the Heritage service had suggested me when she was approached by Ana, who is their events and entertainment executive, to do a talk on Battersea women for IWD. https://www.lifecareresidences.co.uk/residences/battersea-place/
I shall be compiling a booklet, I hope, this year for the Battersea Society. Have to have something to show for lockdown!
The first fifteen formed Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk. I have written blogs on them.
The walk starts at Battersea Town Hall/BAC as this was the site of Elm House the home of 1) Jeanie Nassau Senior 1828-1877, first female civil servant, born Jane Hughes brother of Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. She was appointed by Local Government Board as Inspector of Workhouses reporting on the education of “pauper girls”. Was loved by her famous friends, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, Anny Thackeray, George Watts etc. She died of exhaustion and cancer of the womb aged 48. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/jeanie-nassau-senior-first-women-civil-servant/
2) Olive Morris 1952-1979 came to Battersea from Jamaica in 1962, attended Lavender Hill Girls’s School, active anti-racist, Black Panthers, co-founded Brixton Black Womens Group, co-founded with Liz Obi 121 Railton Road squat. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/olive-morrisblack-activist/
3) Catherine Gurney OBE 1848-1930, born Normanby House Lavender Hill, non-conformist family, stenographers to Parliament. Via a bible class in Wandsworth Prison initiated the Christian Police Association, Police convalescent homes and orphanages in Brighton and Harrogate. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/catherine-gurney-obe-1848-1930-a-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
4) Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 funded Battersea Labour Party HQ where her plaque is sited at 177 Lavender Hill. Her biography tagged ‘An Unhusbanded Life’- Suffragette Socialist and Sinn Feiner. She wrote 10 novels, after she was widowed moved to Nine Elms Battersea, provided welfare facilities, suffragette with Women’s Freedom League, Labour candidate Battersea North 1918. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/charlotte-despard-batterseas-socialist-suffragette/
5) Caroline Ganley CBE 1879-1966 came to Battersea 1901, pacifist, active in suffrage campaigns. 1919 elected Battersea councillor, appointed JP, represented Battersea on LCC, first woman president of the London Co-op Society, MP for Battersea South 1945-51.Battersea Society plaque on her home at 5 Thirsk Road. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/caroline-ganley-mp-battersea-1945-1951/#8230
6) Ethel Mannin 1900-1984 born 28 Garfield Rd, a working class self-educated, prodigious author of a hundred books, including novels, memoirs, travel, childrearing etc. Political maverick, socialist, pacifist, anarchist and ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause. Twice married, had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell between husbands. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/11/18/ethel-mannin-1900-1984/
7) Deaconess Isabella Gilmore 1842-1923, Gilmore House 113 Clapham Common Northside when widowed trained as a nurse in Guys Hospital, asked by Bishop of Rochester to start a deaconate. Deaconesses were “a curiously effective combination of nurse, social worker and amateur policemen”. She addressed the needs of the poor through working with girls and women. Plaque Southwark Cathedral. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/deaconess-isabella-gilmore/.
8) Marie Spartali 1844 -1923 The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens.Pre-Raphaelite painter, During a sixty-year career, she produced 170 works, contributing regularly to exhibitions in the UK and the US. She studied drawing and painting under Ford Madox Brown. Painted by DG Rossetti, Burne Jones, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/…/marie-spartali-pre-raphaelite-artist/
9) Laura Barker 1819-1905, composer and violinist Lavender Sweep House with husband Tom Taylor playwright and Punch editor. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/…/laura-barker-1819-10905-composer/
10) Duval suffrage family lived at 97 Lavender Sweep. Emily and her children Elsie, Victor, Norah and Barbara were active and imprisioned. Emily 1861-1924 became Battersea Councillor Elsie WSPU, worked for Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement founded by her brother Victor. Tragically, Elsie, Barbara and Winifred died in the flu epidemic. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/duval-suffrage-family-of-lavender-sweep/
11) Edith, known as Biddy Lanchester 1871-1966, lived at 27 Leathwaite, socialist secretary to Eleanor Marx was kidnapped on announcement of living with her lover Shamus Sullivan, taken to Roehampton Asylum, supposed cause of her insanity was ‘over education’. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/edith-lanchester
12) Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986, her daughter, trained as a dancer aged ten in Paris with Isadora Duncan, taught dance, set up her own theatre club Cave of Harmony, met and married Charles Laughton, moved to the US. Bride of Frankenstein(1935), made over a 100 films. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
13) Violet Piercy 1889-1972 lived at 21 Leathwaite Rd. first recorded female marathon runner, 1926, she ran from Windsor to London finishing at Battersea Town Hall at 3 hrs 40 mins. her record lasted until till Merry Lepper time of 3:37:07 Western Hemisphere Marathon Dec 1963. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/violet-piercy-marathon-runner-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
14) Penelope Fitzgerald 1916- 2000 novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. Somerville College Oxford got a first in 1938, named Woman of the Year, included The Times list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. Her final novel, The The Blue Flower one of “the ten best historical novels’ lived at 25 Almeric Road when she wrote Booker prize-winning Offshore about houseboat dwellers in Chelsea Reach.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/pamela-hansford-johnson-battersea-born-novelist/
15) Pamela Hansford Johnson CBE, 1912-1981 born 53 Battersea Rise, wrote 27 novels. This bed thy Centre, coming-of-age first novel was based in Battersea, commemorated with a Battersea Society plaque. Married CP Snow. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/pamela-hansford-johnson-battersea-born-novelist/
16 )Hilda Helwett 1864– 1943 first British woman to earn a pilot’s licence in 1911, ran the first flying school in Britain and Omnia Works Aircraft factory Vardens Road 1912-14 with Gustav Blondeau. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/hilda-hewlett-1st-women-in-britain-to-gain-a-pilots-licence/
17) Lady Battersea 1843- 1931Constance Flower, née de Rothschild, a society hostess and philanthropist established the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls, Women and Children. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/lady-battersea/
18) Wilhelmina Stirling 1865-1965author of 20+ books on lives/reminiscences of landed gentry, founder of the De Morgan Centre at her home, Old Battersea House until her death, now at Watts Gallery.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/mrs-stirling-author-battersea-house-de-morgan-collection/
19) Mary Tealby 1801-1865,founded The Temporary Home for and Starving Dogs in Islington in 1860, Dickens wrote about a “remarkable institution”, moved to Battersea in 1871.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/mary-tealby-founder-battersea-cats-and-dogs-home/
20) Ida 1904-1986and Louise Cook 1901–1991 24 Morella Road SW12 were opera loving, civil servants who rescued Jews from Europe during the 1930s, funded mainly by Ida’s writing as Mary Burchill for Mills and Boon, honoured as Righteous among Nations by Yad Vashem.https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/sisters-ida-and-louise-cook-battersea-characters-and-heroines/
Battersea Industrial Riverfront Walk
Battersea Industrial Riverfront from Wandsworth Bridge to Battersea Bridge. This was due to be a walk as the Battersea Society contribution to the Wandsworth Heritage Festival 2020 postponed because of the dreadful pandemic. I will be doing a zoom talk in January for the Battersea Society. Details below of this free event.
Thursday 21 January at 6pm Talk on Battersea Riverside Industrial Heritage
Discover the industrial heritage of Battersea with local historian Jeanne Rathbone. The waterfront between Wandsworth Bridge and Battersea Bridge was home to major industries including Prices Candle Factory, Garton’s Glucose, Battersea Enamels, the Flours Mills, Morgan Crucible and Brunel’s Sawmills. To book for Battersea Society events, please email events@batterseasociety.org.uk Zoom login details will be sent out 24 hours before the event.
Battersea Bridge to Vauxhall awaits! All of the industry has been obliterated since I came to Battersea in the early sixties and worked in Gartons Glucose laboratory when there was little access along the riverside. Candlemakers Apartments and Battersea Power Station are almost the only visible reminders of the indusry that was based here.
This is not the full length of the Battersea riverfront which stretches almost to Vauxhall Bridge. This will feature Gartons Glucose, Price’s Candle Factory, Battersea Enamels, London Heliport, Battersea Square/High Street, Marc Brunell Sawmills and Morgan Crucible.
First a brief note about the Thames crossings. Until Putney was opened in 1729, Kingston Bridge was the only crossing of the river between London Bridge and Staines.
Kingston Bridge was wooden 1219, 1825 a new stone bridge widened 1914, 1906 taking trams.
Richmond Bridge 1777 is the oldest oldest surviving bridge.
London Bridge from Roman and Saxon times were wooden till 1209 when the first stone bridge was built. This famous old London Bridge had shops, a chapel and houses. A new bridge, designed by John Rennie, opened in 1831 Replaced in 1973.The old bridge is now sited in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, having been removed brick by brick. It is London’s widest with 6 lanes.
Proposals to build bridges across the Thames at Lambeth and Putney in around 1670 were defeated by the Rulers of the Company of Watermen. 60,000 rivermen who provided ferry services and a pool of naval reserve. List of crossings of the Thames comprising over 200 bridges, 27 tunnels, six public ferries, one cable car link.
Battersea Wooden Bridge 1771, replaced 1890 Bazalgette, Battersea Railway Bridge 1863 is the only railway bridge crossing the Thames that continuously has carried passengers and freight from the coast to the north of England, Vauxhall Bridge was built in 1816 and rebuilt in 1906.
Wandsworth Bridge, first a toll bridge built by Julian Tolme 1873, in expectation of western terminus of the Hammersmith and City Railway built 1864, problems with drainage on the approach road made access difficult for vehicles.
1937 Tolmé’s bridge was demolished. The present bridge, an unadorned steel cantilever bridge designed by Sir Thomas Frank, opened in 1940.
All materials used in the construction of the new bridge were of British origin or manufacture. Painted in dull shades of blue as camouflage against air raids, one of the busiest in London, carrying over 50,000 vehicles daily, it has been described as “probably the least noteworthy bridge in London”. 9.1 m wide, crossing the river with five spans, it’s a lattice truss bridge of wrought iron. Formally opened in a small ceremony in 1873, a celebratory buffet was provided at the nearby pub The Spread E. A 1⁄2 d toll was charged on pedestrians, and carts were charged 6d. Tolls were abolished in 1880. In 1891 weight limit of 5 tons was introduced, and in 1897 a 10 mph. A217 built 1969. (Wandsworth Town Station nearby opened in 1846. It opened as Wandsworth when the Nine Elms to Richmond line came into service, renamed Wandsworth Town in 1903.)
Wandsworth Bridge now marks the boundary above which a lower speed limit on the Thames is enforced 12 knots (22 km/h) downstream from Wandsworth but because of the number of rowers using the upper reaches of the river, all of the tidal Thames upstream of Wandsworth Bridge is subject to a strictly enforced speed limit of 8 knots.
Chelsea Bridge 1858 replaced 1937.
Albert Bridge was designed by Roland Ordish, built in 1873
Grosvenor Rail Bridge in 1863.
Except for Tower Bridge 1894, Albert Bridge is the only Thames road bridge in central London never to have been replaced.
Much of this info comes from All About Battersea by Henry Simmonds https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55045/55045-h/55045-h.htm and the Battersea section of the Survey of London.
Panorama of the Thames: A Riverside View of Georgian London by John R. Inglis and Jill Sanders
has succeeded in digitally restoring Samuel Leigh’s 1829 panorama, which was 60 feet long. (It was produced in segments, mainly for the use of people using boats at a time when the river was still the major route for transporting goods) http://www.panoramaofthethames.com/1829/guide/14-battersea
The extent of the modern panorama extends 52 miles from Hampton to Tower Bridge. Leigh’s panorama covers 30 miles between Richmond and Westminster.
The river Thames has defined the course of economic and industrial development in Battersea, even after the coming of the railways in the 1830s. Seven water mills were recorded in the Domesday Book; inhabitants of the medieval parish of Battersea depended on fishing for a living, from the late 16th century the river’s fertile loam soil flood plain provided an ideal location for market gardening. Well before the Industrial Revolution, both raw materials and locally manufactured products were being transported up and downstream from Battersea wharves in barges and lighters, themselves often built in the local boat yards.
The Thames, Wandle and Falcon river water supplied the motive power for mills and steam engines, and subsequently enabled the establishment of numerous industries which relied on water- intensive industrial processes with watermen and lightermen, barge-owners, ships’ breakers, fishermen, boat-builders mostly situated at Nine Elms.
My walk starts at Wandsworth Bridge. On this stretch from the Panorama it had market gardens with two industries Wandsworth Distillery and the Silk Factory which was on the site of York House.
This site housed a gin distillery, oil depot and warehouses.“Richard Bush founded Wandsworth Distillery on Gargoyle Wharf on the Thames around 1780. He was a promoter of the Surrey Iron Railway and also with his sons involved with mills along the Wandle. By 1874, the Wandsworth Distillery was under the names John and Daniel Watney.
Wandsworth Distillery and barges.
Gin history The crown attempted to curb imports of French Brandy into Britain, thus creating a market for Britain’s homegrown alternative and put in place laws to make it easier to brew and sell gin. Gin quickly flooded the streets, gin was “the principal cause of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people” Gin popular with soldiers and colonials living in lands prone to malaria infections: gin was excellent at masking the unpleasant, bitter flavor of the anti-malarial alkaloid quinine Hence G&T
Guinness had acquired the land which was cleared in 1992 and lay derelict until 2002 when developers started construction, in 1996, the site was subject to a famous occupation by ‘The Land Is Ours’ group, creating the ‘Pure Genius!’ Eco Village. Here is a alink to video of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ebAjw_rKhM
The Battersea Society, Wandsworth Society, Putney Society, Tonsley residents Association, West London River Group, Planning Aid for London, Gargoyle Wharf Community Action Group, Thamesbank and residents’ associations in Wandsworth were almost unanimously against the development and put out a joint statement of their objections.
The development is called Battersea Reach
The Berkeley Group blurb claims; Battersea Reach has become a thriving riverside community, offering contemporary designed apartments, relaxing open spaces and fast access to businesses, shops, entertainment and international travel.
The York House site had been a focus for industry since medieval times.
Before York House the area known as Bridges or Bridgecourt had wharves where stone and other materials from the Reigate stone industry were brought by road from Surrey before being loaded onto ships for transportation to ecclesiastical and royal building projects, including Westminster and Waltham Abbeys, Windsor and Rochester Castles, and Westminster Palace.
There was a malt distillery of Bell in 1741 then Benwell & Waymouth’s till 1820 close to York House which also fattened pigs and cured bacon, feeding the animals on the ‘wort’ left over from the distilling process. In 1743 the archbishop’s surveyor complained that two new houses built recently in the grounds would have been worth more ‘were there not a great distiller next to them who keeps in different stores a thousand hogs’.
When it closed In 1823–4 it was acquired by John Ford as a woolcloth manufactory, included 450ft of wharfage, warehouses, a dye house, counting-house, engine- and boiler-houses, foundry and blacksmith’s forge, and a residence for Ford. The three-storey brick-built woollen mill, over 150ft long, dominated the site and the riverfront. ( Each floor was supported on hollow iron pillars, to take gas tubes or pipes, gas at the time being introduced into textile mills for lighting. He must have had his own gas-making plant on site). Also erected were a row of 39 four-roomed dwellings, known as Ford’s Buildings, doomed from the beginning and he was forced to sell everything.
It was purchased in 1826 by Ames & Brunskill) a City firm of silk and ribbon makers, until 1850,when another ribbon manufacturer, Cornell, Lyell & Webster took over. In 1875 the glove-making firm of Fownes Brothers, having outgrown their premises in Falcon Road, acquired the site, but increasing industrialization along York Road jeopardized their delicate wares, and by 1884 Fownes’s had removed to a new factory in their home town of Worcester, a centre of gloving’
Garton’s Glucose Factory was next to Price’s candles and the road in between them lead to the river where the lighters wharved. Again river transport brought the maize in lighters. Garton & Sons specialized in sugars for brewing, invert sugar, ‘saccharum’. Expanded to buildings occupying five acres. The firm later became part of the larger Manbré Group of sugar and starch producers.
Garton Hill & Co were sugar refiners who had moved production from Southampton to Battersea in 1882. Their products included a specialist brewing sugar, Garton’s Saccharum, described as fully inverted, free from impurities, and able to ‘brew Beer surpassing even Burton Ales in brightness and endurance’. The company would continue later under the name Manbré & Garton when taken over by Manbré of Hammersmith from 1926 with Richard Garton as Chair. From then on glucose production concentrated here while cane sugar was processed in Hammersmith until the Tate & Lyle takeover.
There was a tragic accident in Gartons in 1899. Thomas Griffin 21-year-old labourer suffered a fatal accident at the refinery. He was working in the hydraulic room when he heard an explosion. It came from a room where his colleague Fred Biggs worked, and he rushed into the steam shouting ‘my mate, my mate’. When he emerged a few minutes later, he was terribly scalded and soon died from his injuries. Awfully, his death was in vain: Briggs had already escaped unhurt. according to the Deputy Coroner at the inquest into it, “a peculiarly sad case”, as Griffin was due to be married on the 11th of the following month. Mr. Arbuckle, Factory Inspector. Mr. Harper, Barrister, appeared for Messrs. Garton, Hill and Co., sugar refiners, Southampton Wharf, Battersea and Frederick Biggs, engineer at Messrs. Garton, Hill. and Co.’s works, said that Griffin worked under him as a fitter.
Harper told the inquest, reported the Evening Standard on 18th April 1899 that, “His clients fully realised the splendid conduct and the high motive which prompted the deceased which prompted the deceased to act as he did.”The Deputy Coroner was, so the newspaper reported, in full agreement and he closed the inquest by telling the court:- “The conduct of a man like him deserves to be recorded.
This tragedy was recorded with a memorial in the Postman’s Park St Martin’s Le Grand, London EC1A. ( St Paul’s Underground) https://www.london-walking-tours.co.uk/postmans-park/thomas-griffin.htm
Devised in 1887 by artist George Frederic Watts, it was first unveiled in 1900 with just four plaques installed. Additions took place in fits and starts (Watts died and his wife took over the project, then the plaque designer quit to work on his novel, with the 53rd tile added in 1931.After a 78-year hiatus, another plaque was finally added in 2009, in honour of Leigh Pitt.
Thomas Griffin
In 1944 a flying bomb caused damage here and after the war Gartons invested heavily in a modern starch-processing plant. I worked for Gartons in the laboratory in the mid sixties testing the starch products. Birds Custard was one customer. I also remember that perfumes and watches were offered for sale by the lightermen!
Many will remember the Battersea Smell. Left-over fibre was piped across the yard, was superheated to make cattle feed. It was this process that created the odour. I really didn’t notice it whilst at work. It was described as a cloying, unpleasant stench that hung over the area for nearly 30 years. Local residents complained of chest illnesses and applied for rate cuts, and though they spent £4 million reducing the nuisance, little improvement was noticeable.
This 1972 video from BBC archives interviews locals about the smell. https://fb.watch/2adKESSGCK/
Tate & Lyle bought Gartons for £44 million in 1976. I found this Hansard entry where our Battersea North MP Douglas Jay, asked the Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection Roy Hatterseley on what grounds his Department decided not to refer to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission the proposed merger between Tate and Lyle and Manbre and Garton.
Mr. Hattersley Primarily because a unified cane sugar refining industry offers the best prospects of keeping the loss of jobs on rationalisation to a minimum, particularly in areas of high unemployment.
The factory had closed by 1980 and most of its buildings were demolished shortly afterwards for the Plantation Wharf housing and office development.
West of Gartons another starch factory, established in 1848 Orlando Jones & Company, holders of a US patent for a process to manufacture starch from rice or corn. Jones’s patent rice-starch was effective in laundering.
When it relocated to Battersea from Whitechapel it was taken over by two men from Bath, William Evill and John Kemp Welch, who had in 1834 bought and successfully developed J. Schweppe & Company, the soda-water manufacturers. They were joined by William Evill Jr also an engineer. Prior to that wheat was used but was becoming scarce it was legislated against for starch manufacture.
Henry Simmonds in All about Battersea 1882 wrote: The process of manufacturing starch from rice was discovered and patented about the year 1840 by Mr. Orlando Jones, founder of the house of the same name. His invention consists in the treatment of rice by a caustic alkaline solution during the steeping, grinding and macerating of the grains. The alkali used is either caustic potash or soda, of such a strength as to dissolve the gluten without destroying the starch; it must consequently vary with the character of the grain and hence the utmost nicety is required. The Battersea Works of Orlando Jones & Co. were built in 1848, the firm having previously carried on their manufacture in Whitechapel, they are situated on the banks of the Thames near the works of Price’s Patent Candle Company, and occupy ground extending from the river to York Road; thus the firm possesses facilities of conveyance both by land and water—this latter is particularly valuable to them to enable them to save all dock, landing and warehousing charges. A large new store has been recently built on their wharf to which rice is barged direct from the ship. From the wharf also the manufactured article itself is conveyed to the docks for shipment to the Continent and our Colonies, with which a large trade is carried on. As an illustration of the extent of Orlando Jones & Co.’s operations it may be added that the box making department is a little factory in itself, and the machinery employed for the various purposes of sawing, dusting, cleaning, lighting, pumping, stirring, and grinding is driven by steam engines. It will be obvious that the manufacture of rice starch on a large scale requires no little capital and skill, and takes high rank among those industrial enterprises which are so peculiarly the characteristic and the glory of our age and country. Messrs. Orlando Jones & Co’s manufacture has been awarded nine prize medals at International Exhibitions, and the grand distinction of the gold medal of the Académie Nationale of Paris. These medals have been awarded ‘for introduction of the process,’ ‘for excellence of manufacture’ and ‘for large production.
William Evill 1821-1905 William Evill – Graces Guidewww.gracesguide.co.uk › William_Evill worked on the construction of the Great Eastern Railway, a member of the The Institution of Civil Engineers (for 67 years exceeding that of any of his fellow members), designed and erected, and enlarged, the extensive works of the company. He became a JP, Tory candidate for Battersea, wrote“Journey to Rome and back,” and “Rambling Records of a Long and Busy Life,” a mine of entertaining and instructive reminiscences.
William Jr lived in Lyncombe Villa(named ‘after the beautiful valley in which my wife lived in Bath’) on St John’s Hill near the railway bridge. As Evill’s family grew to twelve children he took over parts of the villas’ gardens, made additions to Lyncombe House, including a ‘capacious’ music room, where his huge musical brood and associates from St John’s College formed an orchestra. One such extension, in 1875, was designed by E. C. Robins, architect of three Battersea churches.The sites of Lyncombe House and its neighbours have been occupied by the Peabody Trust’s Clapham Junction Estate since the 1930s.
The company was acquired by Colmans, the mustard manufacturers who transferred to their Norwich works in 1901. Interestingly, I found some correspondence in 1879 between William Evill with Colman’s Record – Unilever Archivesunilever-archives.com › Record querying their right to claim Cross of the Legion of Honour was for the company!
Next engineers Archibald Dawnay & Sons Ltd, founded in 1870, bought the site and demolished most of the buildings, spending £2,000 on a new a giant open iron-and-steel shed . An even larger workshop was added alongside in 1924. The Evills had also built workers’ cottages (Starch Factory Road) lining the short access road to the factory. This was renamed Steelworks Road in 1907 and eventually demolished in the 1960s for an office block. ‘Archibald Dawnays Ltd, constructural steelworks company founded in 1922 at Battersea. it was one of the oldest Structural engineering concerns. It supplied the Steelwork for some of the largest buildings in England – the Stock Exchange, the Baltic Exchange, some of the largest cinemas in the country,, the Shepherd Bush Pavilion, and the Brixton Astoria, the Central Hall, Westminster; the School of Hygiene in Bloomsbury, theatres, telephone exchanges, post offices, power Stations, railway Stations, road and railway bridges. Dawnays left around 1970 and the site was cleared in the mid-1980s, partly to help accommodate the enormous Plantation Wharf development spilling over from Gartons next door, partly for a trading estate and hotel on Gartons Way and York Road.
There were two riverside plots Sherwood Lodge and York House—set in extensive grounds, with a deep creek at the mouth of the Hydeburn or Falcon brook flowing into the Thames and forming a natural boundary between them. Industries were drawn to the area in the 1740s and ’50s, and eventually both sites were swallowed up to form the factory of one of Battersea’s biggest and best-known companies, Price’s Patent Candle Company.
Battersea Enamels were based in the grounds of York House. It was short-lived but historically important factory producing objets de vertu and other wares in what became known as Battersea enamel. It was based in the grounds of York House. Sir Stephen Theodore Janssen, who owned the premises, and funded the venture, was an aristocrat and entrepreneur. He brought in the expertise of two Irishmen, Brooks brought expertise in the printing processes and Captain Henry Delamain who was a potter but both had left the partnership by 1754. They traded initially as Janssen, Delamain, and Brooks.
Battersea Enamel ware were small luxury items—snuff-boxes, patch boxes, bottle tickets, watch- and toothpick cases, coat buttons and miniature paintings—moulded from thin copper and applied with a white vitreous coating, which when fired gave the appearance of porcelain.
Fine-quality engraved illustrations, usually of royal portraits or picturesque scenes, were then inked on to paper and transferred to the items by a special process, and fixed by further firing. Finally, additional details in enamel colour were applied by brush. The relatively cheap materials and partly mechanical nature of the processes allowed for production at speed and on a considerable scale, the intention being to undercut the trade in similar but expensive items in gold and porcelain from the Continent. As well as enamels, the factory also produced decorative earthenware tiles known as ‘Dutch tiles’.
Janssen was a man of wide artistic and business interests and had a high social standing. Sir Stephen Theodore Janssen, 4th Baronet was an English Member of Parliament and Lord Mayor of London in 1754. He was also the MP for London from 1747 to 1754 and Chamberlain of London from 1765 to 1776. In 1749 he was appointed one of the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia. John Brooks, was a Dublin-born mezzotint engraver and publisher, was a pioneer and possibly inventor of the revolutionary transfer-printing process that was fundamental to the factory’s output. Delamain, a former captain in the Duke of Saxe-Gotha’s army, was owner of Ireland’s foremost Delftware factory, and a potter with a particular expertise
Badge of the Anti–Gallican Society 
French-born artist and engraver Simon François Ravenet, who had come to London in the 1740s to engrave part of the Marriage à-la-mode series for William Hogarth. Ravenet has also been credited with developing the transfer process, and was certainly responsible for engraving many of the copper-plate illustrations used on Battersea enamel wares. I think his engraving of designs for the Battersea Enamel wine labels of the cute putti quite charming and would like to own some! They sell for a few thousand.
Vitreous enamel has many useful properties: it is smooth, hard, chemically resistant, durable, scratch has long-lasting colour fastness, is easy to clean, and cannot burn. Enamel is glass, not paint, so it does not fade under ultraviolet light.
In 1755 Horace Walpole listed ‘a kingfisher and ducks of the Battersea enamel’ in his catalogue of specimens at Strawberry Hill and sent to a friend “a trifling snuff-box only as a sample of the new manufacture at Battersea which is done with Copper plates.”
The Anti-Gallican Society was formed around 1745 to counter the influx of French goods and the pervasive cultural influence of France to promote British manufacturing. Janssen, was an early Grand President of the Society. The first enamel medallions were produced at Battersea, continuing at Birmingham after 1756. The society met in London four times a year.The society continued in being until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In the centre is a painted enamel of the arms of the Society St George on horseback spearing flag of Royal Arms of France.The escutcheon is supported by a yellow lion and a grey double-headed eagle.A blue enamelled scroll with a motto For our Country.
1756, after only three years in operation, Janssen was bankrupt, and all of his personal property as well as the factory and stock were put up for auction.
The dispersal of materials and workmen to provincial centres, especially Bilston, Birmingham and Liverpool, saw a flowering of Battersea-style enamels, often bearing the same printed decorations. This has made the authentication and dating difficult. The book by Egan Mew of Battersea Enamels published in 1926 has a description of the auction sale contents. Amongst the lots at Jannsen’s bankruptcy sale in 1756 were ‘Bottle tickets with Chains for all sorts of Liquor, and of different subjects…’. There appears to be seventeen different designs and around forty different recorded titles.
Lady Charlotte Schreiber left her collection of Battersea Enamels to the V and A in 1884. She was a fascinating women who as an accomplished linguist, and the wife of a foremost Welsh ironmaster John Guest, she became a leading figure in the study of the wider Welsh Renaissance of the 19th century. She had ten children and took over her husbands business when she was widowed. With her second husband Charles Schreiber, her children’s tutor and they became avid collectors. She became a well known Victorian collector of porcelain; their collection is held in the V&A. She was noted as an international industrialist, pioneering liberal educator, philanthropist and elite society hostess.
PRICES Candle Factory
It was essentially a family business but there was no Mr Price. It was founded by William Wilson and Benjamin Lancaster and run by Wilson and his two sons George and James for much of the nineteenth century, called Edward Price & Company in its original form, the name apparently taken from a relation of Lancaster’s to preserve his and Wilson’s anonymity, candle-making at the time being generally considered a low undertaking. were snobbish about being associated with an industry that was considered a low class trade associated with dead animals and unpleasant smells.
Wilson was a Russia broker dealing in tallow and acquired a patent for hydraulically separating coconut oil into its liquid and solid latter (stearine) as a cheap and cleaner substitute for tallow in candle manufacture, the former as a lamp oil. Made the candles for Queen Victoria’s wedding thus gaining a royal warrant. In order to secure regular supplies of raw materials bought a plantation in Ceylon and erected steam-crushing mills there so that the oil could be processed before export. Later William’s son George experimented with mixing strong alkalis with vegetable or animal fats which caused the liquid to separate from the solid components. This process, known as saponification, was already used by soap makers. Further distillation using heat and high pressure to produce a harder, pure fat known as stearine. This was excellent for candle making as it burned brightly without smell or smoke.
By-products of the stearine process included light oils and glycerine. Price’s soon found uses for these by-products, which made valuable contributions to the company balance sheets. Using the new process, candles could also be made from other raw materials including skin fat, bone fat, fish oils and waste industrial grease. The original Edward Price & Co. became the Price’s Patent Candle Company in 1847 joint-stock enterprise with about 84 staff.
The need to minimize the risk of fire the buildings were long, single-storey structures of yellowish stock brick, with large Venetian or recessed semi-circular windows. Only a few—generally the road-front subsidiary buildings—had any upper floors; and nearly all were topped with giant curving roofs of fire-resistant galvanized corrugated iron.
Twenty-five years later had become a national household name employing 2,300 staff of which 1,200 were boys. Later they imported palm oil from West Africa as a way of providing work which would prevent natives being sold off as slaves. By the end of the 19th century it was the world’s largest manufacturer of candles exporting to all parts of the empire. Price’s was a benevolent company, introduced an educational programme for staff, a profit-sharing scheme in 1869 and in 1893 a contributory employee’s pension scheme. The provided free breakfast club and canteen to facilitate shift workers. Price’s was one of the biggest employers in Battersea and a global company even in the Victorian era.
In 1877 it produced 147 million candles, 32 million night lights, almost one million gallons of lamp oil and a large range of household and toilet soaps. New buildings for printing, cardboard-box making and other activities replaced the old structures at the west end of York Road, thereby improving the main frontage. Price’s was now at its height, exploiting by-products such as benzine and kerosene. By 1900 paraffin wax candles had a 90% share of the market and their Motorine oil dominated the UK motor oil industry in the early 1900s .
Widespread use of gas and electric lighting led to a reduction in the use of candles, and the company branched out into motor oils, soap and white spirit and opening subsidiary factories in Africa and Asia. https://www.prices-candles.co.uk/history/
UK demand went in 1910 Price’s set up candle factories in Johannesburg, Shanghai, Chile, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Morocco, Pakistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka to serve local demand.
The Mayor of Battersea in 1912 Thomas Brogan first Irish nationalist and Catholic mayor in London was a Price’s employee who mentored John Archer who was the first Black mayor of a London borough the following year. In was informed that one of Thomas’s sons went to work in Price’s in South Africa.
Thomas Brogan 
John Archer
Price’s was taken over by Lever Brothers in 1919, wanting to diversify into a wide range of fat-based products. After the war, bomb-damage and a changing market saw Price’s contract. Two V1 rockets hit the factory in 1944 and several buildings had to be reconstructed.
British Petroleum (BP), one of a consortium of oil companies that had owned Price’s since the 1920s, removed the motor-oil side of the business to Grangemouth in 1954, prompting the sale of the bomb-damaged north-eastern half of the Battersea site and its redevelopment as a heliport and small industrial estate.
Queen’s Coronation Candles 
In the early 2000s the factory became upmarket apartments, known as the Old Candle factory and Candlemakers former cardboard-box factory, paper wicks and night-light store, of 1891–2, on the corner with York Place, now with a modern third storey and French-style pavilion roof. These are only a remnant of the complex of buildings that were here.
Hilaire is a poet and member of the Battersea Society Heritage Committee. London Undercurrents is a delightful anthology consisting of poems by her and Joolz about women, Hilaire’s reference south of the river. She reads her poem Wickers about the girls who put the wick in the night lights in Price’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT9EqDHeC0I&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2QIH—NvQwJPiwjv2nUzElGxA6YaKiWMMj1R5QGYJdZm-4fzNGnZY6CM
HELIPORT https://www.londonheliport.co.uk/
The Festival of Britain 1951 on the South Bank site had a site which was temporarily earmarked by the Ministry of Aviation for flights from 1952 which closed in 1957. The Helicopter Association of Great Britain promoted a report setting out guidelines for a heliport within fifteen minutes’ drive of central London but recommended no sites.
The application from Westland Aircraft for an ‘interim’ heliport in York Road, Battersea was successful when in 1958 Henry Brooke, Minister for Housing and Local Government, guided by London County Council advice, approved the Westland scheme for a provisional seven years.
The London Heliport Ltd was the brainchild of (Sir) Eric Mensforth, chairman of Westland Aircraft and the man most responsible for the successful production of Sikorsky-type helicopters in Britain. It was originally promoted as an advertisement for Westlands, not hitherto flight operators, under the slogan ‘Westland gives London a heliport’; according to the Helicopter Association, ‘no profit is to be expected’.
It is a very small site, making use of a jetty to provide a helipad for take-off and landing, and onshore parking for three to four aircraft, depending upon their size. The heliport provides landing, parking and refuelling services between 08:00 and 21:00 (flights are permitted between 07:00 and 23:00), albeit parking is normally restricted to smaller helicopter categories.
The small portion of the Belmont Works site off York Road acquired allowed little room for buildings or operations. The T-shaped concrete slab stretching into the water consisted of a 65ft stem and a crossbar 125ft by 53ft, capable of withstanding both the single-engine helicopters then operating and the heavier double-engine machines projected but not yet in service.
On land the space was mostly given over to parking helicopters, but to one side was a single-storey building for passengers and staff, and a store with a timber control centre on top, managed by International Aeradio Ltd. The planning and structure were in the hands of H. J. B. Harding of Lewis & Duvivier, engineers, architectural features being provided by Caroline Oboussier.
The heliport was opened on St George’s Day 1959 by John Hay of the Ministry of Transport and Civil aviation, who arrived in a Port of London Authority launch and departed in a Westland Widgeon. With other options still being considered, Hay was cautious in his predictions for the heliport, thinking it too far from the centre of London for regular passenger services. BEA and Sabena, the civil airlines most interested in helicopter operations, pronounced themselves ready to fly there occasionally, but the main users anticipated were hospital patients, businessmen, and ‘aircraft carrying news and pictures for London newspapers’.
Traffic in the early years was limited to daylight hours, emergencies excepted, with 1,515 movements recorded in the first year. The numbers did not rise much till 1966, when turbojet helicopters for executives started flying. By then the seven-year option on the site had been extended; this was repeated recurrently until permanent planning permission was granted in 1995. After the number of flight movements climbed, an annual upper limit of 12,000 was fixed in 1977. By the end of 2006 this had been exceeded, against a background of a growing population along the Thames corridor used for the majority of flights and increasing concern over noise levels. By that date the heliport was owned by Weston Aviation.
It has been much replanned; none of the original buildings survives. In 2003 London Heliport was acquired by Weston Homes. In 2012 it was bought by the Reuben Brothers, who also own Oxford Airport.
Its strategic location provides the ideal launch pad for celebrities, business people, heads of state, and other weathy folk and dignitaries as well as air ambulance and aerial police units. The Children’s Air Ambulance was launhed in 2012 by Simon Le Bon.
Since 2013 it opened up for sightseers who want to get a bird’s eye view of London — provided they can afford it and special trips for the fashionable events including Royal Ascot, British F1 Grand Prix, Festival of Speed/Revival Meetings at Goodwood, Cowes Week, Wimbledon Tennis and inbound for the Chelsea Flower Show.
Paparazzi photos inform us that Tom Cruise, Kendall Jenner, and Mariah Carey are among the celebs who’ve recently flown in here — and apparently the facility is also particularly handy for footballers needing to get places quickly on transfer deadline day. The site of the heliport can only be seen easily from the riverside walkway in Fulham.
On 16 January 2013 a helicopter diverting to London Heliport in adverse weather collided with a construction crane and then crashed into the street near Vauxhall Tower, killing the pilot and one person on the ground. This was the first fatal helicopter crash anywhere near the heliport since records began in 1976.
Edmiston, the luxury yachts, announced in August 2019 that they would be taking over the title sponsorship of the heliport with a restyling of the interior & exterior areas as well as repainting the helicopter landing apron.
View London from 1000 feet above the Thames! See all the major attractions that have made London one of the greatest cities in the world.Approx 60 mins with 30 mins flying. From £99 per person! https://www.adventure001.com/Activity/Aviation/Helicopter-Rides/43
So what was set up as a temporay enterprise is still there and it is London’s only heliport.
Beyond the Heliport towards Battersea Square which was the old village of Battersea were a few industries Whiffen’s from1850s made strychnine and quinine at Lombard Wharf, by 1933 had moved to Fulham, fire-brick and sanitary ware manufactory of West Brothers, 1870s until the 1950s.
Walter Carson & Sons paint and varnish works the Grove Works, was the longest lasting, surviving into the 1960s.
Before Battersea Power Station in 1901 Battersea Borough Council’s constructed an electricity generating station beside the Caius Mission till 1972. There was boat- and barge-building mainly from the 1870s at Albion Wharf, beside the White Hart Inn. At Valiant Wharf was a ready-mixed concrete plant 1955–8 by Ham River Grit Co. Ltd, processing cement and aggregates brought by road and river from Kent and Essex expanded into marine aggregates and in 1968 was taken over by the Ready Mixed Concrete. The wharf closed and were replaced by Valiant House flats,
Albion Works of Thomas Hunt & Sons, millwrights, a dye-works at Althorpe House (1850s); a cigar factory in the High Street (1875), Allen and Ernest Lambert, sons of the founder of Lambert & Butler. It became a pipe factory Ductube Company Ltd which closed in the 1950. , E. Wolff & Son Pencils in Battersea the High Street were absorbed into the Royal Sovereign Pencil Co. Ltd, when production moved to Neasden.
Victoria Granaries warehousing and stables,at Battersea Square converted to dance studios for the Royal Academy of Dance. Ship House at Nos 34 & 35 became offices in 1989–91. The Royal Academy of Dance is moving and and has been bought by Thomas’s School to build a secondary School there. Will the young royal children continue their education here?
In Church Road from 1834 was the May & Baker factory perhaps the area’s biggest and best-known chemical company as suppliers to pharmacists of bismuth, camphor, ether and ammoniacal preparations. The firm’s riverside site at Garden Wharf, acquired in 1841, remained its headquarters until 1934.
Bolingbroke House next to St Mary’s Church was the manorial house. In the 1740s it had been home to the famous politician and philosopher Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke.
The house is particularly associated with Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke. Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678 –1751) was an English politician, government official and political philosopher. He was a leader of the Tories supported the Jacobite rebellion 1715 escaped to France but was allowed to return to England in 1723. It was his childhood home, and he died there in 1751. Both Bolingbroke’s grandfather, Sir Walter St John (1622–1708), and father, the first Viscount St John (1652–1742), lived there for much longer periods.
Most of it was pulled down in the late eighteenth century, leaving the north wing and stables (later occupied in connection with the adjoining flourmills and demolished about 1925.
However, the next structure on the site was the horizontal mill built in 1788 by Thomas Fowler. It was one of Battersea’s first power stations. The two paintings below are by two non related Turners and both are in Tate Britain. The Swan is the pub in Daniel’s painting around 1805. with the old Battersea Bridge erected 1771. Daniel lived and worked in Horseferry, Millbank, just a few moments’ walk from where the present-day Tate Britain stands.
J MW Turner 
Daniel Turner
It had been built in 1788 for Thomas Fowler, an oil and colour merchant, and first used for crushing linseed for a few years before, in 1792, being annexed to the extensive adjacent maltings and distillery owned by John Hodgson, and being put to use grinding corn and malt. The white tower contained a forty-metre-high machine, comprising horizontal ‘floats, as in the wheel of a water-mill’ which when the shutters were opened turned to generate power, ‘even where there is little wind. This strange gasometer-like horizontal windmill monopolized the skyline around the church for forty years and built on land reclaimed from the river in front of the formal gardens of Bolingbroke House.
The idea that Bolingbroke’s home had become the site of an industrial windmill horrified one former visitor, who wrote in 1817:“This house, once sacred to philosophy and poetry… is now appropriated to the lowest uses! The house of Bolingbroke become a windmill!.. yesterday, this spot was the… seat of enjoyment of Bolingbroke, Pope, Swift… (now) vanished; while in their place I behold hogs and horses, malt-bags and barrels, stills and machinery!” (Rev Daniel Lysons 2nd Edition 1811).
The management of the mill changed from Hodgson to Thomas Dives probably coincident with the change from wind to steam power, which occurred before 1833.
It worked by wind until 1825, when the windmill was dismantled just , leaving the base which was removed in 1849 but the site was used for milling, using other machinery, until 1882. The mill was supplemented by a steam engine and Pitt the Younger is said to have shown great interest in the whole enterprise. Thomas Dives was succeeded by his son Frederick on his death in 1880.
Frederick took James William Mayhew into partnership some time before 1890 and the Mayhew family eventually took over control (1894) though Frederick Dives retained an interest until at least 1901.
Mark James Mayhew (1871-1944 was born in Battersea and in 1891 was living at 1 Spencer Park, Wandsworth with his parents and described as a Miller’s Assistant. He became a great motoring enthusiast rather like Viscount Curzon 1884-1964 the MP for Battersea South who became a racing driver winning the 1931 24 Hours Le Mans race. Served as President of the British Racing Drivers’ Club which he co-founded in 1928 and served as its President until his death in 1964.
Mayhew once stood as a Radical parliamentary candidate for Wandsworth, was an unusually enlightened owner, drawing rebukes from the Master Millers’ Association for paying his workers more than was usual in the trade at the time when he reduced their working hours for the same pay.
As a Yeomanry officer he has made considerable use of horseless vehicles during manoeuvres, and also in conducting staff officers, and frequently the Commander-in-Chief himself, on official inspections. He organised the Corps of Automobile Volunteers. One of his Captains was Charles Rolls of Rolls Royce.He participated in the great Continental Road Races of the day -the Paris to Bordeaux races and the ‘Gordon Bennett’ series. He is the owner of, and drove, Benz, Panhard, Mors, New Orleans and Napier cars. In May 1902, he spent what was probably the first recorded motoring honeymoon – in Wales. Soon afterwards his wife was photographed behind the wheel of her own Baby Peugeot.
He also was, of course, keen on the use of motor vehicles in the milling industry. He was quoted in this mechanical-haulage-for-millers article in 1905 when he tells us about his fleet of lorries .http://archive.commercialmotor.com/article/8th-june-1905/9/
In 1914 when Mayhew’s business was acquired by Joseph Rank Ltd, the leviathan of British flourmilling, primarily as a vehicle for Joseph’s second son Rowland to practise his own theories on modern milling. This was a time of tremendous growth for the family firm, and increasing involvement and responsibility for Rowland and his two brothers, James and J. Arthur Rank. It was said that but for Rowland’s death in 1939, the success of his firm—which kept the name Mark Mayhew Ltd—might have rivalled that of his father’s.
Rowland began reconstructing the mills on Rank family lines, using his father’s architects, Sir Alfred Gelder and Llewellyn Kitchen. In 1915–18 land was reclaimed from the river to add to the wharf, the remnants of the old horizontal mill were demolished, and a new range of mill, silo and screens buildings erected. Within a decade a second, larger range of buildings for the old maltings site was cleared and its wharf extended into the river. Taller than hitherto, with silos over 110ft high, the new mills could only be raised under waivers from LCC building regulations. Gelder, a veteran of British mill design, complained that he had never ‘been subject to such severe conditions.
The additions, which connected to the existing range at its north and south ends to form a sort of quadrangle, were made c.1934–7. The great height of the buildings—in particular the grain silos—was deemed necessary to enable an entire barge of imported grain to be unloaded at one time. From the silos it was taken to the adjoining screens for washing and purifying, then crushed in the mills by steel rollers powered by coal-fired steam-engines.
The business was incorporated into the Rank company which, in 1962, acquired Hovis McDougal to become Rank Hovis McDougal. All buildings on the site remained until the 1970s. The flourmills finally closed in 1992, and were sold and demolished in 1997 to be replaced by Montevetro which was designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership which took six years to build and finished in 2000. I think it an interesting juxtaposition. Both building dominate the charming St Mary’s Church which is grade 1 listed .
We move along to the site that was dominated by Morgan Crucible but was built on the site that was occupied by Marc Brunel’s Sawmills and boot factory. Morgan’s Walk now occupies that area which is on a modest scale compared to Montevetro apartments alongside of Richard Rogers Partnership’s towering over St Mary’s. As part of the planning agreement an intended private riverside walk was made public, and the site of the disused fire station at Battersea Bridge incorporated into the scheme and landscaped as a public open space.
Panorama of the Thames 
Marc Brunel 
Isambard in a top hat
Battersea was graced with the genius of Brunel who set up his sawmills a little way along from Battersea bridge. Marc Brunel 1769-1949 was a French-émigré engineer and inventor who solved the historic problem of underwater tunnelling. He is best known for the construction of the Thames Tunnel and as the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was born in Hacqueville Normandy on the family farm. At the age of eleven he was sent to a seminary, where they allowed him to learn carpentry and sketch ships in the local harbour. As he had no interest in the priesthood he was sent to relatives in Rouen where a family friend tutored him on naval matters and he became a naval cadet in 1786, visited the West Indies and made an octant for himself from brass and ivory.
He had fled to the United States during the French Revolution as he was a a Royalist sympathiser. In 1796, he was appointed Chief Engineer of New York City where he built many buildings, improved the defenses of the channel between Staten Island and Long Island, and constructed an arsenal and a cannon foundry. He moved to London in 1799, where he married Sophia Kingdom from Plymouth. They had met when she was a governess in Rouen in the early 1790s, she was arrested as an English spy, and daily expected to be executed. She was only saved by the fall of Robespierre and returned to London 1795 and was able to leave France and travel to London. Marc remained in the United States for six years, sailing for England in February 1799. He immediately sought and found Sophia and they married in November that year.
He had heard of the difficulties that the Royal Navy had in obtaining the 100,000 pulley blocks that it needed each year which were made by hand. Brunel quickly produced an outline design of a set of machines that would automate their production. In 1802 Brunel’s block-making machinery was installed at Portsmouth BlockMills. A pulley-block has four parts: the shell, the sheave, the pin for locating the latter in the shell and a metal bush, or coak, inserted into the sheave to save wear between it and the pin.His machine could be operated by unskilled workers, at ten times the previous rate of production. Altogether 45 machines were installed at Portsmouth, and by 1808 the plant was producing 130,000 blocks per year. Unfortunately for Brunel, the Admiralty vacillated over payment, despite the fact that Brunel had spent more than £2,000 of his own money on the project. In August 1808 they agreed to pay £1,000 on account, and two years later they consented to a payment of just over £17,000.They started the age of mass-production using all-metal machine tools and are regarded as one of the seminal buildings of the British Industrial Revolution. They are also the site of the first stationary steam engines used by the Admiralty.
Portsmouth Block Mills 
Portsmouth Block Mills
Brunel’s Battersea sawmills evolved from this pioneering mechanized block- and sawmills projects for the Royal Navy and he planned to to capitalize on Portsmouth’s renown by establishing his own private block factory and sawmills to serve the merchant navy. He had began experimenting there with new types of circular saws, made to his designs by Henry Maudslay. He had by then acquired business partners and the the intended location for this factory had shifted to Battersea, to a riverside works a little west of Battersea Bridge by 1806.
This appealed to Brunel greatly, principally for its proximity to Chelsea and good transport links: ‘476 feet along the River and contiguous to two Turnpike Roads will always be of great value’, he wrote to his partners, ‘where can you meet with such [a] spot’? He may also have been influenced by his connection with the 2nd Earl Spencer—lord of the manor and major local landowner—and his wife the Countess Lavinia, whom Brunel considered his friends. It was the Earl who, during his tenure as first Lord of the Admiralty, had been instrumental in securing Brunel’s contract at Portsmouth.
Brunel’s Sawmilla and Old Battersea Bridge
Marc and Sophia came to live in Lindsey House in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea directly opposite his sawmills in 1808 1826. So, it was not far for him to walk to work. By then they had their three children Sophia, Emma and Isambard who was born in 1806. Isambard was Marc’s second name.
Lindsey House has quite an illustrious history of occupants. It was built in 1674 by the third Earl of Lindsaey on the riverside site of St Thomas More’s garden and thought to be the oldest house in Kensington Chelsea. It was extensively remodelled in 1750 by the German aristocrat Count Nicholas von Zindendorf, head of the Moravian Church who intended to make it the centrepiece of a religious settlement. Lindsey House originally stood directly beside the river, but when the Chelsea Embankment was built in 1874 to create a modern sewage system for London the house found itself well away from the water.
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd painting 
The house was later divided into seven dwellings: five in the main range and one smaller house in each of the two-storey wings at the ends. The terrace of seven houses thus created was renamed Lindsey Row. Today, it is known as Nos. 96 to 101Cheyne Walk. Whistler was a later resident. Behind the house is a small garden designed by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll which features a lily pond and a mulberry tree, surrounded by a colonnade, with ornamental statues. That section of Cheyne Walk left over Battersea Bridge housed Turner at and Walter Greaves was the hoalso
Cheyne Walk Brunel’s 2020 
December 2020
Of all Brunel’s sawmills, that at Battersea was probably the most sophisticated architecturally, being in a severely simplified, astylar mode of Neoclassicism He placed his sawing-machines in the main central mill area, with ‘pavilions’ to either side—one a boiler- and engine- house, the other workshops.
Brunel explained in a letter to Earl Spencer, the origin of the boot factory was when he was approached in 1810 by a ‘respectable’ Army clothier to invent an apparatus for making military shoes,presumably with a view to entering into partnership. When the clothier withdrew shortly afterwards, Brunel decided to pursue the project alone. In this he was encouraged by Mudge, whom Brunel credited with the idea of employing only invalid ex-servicemen.is not certain that Brunel had an official contract for supplying the Army’s footwear. Following a few tentative purchases by the government, he claimed later to have been ‘prevailed upon and induced’ by ‘flattering encomiums’ and verbal promises from high-ranking visitors to the factory— including Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of York, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces—to invest in expanding the business to supply the whole army with new boots and shoes, increasing production from about 100 pairs a day in 1810 to 400 by 1812; Wellington’s troops at Waterloo are said to have worn boots made by Brunel at Battersea but when peace came in 1815 the British government had no need for Brunel’s boots on such a scale, leaving him with a stock of some 80,000 unwanted pairs.
Brunel’s desperation had been compounded by further misfortune in August 1814 when the Battersea sawmill was almost entirely consumed by fire. Much of the stock of timber and veneer was rescued but the rsult was the destruction of all but the right wing of the sawmill and its steam engine. Brunel the optimist just made improvements. The sawmills were rebuilt and were fully operational again by 1816., similar to its to its predecessor – a central mill-house with flanking pavilions which had pediments and it was retained like that until its demolition in the late 1970s by Morgan Crucible Company which they used it as a store and workshop,.
By then he got invloved in,new private ventures, including a circular-frame knitting-machine, an experimental rotary printing-press, and the manufacture of a new type of decorative tinfoil. and had acquired new business partners, Samuel Shaw, a personal friend in the decorative tinfoil scheme and William Hollingsworth of Nine Elms a wealthy merchant and brewer, with one of his brothers, only in the sawmills.
Brunel patented his tinfoil process in 1818. By smoothing a thin layer of foil on a heated plate, applying additional heat, he was able to produce a delicately crystallized surface, which was then varnished and used to decorate all manner of objects from small items such as snuff or patch boxes, to lamp columns, urns and cabinets, even coaches. He presented the Prince Regent with a screen made of the patented tinfoil, and some of the rooms at Brighton Pavilion were apparently decorated in the material and it was also exported to Madras and Calcutta. However, the new foil process was widely pirated, and failed to bring the economic success he had hoped.
In 1828 these sawmills were acquired by John and James Watson and sawyers and veneer-cutters, who remained in business there until about 1849. By then the site had become part of a the steamboat yard Its boats plied between London Bridge and Chelsea becoming in 1875 the London Steamboat Company which were In 1897 were acquired by the Thames Steamboat Company, owned by Arnold Hills which eventually failed and its Battersea yard was acquired around 1905 by the Morgan Crucible Company.
Brunel is mostly known for designing and building the first Thames tunnel, between Wapping and Rotherhithe, which is now part of the London Overground. This, the world’s first underwater tunnel through soft ground, was begun in 1825 and – despite many difficulties and disasters – was completed in 1843.He is known above all for designing and building the first tunnel under the Thames, between Wapping and Rotherhithe, which is now part of the London Overground. This, the world’s first underwater tunnel through soft ground, was begun in 1825 and – despite many difficulties and disasters – was completed in 1843. This engineering marvel, had 24 million pedestrians pass through before it was converted to rail use for the Underground in 1865.
Sir Marc Brunel was a remarkable engineer and inventor who certainly left his mark on industrial Britain but Battersea can boast that he came here when he left Portsmouth to set up his sawmills and his later enterprises until bankruptcy when he served time in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark and his other ventures took over. I am sure the young Isambard must have also crossed over Battersea Bridge with his father from his home in Cheyne Walk and was inspired by what he saw in his Dad’s business.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814 and .knighted for his contribution to engineering in 1841. He died on December 12th 1849 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery London as was Sophia and Isambard in 1859. It is one of the Magnifient Seven Metropolitan Cemeteries and well worth a visit. I am familiar with it as I have conducted many a funeral in West London Crematorium, including a memorial service there at newly constructed mausoleum in the cemetery.
Morgan Crucuble Company is the final great industrial venture on this part of the Thames near Battersea Bridge. It was very much a family business founded by six Morgan brothers – Thomas, William, Walter, Septimus, Octavius and Edward.
The business began in 1850 with William Morgan’s acquisition of the City firm of a family friend, importing and exporting druggists’ sundries and ironmongery; by 1855 the other siblings had joined him in Morgan Brothers. Among the items of stock-in-trade they inherited were crucibles of imported graphite (or ‘plumbago’), used by metallurgists and jewellers to melt precious metals. William who was in London working for the National Provincial Bank, the Morgan Brothers became sole agents for crucibles from Joseph Dixon and Co, a New Jersey manufacturer of these crucibles,before long decided to establish their own factory. It offer metal smelters ‘a saving of more than 50 per cent in time, labour, fuel and waste‘ and were soon selling well all around the world.
In 1856 they acquired the small riverside crucible factory of E. Falcke & Sons at Garden Wharf, midway between Battersea Bridge and St Mary’s Church. The Falcke business dated back to about 1823, when the potter Wilhelm or William Gottlob Falcke (d. 1849) took a lease of land here. Trading initially as the Patent Plumbago Crucible Company, the Morgans added new kilns, factory-warehouses, chimney shafts and a wharf wall in the 1850s–70s; much of this work was overseen by the engineers R. M. Ordish and William Henry Le Feuvre. Ordish designed and built Albert Bridge in 1873
In 1872 the Morgans bought up houses standing between their works and the main road, enabling them to erect a large six-storey extension. Italianate in style, with a 100ft-tall clock-tower, the factory dominated the Church Road frontage and remained the focal point of the works throughout its 100-year history. As business grew, the brothers whenever possible acquired adjoining properties and expanded the works. In 1876–80 the wharves to the east, formerly of Condy’s Fluid Company and the Bolingbroke Oil Works, were annexed, a large chunk of riverfront was reclaimed and embanked, and a concrete wharf wall constructed. In 1881 The current name of the company, the Morgan Crucible Company, was adopted. It became a limited company in 1890.
During the early 1900s they continued to expand along the riverfront. To their east in 1904–5 they bought up the former boatbuilding yard of the Thames Steamboat Company, including 330ft of river frontage and Brunel’s sawmills followed soon after by housing in Church Road and Little Europa Place.
The buildings that took their place included a five-storey office block of 1907, built alongside the 1870s clock-tower factory, and several mill buildings of 1911–14, of ferro-concrete construction. They acquired the Phoenix Wharf in 1910 and also the old maltings site beside the church so that by the mid 1920s only the Battersea Flourmills and May & Baker’s chemical works stood between Morgan’s and complete dominance of the riverfront from St Mary’s Church to Battersea Bridge.
1904 The company diversified into carbon brushes. The youngest and last surviving brother, Edward Vaughan Morgan, died in 1922. Members of the following generation continued the Morgan involvement in the business. In 1929 the Russian authorities closed the Leningrad factory and arrested its director after many years in which he defended this private company against the pressure exerted by the regime.
Morgan’s expanded by acquiring other firms and diversification, including May and Bakers chemical works the last run of terraced housing at the east end of Church Road and new products such as refractory materials and electrical carbons. In 1934–7 they built large-scale reinforced-concrete factory buildings.
The 1951 film The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guinness was filmed along Church Road by Morgans. I often say how important these clips will become in reminding us what was there before development. This is why the Battersea Society screens a film annually at the Royal College of Art with Battersea locations.
Looking out from Morgan’s onto Church Road
Between and after the wars Morgan’s set up subsidiaries abroad to supply a growing world market. By 1960 the reorganisation of the group that had been underway for 12 years was completed with the creation of 4 new subsidiaries, bringing the total to 11 home subsidiaries and 12 external ones. In 1961 Morgan Crucible ceased to be a trading company; new UK trading subsidiaries were created: Morganite Carbon, Morganite Crucible Morganite Electroheat, Motganite Research and development. It was now a parent of 19 subsidiaries employing 8,000 people and were manufacturers of carbon brushes, carbon products, crucibles, furnaces, foundry plumbago, refractories; electrical and engineering products, radio and heavy duty resistors; bronze oil retaining bearings and sintered metal products. In 1964 they became one of the first businesses in the UK to computerise its financial records.
I worked for a briefly in 1966 in the laboratory of one subsidiary of Morgan’s called Graphite Products Ltd which was based in point Pleasant Wandsworth SW18 which produced lubricants and specialist paints using graphite.
The congested site left the firm little scope for expansion, in 1967 Morgan’s decided to transfer production to an existing second factory at Norton, Worcestershire, which had started as a ‘shadow factory’ during the war, and a new 40-acre complex at Morriston near Swansea. Unemployment around Swansea was high, and the move there in 1969–72 was sanctioned by Douglas Jay, Battersea North’s MP, President of the Board of Trade and a keen supporter of regional development. In 1977 they closed the carbon fibre venture at Battersea because of the lack of domestic demand. Morgan Crucible Co plc changed its name to Morgan Advanced Materials plc in 2013 and it is now a global engineering company, listed on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 250. They manufacture in 30 countries and employ approximately 8,800 employees. They continue to manufacture products from carbon and ceramic (including crucibles.
Brian in his workshop 
Battersea Mural 
Brian and me when he got his MBE
We can’t finish this history of Morgan crucible without mention of the wonderful mural of Brian Barnes MBE noted Battersea citizen and campaigner. Brian’s mural most famous mural is The Good the Bad and The Ugly, also known as The Battersea Mural, designed in 1976 and painted by a group of local people from 1976 to 1978. The 276-foot mural was demolished in 1979 by the Morgan Crucible in the middle of the night.
Here is a video of Brian which is one of the 1000 Londoners and is made by Battersea based Chocolate Films. I also feature as one of the 1000 Londoners and one of the four in Nine Elms.
After much debate plans for a private housing development by Wates Ltd for the vacated site were approved in 1978. Morgan’s Walk was completed in 1984. This was first big private housing development in Battersea on a prominent, formerly industrial riverside site, and seen as a harbinger of the area’s gentrification. However its the modest scale and architectural conservatism of its buildings is in stark contrast to the towering Montevetro apartments alongside.
Battersea Bridge The bridge’s creation in 1771–2 encouraged industrial development but its narrow timber spans hindered riverborne trade, collisions with barges being frequent enough to merit throwing four of the central spans into two in 1795. But by the early 1800s factories and wharves were appearing in larger numbers: in addition to Brunel’s works, chemical production, soapmaking and a pottery were established, and by the time of the general building boom of the 1840s, the riverfront here was fully built up. Collisions with barges being frequent enough to merit throwing four of the central spans into two in 1795.
Old Battersea Bridge showing the Malt Mill c.1805 Daniel Turner active 1782-1801 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T14891 
Old Battersea Bridge 1874 Walter Greaves 1846-1930 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04598
With such importance attached to river transport, Battersea Bridge was further modified to aid navigation, Rowland Ordish in 1875 enlarging the central waterway from 31ft to 75ft and also increasing the size of openings towards the Chelsea end. It was eventually rebuilt in 1886–90 with the existing bridge, designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and built by John Mowlem and Co. There have been a few incidences with the bridge partly because of its position on a bend but we live with it and get great views from from the bus coming from Chelsea. https://londonist.com/2015/07/battersea-bridge-125-years-of-collisions
Morgans Walk and Montevetro from Battersea Bridge 
Battersea Bridge shining in the sunlight 
Battersea Bridge Pissaro
Here endeth this trip along the much altered Battersea riverfront. The views from Cheyne Walk by residents and the artists who painted from there, the two Turners, Whistler and his pupil, some say imitator, Walter Greaves certainly enjoyed the views and prompted me to check the houses and plaques of their illustrious residents over the years. I went with my list and friend Joan to take the snaps. I passerby, Clara who lived in the Greaves/Belloc House, kindly toook pics outside her place and Turner’s House. Secret London post was helpful. https://secretldn.com/cheyne-walk-famous-street/
If you have stayed with this till the end I hope you feel you learnt a little of the industrial heritage of this stretch of the Battersea riverfront but sorry that it is long and somewhat rambling but it is because I feel that so much has been obliterated of this heritage and replaced by luxury housing. The only upside is that we now have access to the Thames riverfront.
If you are interested in Battersea past, present and future do consider joining the Battersea Society. The aims of the Society are to strengthen Battersea’s sense of identity and community, stimulate interest in its geography,history, and architecture, and to promote excellence in new developments whilst conserving the best of the past. The Society organises talks, social events, walks and visits, and publishes a quarterly magazine, Battersea Matters. Find Battersea Society on http://www.batterseasociety.org.uk Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @batterseasoc.
Welcome to the Battersea Society websitewww.batterseasociety.org.uk
Battersea’s commemorative Plaques
I began researching famous people connected to Battersea which had been a progressive Borough from its inception. I am a member of the Battersea Society Heritage Committee. I have lived in Battersea since I came over as a teenager in the sixties from Ireland and revel in its radical history and lament that it got subsumed into Wandsworth.
In 2018, the centenary of some women getting the vote, I started blogging on notable women and developed a walk of Notable Women of Lavender Hill and have blogged on each of them. I am happy to arrange a walk for groups. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/notable-women-of-lavender-hill/
I had also prepared an industrial Battersea riverfront walk for 2020 Wandsworth Heritage Festival which I am scheduled to do as a zoom talk in January. I do hope to do one IRl eventually!
Thursday 21 January at 6pm
Talk on Battersea Riverside Industrial Heritage
Discover the industrial heritage of Battersea with local historian Jeanne Rathbone. The waterfront between Wandsworth Bridge and Battersea Bridge was home to major industries including Prices Candle Factory, Garton’s Glucose, Battersea Enamels, the Flours Mills, Morgan Crucible and Brunel’s Sawmills. To book for Battersea Society events, please email events@batterseasociety.org.uk Zoom login details will be sent out 24 hours before the event.
I quickly discovered that there were sixteen LCC/English Heritage plaques all of which commemorated men. In August 2020 another man has been commemorated – Sir Robert Hunter co-founder of the National Trust. The Battersea Society has stepped in with our own plaque scheme and we have unveiled six.
There are plaques pending – Marie Spartali Pre-Raphaelite artist lived at The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens, Penelope Fitzgerald Booker prizewinning novelist of Offshore who lived at 25 Almeric Road when she wrote it, Jeanie Nassau Senior first woman civil servant when appointed Inspector of Workhouses who lived at Elm House on the site of Batteresea Town Hall and Ethel Mannin prolific author who was brought up in 28 Garfield Road SW11 but lived at Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon SW19.
Some plaques are in the north of Battersea centred near the mansions and the others are south of Lavender Hill. These next few are south of Lavender Hill.
Edward Thomas (3 March 1878 – 9 April 1917) was a poet, essayist, and novelist. He is considered a war poet although his career in poetry only came after he had already been a successful writer and literary critic. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the war and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras. in 1917, soon after he arrived in France. His plaque is on 61 Shelgate Road SW11 near Battersea Rise
John Walter (1 January 1738 – 17 November 1812) was an English newspaper publisher and founder of The Times newspaper, which he launched on 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register. His plaque is on Gilmore House 113 Clapham Common Northside SW4. He lived there when he was a coal merchant and he went bust but the house which became the deaconate under Isabella Gilmore was saved from demolition by her as she had acquired it in her name. She was a sister of William Morris and the chapel which was designed by architect Philip Webb has a window designed by Burne-Jones. Alas my bid for an EH plaque to her was unsuccessful. DEACONESS ISABELLA GILMORE | Jeanne Rathbonesheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com › 2018/03/12
Fred Knee (16 June 1868 – 8 December 1914) was a British trade and socialist politician. In 1900 he became an alderman and the chair of the Housing Committee, instituting a major programme of construction, producing some of the nation’s first council housing. He also has a plaque in Frome which was unveiled by Lord Alf Dubs who our Battersea MP. https://seancreighton1947.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/2nd-plaque-to-honour-free-kneeam/ His plaque is on 24 Sugden Road SW11.
William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a politician, philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the trade of black slaves from Africa. In earlier years he became an habitué of gambling clubs such as Goostree’s and Boodles in Pall Mall. The writer and socialite Madame de Stael described him as the “wittiest man in England”. He lived at Battersea Rise House, the home of fellow his friend banker Henry Thornton and it became a base for the Clapham Sect. He later moved to Broomwood Road on the west side of Clapham Common, where another plaque commemorates the site of his former home 111 Broomwood Road SW11.
George Alfred Henty (8 December 1832 – 16 November 1902), a prolific English novelist and war correspondent, is best known for his historical adventure stories that were popular in the late 19th century. He wrote 122 works of historical fiction. Henty’s novels were racist and xenophobic towards non-British people and many objected to his glorification of British imperialism. The pub in Lavender Gardens called The Cornet was named after The Cornet of Horse: A Tale of Marlborough’s Wars. His plaque is on 33 Lavender Gardens SW11.
John Burns (20 October 1858 – 24 January 1943) was a trade unionist and politician, particularly associated with London and Battersea politics and He was a socialist and then a Liberal Member of Parliament and Minister. His plaque is on 110 Clapham Common Northside SW4.
Ted “Kid” Lewis (born Gershon Mendeloff; 28 October 1893 – 20 October 1970) was an professional boxer who twice won the World Welterweight Championship. He was a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and became a friend of Charlie Chaplin’s. Strangely in 1931 he stood for parliament with Mosley’s New Party! https://www.britishvintageboxing.com/post/ted-kid-lewis-the-aldgate-sphinx He died at the Nightingale Jewish Care Home at 105 Nightingale Lane SW12.
Gus Elen (22 July 1862 – 17 February 1940) was a musichall singer and comedian. 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. He dressed as a costermonger. He spoke of the living conditions of ordinary workers and about the cramped housing conditions of the East End and was well known for his involvement in personally organised charity events. His home was 3 Thurleigh Avenue SW12
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (19 June 1834 – 31 January 1892) was a British Baptist preacher. He remains highly influential among Christians of various denominations, among whom he is known as the “Prince of Preachers”. He was a prolific author of various types of works which were translated into many languages during his lifetime. Thousands flocked to hear him speak. His tomb is at West West Norwood Cemetery. The plaque is at 99 Nightingale Lane SW12.
Henry Mayo Bateman (15 February 1887 – 11 February 1970] was a cartoonist and , humorous artist. He was born in Australia. noted for his “The Man Who…” series of cartoons, his work can be read as a social history of Britain in the first half of the 20th Century. He made radical contributions to the art of the cartoon and became the most highly paid cartoonist in the country, sought after by advertisers in America, Australia and was published in Europe. He left for Gozo, Malta to paint and avoid the taxman where he died. http://www.hmbateman.com/about.htmhttp://www.hmbateman.com/about.htm. His plaque is on his home 40 Nightingale Lane SW12
Charles Sargeant Jagger (17 December 1885 – 16 November 1934) was a sculptor who, following active service in WW1sculpted 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 War Memorial at Paddington Station. He lived at 67 Albert Bridge Road SW11.
Edward Adrian Wilson (23 July 1872 – 29 March 1912) was was an English physician, polar explorer, natural historian, painter and ornithologist.at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London and undertook mission work in the slums of Battersea in his spare time. Scott wrote ” I believe he really is the finest character I ever met.” He died in the polar expedition. He lived at 42 Vicarage Crescent SW11.
Short Brothers. In 1908 Eustace (17th June 1879-3rd April 1932) and Oswald (16th January 1883-4th December 1969) were into ballooning which is why they were based near the gasholders. They joined by Horace (2nd July 1872- 6th April 1917) when it became apparent that heavier than air crafts were the future of flight. They registered their partnership under the name Short Brothers. The American Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, assigned the new company the British rights to build the Wright Flyer for six aircraft thus becoming first aircraft manufacturing company in the world. The plaque is on arch 75 Queens Circus SW11 which was unveiled by Jenny Body OBE, the first female President of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Sir Robert Hunter (27 October 1844 – 6 November 1913) was a solicitor, civil servant and co-founder of the National Trust. He was a leading figure in safeguarding the protection of open spaces and historic places in Britain. He is commemorated with a blue plaque at 5 Louvaine Road SW11 where he lived between 1869 and 1872 – a short but significant period of his life, both professionally and personally.
Norman Douglas (8 December 1868 – 7 February 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind based in Capri. His travel books such as his 1915 Old Calabria were also appreciated for the quality of their writing. He was accused of paedophilia and jumped bail. He had literary friends and lived with the publisher Pino Orioli. He lived in 63 Albany Mansions, Albert Bridge Road SW11.
John Archer (8 June 1863 – 14 July 1932) was a politician and political activist. In 1913 he was elected Mayor of Battersea, the first black mayor in London. He was a notable Pan-Africanist and the founding president of the African Progress Union. He was Labour Party election agent for Shapurji Saklatvala, a Commmunist Party activist who became Battersea North MP, one of the first Indian MPs in Britain. The plaque is on his former home 55 Brynmaer Road SW11.
Seán O’Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist writing about the Dublin working classes at a time of political upheaval against British colonisation and the ensuing civil conflict in Ireland. His plays include ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ (1923),’Juno and the Paycock’ (1924), ‘The Plough and the Stars’ (1926), and ‘The Silver Tassie’ (1928). Situated at 49 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW11.
Battersea Society plaques.
Hilda Hewlett (17 February 1864 – 21 August 1943) was an early aviator and aviation entrepreneur. She was the first British woman to earn a pilot’s license. With her business partner Gustave Blondeau she ran the first pilot’s training school in Brooklands, taught her own son to fly and he became a captain in WW2. They ran the Omnia Works aircraft Factory 1912-1914 in 4 Vardens Road SW11.
Donald Ibrahím Swann (30 September 1923 – 23 March 1994) was a Welsh-born composer, musician, singer and entertainer. He was one half of Flanders and Swann, writing and performing comic songs. Michael Flanders used to rib him for living in Battersea! His plaque is on his home 13 Albert Bridge Road SW11.
Sir George Shearing (3 August 1919 – 14 February 2011) was a jazz pianist from Battersea, the youngest of nine children. For many years he led a popular jazz group that recorded for Discovery Records, MGM Records and Capitol Records The composer of over 300 titles, including the jazz standards “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Conception”. He played with Claude Bampton’s newly formed, all-blind stage orchestra in 1937. He went to the US in 1947 forming his quintet, later a sextet, with its trademark “Shearing sound” and performed for three US presidents. He returned most summers to the Cotswold house he had bought with his second wife, the singer Ellie Geffert, avidly following cricket on BBC Radio’s Test Match Special. Alyn Shipton jazz broadcaster had co-wrtten George’s biography and he unveiled the plaque which is on what was Linden Lodge School for the Blind which he attended now Northcote Lodge Prep School on Bolingbroke Grove SW12.
Northcote Lodge School, 26 Bolingbroke Grove, London SW11 6EL
Katherine Mackay Low was born in Georgia, USA (9 July 1855- 2 January 1923). Her many friends created a memorial to her which would also further the kind of service to which she had devoted herself to in Peckham. On 17 May 1924 the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) declared open the Katherine Low Settlement. KLS supports children, young people and their families, older people, women and refugees and newly-arrived communities. KLS is a listed building situated on Battersea High Street.
Pamela Hansford Johnson ( May 29, 1912,- June 18, 1981), was a novelist and critic. She treated moral concerns with a light but sure touch. Her debut novel This Bed Thy Centre (1935) was set in Battersea/Clapham and was a popular and critical success. Among her most fully realized novels are Too Dear for My Possessing (1940), An Avenue of Stone (1947), and A Summer to Decide (1948), a trilogy that follows the fortunes of a group of friends from the 1920s to the end of the 1940s. She cane from a theatrical family, attended Clapham County School, was first girlfriend of Dylan Thomas and her second husband was CP Snow. She was brought up at 53 Battersea Rise SW11.
Caroline Selena Ganley (16 September 1879 -3 August 1966) CBE, JP, Labour Party member of the London County Council elected 1925 1934 for Battersea North. She became the first woman president of the London Cooperative Society, served as a Battersea Councillor (1919–25, 1953–65) and as Member of Parliament for Battersea South 1945-51. Her biography was written by Sue Demont, secretary of the Battersea Society. Mrs Ganley lived at 5 Thirsk Road SW11.
Caroline plaque unveiling
Charlotte Despard (née French 15 June 1844 – 10 November 1939) was an Anglo -Irish suffragist, socialist, pacifist, Sinn Feiner and novelist. She was a founding member and President of the Women’s Freedom League, Women’s Peace Crusade, and the Irish Women’s Franchise League and an activist in a wide range of political organizations over the course of her life, including among others the Women’s Social and Political Union, Humanitarian League Labour Party Cumann na MBan and the Communist Party of Great Britain and secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia. She was widowed and childless. She came to live in Nine Elms Battersea amongst the people she helped and set up facilities including a canteen, clinic and classes. She was imprisoned four times for her suffragette activism and she continued actively campaigning for women’s rights, poverty relief and world peace right into her 90s. Her plaque is on Battersea Labour Party HQ 177 Lavender Hill which she helped to fund.
That’s all folks. Enjoy the Battersea plaques trail.
Four 18th Century Houses near Lavender Hill and their occupants
This was the title of a presentation for the Battersea Society which I was due to give for the Wandsworth Heritage Festival 2020 in Battersea Library on Lavender. Hill. I did present it, via Zoom, for the Battersea Society and it was our first one in lockdown on 16th June. This evolved out of the notable women of Lavender Hill walks/talks that I have been doing as I promote these inspiring women in my immediate neighbourhood. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/notable-women-of-lavender-hill-walk/
I did a zoom talk for the Battersea Women’s Institute which had technical difficulties so that they couldn’t show Powerpoint so I did another walk on Sunday 20th July pointing out, as always, that there are 16 English Heritage/LCC blue plaques in Battersea none of which commemorate at woman and I am on a mission to redress it.
We now have three Battersea Society plaques commemorating Hilda Hewlett at 4 Vardens Road, first woman to gain a pilots licence in 1911, Caroline Ganley OBE on 5 Thirsk Road who was Battersea MP 1945-1951, Pamela Hansford Johnson CBE novelist and critic on 53 Battersea Rise and a Labour Party one to Charlotte Despard Socialist, Suffragette, Pacifist and Irish Nationalist on 177 Lavender Hill and there is one proposed for Jeanie Nassau Senior on Battersea Town Hall.
The Lavender Hill Clapham Common area of Battersea was where the larger villas were in the 18th Century. I am focusing on four of them which featured in my walks/talks of notable women of Lavender Hill.
The villas were up the hill and near Clapham Common. The majority were City men, attracted by the common’s rural environs, open outlook this area as it became developed was, generally regarded as an offshoot of Clapham.
With the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1540 the manor returned to crown ownership, and was eventually sold to the St John family. At the end of the eighteenth century it passed into the hands of the Spencer family. From the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth Battersea was best known for market gardening supplying vegetables, fruit and flowers to the London markets, as well as plants to the colonies in America.
The village itself was by the river, close to the parish church, and there was a scattering of industry along the riverside. The construction of railways in the Victorian period hastened the suburbanisation of London and the population of Battersea increased from 6,000 in 1841 to 168,000 by 1901, by which time it had become a metropolitan borough.
After 1870 when Victorian building expansion began as the villas with gardens near Lavender Hill towards the commons were demolished, with ex-carpenter Alfred Heaver being one of the bigger developers who worked with the Conservative Land Society. Social conditions in the north of the parish were severely impoverished and industry was being developed along the river.
I live in Lavender Sweep and the house opposite us has the fanlight from the original Lavender Sweep House which was the home of playwright Tom Taylor and his composer wife Laura.
This started me on finding out more about the history of the immediate area and the interesting people who lived here. Much was revealed in The Survey of London Battersea chapters and this is how I became familiar with my previous near neighbours that I wish to share with you, but there is no gossip involved.
The first of these 4 older houses is Elm House on Lavender Hill now on the site of Battersea Town Hall home to Jeanie Nassau Senior, the first woman civil servant. Jane Hughes known as Jeanie, whose brother Thomas Hughes MP, author of the popular novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays describes their early family life in the first few chapters of it. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/jeanie-nassau-senior-first-women-civil-servant/
Her friend Tom Taylor wrote In Memoriam to her when she died and another friend and admirer the artist George Watts who also painted wrote in anger to his sexist patron: I think when you read the biography of “That Woman”, for it is one that will be written, you will find that very few canonized saints so well deserved glorification, for all that makes human nature admirable, lovable, & estimable, she had very few equals indeed, & I am certain no superior.
Sadly, it took 130 years before her biography was written. It was only published in 2008. Her biographer Sybil Oldfield draws on sources released only in 2000. Some of you will have come to the lovely talk on Jeanie given by Sybil last October in Dimson Lodge.
The cache of letters and ephemera found in the attic of her great, great grandson Graham Senior-Milne, with whom I am in contact, included letters written between her and her only child Walter and a network of friends, including George Eliot, who wrote about her as the model for Dorothea in Middlemarch, Millais, who painted her, Julia Margaret Cameron, who photographed her, Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano, who sang with her, Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen, who tried to seduce her and her neighbours the Taylors of Lavender sweep House and the artist Marie Spartali of the Shrubbery, Marianne Thornton at Clapham Common,. Kate Dickens and Anny Thacheray were close friends and confidantes The letters feel very contemporary and the ones to Walter at school and university were very frank, especially when mentioning his father.
There are no photos available of Elm House. The Survey of London states: In the 1860s, when a typical villa might let for £100–200, the Senior family managed to afford their residence at Elm House by means of Jeanie Senior’s own £400 a year, a £300 allowance from Nassau’s father, and £300 contributed by her mother, who lived with them. This allowed a staff of up to six servants, though no carriage. But theirs was an unusual household, its financial stability shaken by the failures of an unemployed husband and the commitments of an energetically philanthropic wife. His father disinherited him when he died.
Her friend Anny Thackeray, Lady Ritchie, recalled In ‘From The Porch’ (1913) that Elm House in those days had the : long, low drawing-room, with its big bow-window opening to a garden full of gay parterres where lawns ran to the distant boundary, while beyond again lay a far-away horizon… the vast plateau of London, with its drifting vapours and its ripple of housetops flowing to meet the skyline. The room itself was pleasant, sunny, and well-worn. There were old rugs spread on the stained floors (they were not as yet in fashion as they are now); many pictures were hanging on the walls; a varied gallery, good and indifferent; … and then, besides the pictures, there was a sense of music in the air, and of flowers, and of more flowers. The long piano was piled with music books. ……Stately and charming people used to assemble at Elm House. It is an odd saying that people of a certain stamp attract each other. It was a really remarkable assemblage of accomplished and beautiful women who were in the habit of coming there, that home so bare, so simple yet so luxurious.’
Jeanie, born in 1828, was the only daughter among her six brothers and was brought up in Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire.
Jeanie, described as winsome and vivacious with a golden halo of hair, had a magical singing voice.
Devastated with grief after the death of her next oldest brother she became involved with Nassau John the only son of Nassau William Senior who was a well known political economist and close friend of her father. Jeanie later was to come into conflict with her father-in-laws social and political views. It was he who had drafted the harsh New Poor Law of 1834, and believed, for example, that “a well-regulated workhouse” was the best way to prevent pauperism because the “dissolute poor hate its cleanliness. She was 20 when she married.
The couple spent the early days of their married life at her father-in-law’s house in Hyde Park Gate, London, where Jeanie met many, of the leading religious, political and cultural figures of the day including Jenny Lind as Nassau Senior was her legal advisor. Her musical training as a serious singer makes her a great social attraction at the dinner parties of her eminent father-in-law who paid for her lessons. She was asked to test the acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall.
Jeanie’s husband turned out to be lazy and workshy. He could never hold on to the opportunities she secured for him. He apparently, loved Turkish baths. But his indolence condemned her to a lifetime of financial worries. She gave singing lessons. She juggled the family finances by the income from the various lodgers she accommodated including her mother and mother-in-law.
Yet she still had energy and emotion to spare especially for those whom her father-in-law had scorned. She visited workhouse inmates, supported a local industrial school for girls, and assisted Octavia Hill in her housing project for the poor in Marylebone.
This picture by George Watts is in Wightwick Manor (National Trust) in Staffordshire.
Jeanie, wrote of providing soup with her mother Margaret to the people of Latchmere down Pig Hill. She wrote a letter to The Times arraigning the Wandsworth Board of Works about the dreadful sanitation at the foot of Battersea Rise which had an open sewer the Falconbrook but she wrote in her husbands name for her first foray into political life!
She was involved in provisions for Franco-Prussian War 1870-71 which led to her co-founding the British Red Cross, whose medal she received, and the scheme she set up Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, ‘had wide-reaching and beneficial results.’
These are two local institutions she probably visited.
She was approached, via Octavia, by James Stansfeld MP, President of the Local Government Board, and he appointed her as Assistant Inspector (and later Inspector) of Workhouses. They became great friends. She wrote an official report on pauper schools. ‘Report by Mrs. Senior on Pauper Schools’, in January 1874 which was inevitably critical of the existing arrangements. Carleton Tufnell, the Chief Inspector of Workhouses, tries to make Jeanie withdraw her Report before publication. Her report caused a public furore with a lengthy battle with the vested interests in the ‘workhouse establishment’, carried out largely through the letters columns of The Times. Jeanie bravely stood her ground but she had to resign as a result of ill-health as she had ovarian cancer in December 1874.
She fought from her bed, with the backing of Florence Nightingale, who said she was a noble army of one, but it was too much. She died on the 24th March, 1877 aged 48. We can but wonder what she might have achieved if she had lived.
BAC had an immersive children’s show Return to Elm House inspired by Jeanie and her vision of fostering children and BAC have agreed to have a Battersea Society commemorative plaque on Battersea Town Hall when we can. It is the least that this remarkable and gritty woman deserves.
Lavender Sweep House was home to Tom and Laura Taylor and was one of four grand houses with a curved carriageway called Lavender Sweep, between Lavender Hill and Battersea Rise with a lodge at either end. Lavender Sweep house had its own carriageway entrance.
The back of the house seems so much larger than the front. The house had been expanded much by the time the Taylors bought it.
From the Survey of London; a billiard room on its north-west side, 30ft by 20ft, joined to the conservatory by an unusual flight of steps within a glazed, sloping passageway. A magnificent detached 42ft conservatory to the north-west of the house, with semi-circular ends in the manner the Palm House at Kew, reached by a tiled and glazed passage were added when the Taylors moved in 1858 when the house was sold the house to its final occupants. Taylor added a large study ‘to his own design’. A visitor in the 1870s found every wall in the house, even in the bathrooms, covered with pictures; a pet owl perched on a bust of Minerva; and a dining room ‘where Lambeth Faience and Venetian glass abound’.
It seems enormous compared to the front of the house.
Ellen Terry In her autobigraphy said ‘it clearly became the home from home for the people from all the walks of literary, artistic and theatrical life that Taylor was part of”.
Lavender Sweep was a sort of house of call for everone of note…At Lavender Sweep, with the horse-chestnut blossoms strewing the drive and making it look like a tessellated pavement, all of us were always welcome…The atmosphere of gaiety which pervaded Lavender Sweep arose from his kindly, generous nature, which insisted that everyone could have a good time…. …his house was a kind of mecca for pilgrims from America and from all parts of the world….. Yet all the time occupied a position in the Home Office and often walked from Whitehall to Lavender Sweep when his day’s work was done…
Friends and visitors to Lavender Sweep included Dickens, Thackeray, Henry Irving, Tennyson and Lewis Carroll who took photographs of the house, politicians like Mazzini and touring musicians like Clara Schumann, violinist Joseph Joachim, his wife soprano Amelia and Jeanie Nassau Senior and probably his neighbours the Spartalis.
The soirées were presided over by Taylor himself dressed in ‘black-silk knee-breeches and velvet cutaway coat.
Tom Taylor had quite a CV.
Tom had an extensive CV. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/tom-taylor/
He was a playwright, critic, journalist, editor of Punch, Professor of English Literature at London University, a barrister, a civil servant. Tom was the son of a brewer who had been a farm labourer. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. B.A. in 1840 in mathematics and in classics, in 1842 he was elected a fellow of Trinity, got M.A. in 1843. He co-founded the Old Stagers which is recognised as the oldest amateur drama society still performing. For two years was professor of English in the London University. Meanwhile, having kept his terms as a law student at the Inner Temple, he was called to the bar in November 1846. For a while he went the northern circuit, on the passing of the Public Health Act, in 1850, he was appointed assistant secretary, then secretary of the Board of Health. When that was absorbed in the Local Government Board his post became that of secretary to the sanitary department.
But Tom Taylor owed his fame and the greater part of his income to other occupations. He engaged in journalism on the ‘Morning Chronicle’ and the ‘Daily News’ as a leader-writer. art critic for the ‘Times’ and the ‘Graphic and had started his connection with ‘Punch,’ and until 1874 he was an active member of the staff becoming editor in that year and he held that office till his death six years later.
His intention was to create plays his audiences would enjoy, and many of his works were adaptations of existing French plays, or dramatisations of the novels of Charles Dickens or other popular novels of the time and in thirty-five years he supplied more than seventy plays to the principal theatres of London. He played several parts as an actor. Our American Cousin, the play President Lincoln was watching in 1865 when he was assassinated.
He married Laura Barker in 1855 when she was 36. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/laura-barker-1819-10905-composer/
Laura was born in 1819 was a musician and composer from Thirkleby Yorkshire, was the sixth daughter of a vicar and was a descendant Wycliffe, the 14th century theologian, and religious reformer. Laura and her sisters had an upringing like the Brontes. Her father was an amateur musician and painter and. Her first musical instruction in violin and piano came from her parents and then studied private composition and piano with the composer and pianist Philip Cipriani Potter, who became principal of the Royal Academy of Music in 1832 1859
Laura met Paganini, with whom she played aged 13, who it said ‘was much astonished at her power in rendering—entirely from ear—his wonderful harmonies upon her violin’ which was a Stradivari which was later inherited by her future husband the playwright Tom Taylor which was owned by and played by the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell.
Her father had sent Louis Spohr one of her compositions in 1937. Shemet him after a concert and he invited her to become his pupil at Kassel. That year Her Seven Romances for voice and guitar were published, then an album of six songs for a voice and piano. Many of her compositions are based on texts by Tennyson.
She taught music at the York School for the Blind from 1843 until she married Taylor. Her great, great grandson Rupert, an actor living in Cork wrote to me as he wouldlove to resurrect her reputation as he thinks she was a sensational musical talent. He has several of her compositions for the Piano and Organ but said that when his parents sold their family home the early 70s another five or six volumes of her work were, for some reason, put into auction and have disappeared into a collection somewhere. He adds if one could only get some brilliant young up and coming female pianist to champion her cause, I am sure she would once again be restored to her place as one the top British women composers In the late 1800’s she had as big an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography as her husband.
She was an excellent water colourist and so were her sisters. They were all very talented in several artistic directions and were called ‘the phenomenons’ by their contemporaries. Some of her watercolours are on display in Ellen Terry’s Smallhythe Place.
She had two children Lucy and Wycliffe. During her marriage there were few compositions except collaborations with Tom and incidental music to plays. She published again after he died. A reviewer in 1899 said she was an amateur of far more than ordinary ability. She died in 1905 having moved to Colsehill Berkshire.
Tom Taylor died at Lavender Sweep on 1880. The house was demolished but it it was the 1,200ft of frontage to Lavender Sweep/Battersea Rise that were the pull for the developers. Our house was built by 1882.
Laura went to live in Porch House Coleshill Bucks with Lucy. I was contacted by Dr Peter Helps who now lives in the house and is a great, great grandson of Tom and Laura and Sir Arthur Helps, who was Clerk of the Privy Council, serving under 5 Prime Ministers and confidante of Queen Victoria worked with Tom Taylor.
I would like to see a Battersea Society plaque commemorate the Taylors at 84 Lavender Sweep.
Marie Spartal 1844-1923, a prolific Pre-Raphaelite artist lived in The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens.
It is now a large house in a small garden, divided into 16 flats with St Barnabas Church in front added in 1897. When first erected it was a smallish house with a 7-acre garden that stretched from Clapham Common to Lavender Hill. In those days the house’s only immediate neighbours were Akerman’s Sister Houses to the east and West Lodge which once housed the gentleman thief known as Adam Worth, reputedly the inspiration for Moriarty – Sherlock Home’s nemesis.
In 1764 Robert Lovelace, of Child’s Bank, had bought the land from 1st Earl Spencer, to build then in 1796, Railton lived at The Shrubbery, his son William was the architect designer of Nelson’s column. Next George Scholey, distiller, was Lord Mayor in 1812.
Next John Humphery, in 1845 after extensions, which included a suite of three grand reception rooms on the north (garden) front—a dining room, circular drawing room and state drawing room, together nearly 100ft in length—the central one with a double-height bow to its exterior, embellished with giant-order Corinthian half-columns hall. The hall is topped with a saucer dome, open in its centre to a galleried hall above, lit by a hexagonal cupola, all decorated in and out with vigorously modelled Italianate plasterwork and stucco typical of the era. His family retained owership for the next forty years. He was Lord Mayor of London in 1842.
Next owner in 1864 was Greek magnate in shipping Michael Spartali, who became Greek Consul. The Spartalis went bankrupt in 1885 and in the sale of furnishings were Old Master paintings, carved oak furniture, tortoiseshell cabinets, large chandeliers etc. It was described as an ‘Italianate mansion’ . As well as Humphery’s ‘richly decorated’ reception rooms, there was on the ground floor a second dining room and billiard room, either side of the entrance hall and vestibule, as well as a library and conservatory. The first floor had nine principal bedrooms, three dressing rooms, two bathrooms, a boudoir and morning room, with the second floor given over to servants’ accommodation.
The estate was acquired in 1885 by Heaver, who laid out Lavender Gardens in the grounds Rev. Francis Henry Baring, of the banking family, resided at the Shrubbery for a few years. the Vicar of Battersea, Canon Erskine Clarke, bought the house and moved his Vicarage School here in 1887. The the old mansion remained in use as a parish hall for nearly 40 years. One of my children went to playgroup there in 1980. An application by the church to demolish it was refused in 1969, and when it was sold in 1985 was in ‘a very dilapidated state’.
Marie Spartali
was probably the most prolific and significant female artist of that movement. During a sixty-year career, she produced over a hundred works and seventy works, contributing regularly to exhibitions in Great Britain and the United States.
The Spartali’s friends the Ionedes were patrons of Rossetti, Watts, and Whistler. This is how Marie and her sister met them and were i asked to pose for them. On meeting Marie Swinburne said “She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry”. Marie was an imposing figure6 ft 3 in tall. Beautiful throughout her lifetime she became more valued for her role as an artist’s model. She became a close friend of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and alongside her cousins Maria Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio, collectively came to be known as The Three Graces.
All featured in the recent Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Exhibition. She sat for numerous paintings by Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. She was the ideal as the mythical women and iconic heroines of early Italian literature They also had a home on the Isle of Wight decorated in the Aesthetic taste; There they were mixing with Tennyson and his visitors and photographer Julia Margaret Cameron who photographed her.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti describing Marie Spartali Stillman in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,in 1870′ She is a noble girl, in beauty, in sweetness and in artistic gifts, and the sky would seem very warm … and the road in front bright and clear … to him who starts on his life’s journey foot to foot and hand in hand with hand”
Unhappy with being purely the recipient of male gazes, she desired to become an artist herself, and in 1864 studied drawing and painting under Ford Madox Brown for six years. She chose to work in a mixture of watercolor, gouache, and graphite, innovating her own technique with the addition of heavy, opaque pigments and additives that gave her work an overall quality of an oil painting.
Her paintings adapt the typical Pre-Raphaelite themes of female figures and literary characters, in addition to traditionally ‘feminine’ subjects of landscapes and floral still lifes. Her paintings of women ‘revised the way Pre-Raphaelite women were represented.
She exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1867, the Grosvenor Gallery the Royal Academy and at various galleries in the USA between 1867 to 1908. A retrospective show there in 1982, and another one at the Delaware Art Gallery in 2015 and at the Watts Gallery Compton in 2016. Dr Nick Tromans, Curator of Watts Gallery, comments: “Like Mary Watts and Evelyn De Morgan Marie Spartali is part of the first wave of British women who were able to train as professional artists
Marie married an American widower William Stillman who had three children. His wife had committed suicide and her parents disapproved so they did their courting in Elm House as she was a great friend of Jeanie’s. He was an art critic, friend of Ruskins and a foreign correspondent. In 1874, they moved into No. 44 Altenburg Gardens briefly in what Stillman called ‘that delightful neighbourhood’. The house backed on to the garden of the Shrubbery.
She and William had three children, living in Florence from 1878 to 1883, and Rome from 1889 to 1896, also travelled to America.
She went on to travel to the United States in the early 1900s where she exhibited her work at Curtis and Cameron’s Gallery in Boston, as well as in New York, making her the only Britain-based Pre-Raphaelite artist to work in the United States. Throughout her career, she consistently exhibited several pictures a year and sold work regularly.
William died in 1901. Marie was good friends of William and Jane Morris and visited them often at Kelmscott Manor.
Marie died in 1927 cremated at Brookwood Cemetery. There is a Spartali Mausoleum at West Norwood cemetery.
She featured in the recent Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Exhibition at the NPG, as did her her cousins Maria and Aglaia. An application for an EH plaque to her by residents has been successful.
Gilmore House 113 Clapham Common became the deaconate established by Deaconess Isabella Gilmore 1842-1923.
https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/03/12/deaconess-isabella-gilmore/
She was an English church woman who oversaw the revival of the Deaconess Order in the Church of England. She served actively in the parish of Battersea one of the poorest in south London for almost two decades from 1891.
Sister Houses hence the name of the avenue nearby.
For nearly 150 years these two villas and their grounds formed one of the area’s great landmarks, built by the Akerman family to preserve the view from their home later known as Battersea Rise and the home of William Wiberforce. It was across the small part of Clapham Common. The gardens ran to Lavender Hill. These villas acquired the name Sister Houses, or the Sisters; they were later known individually as Sister House and The Sisters which became Gilmore House.
It is on the corner of Elspeth Road, facing Clapham Common, now private apartments. There is a GLC plaque to John Walter, coal buyer, who lived there for a few years 1774-1782 till he became bankrupt but later founded The Times
Deaconess Gilmore was born Isabella Morris in 1842 at Woodford Hall, Essex. She was one of ten children. She was educated by a governess before attending a private school in Brighton and a finishing school in Clifton in Bristol.When her father died the family moved to Water House, Lloyd Park Walthamstow E17 ( from 1848-1856) now William Morris Gallery and then to Leyton House in Leytonstone.
She met naval officer Lieutenant Arthur Hamilton Gilmore who was ten years older than her but she liked him for his kindness and humour and they had a happy marriage. She was widowed at the age of 40. Childless, she began training as a nurse at Guy’s Hospital which caused a lot of misgivings in the family. Two years later, she took on as her own, eight orphaned nieces and nephews from her late brother Randall.
In 1886, she was recruited by Bishop Thorold of Rochester, via the matron Miss Jones at Guys, to revive the female deaconate in his diocese. Reluctantly at first she accepted the challenge He was regarded her as a woman of high intellect and strong will, with the rare gifts of sympathy with the souls of the very poor, and of courage to face the misery into which their misfortune or their faults had depressed them.
Deaconesses were to be “a curiously effective combination of nurse, social worker and amateur policemen” They established a training house for Deaconesses at Park Hill Clapham where she was ordained in 1887.
Most left after a shorter or longer time as the job proved too challenging. She insisted that the women were taught basic theological principles in order to be ready for parochial duties, trained in basic nursing skills and some were given the opportunity to train for six months at Guy’s hospital. The strict discipline weeded out the unsuitable candidates quite quickly and after a couple of years, the house was full of dedicated professionals. They provided a soup kitchen, donated clothing, looked after the sick, taught religion and basic sanitation.
One of Isabella’s less likeable duty was fundraising but was very good at it and in 1891, the institution could move to a larger house on the north side of Clapham Common
She wrote As we crossed the Common on Sunday afternoons, we came out at the top of Battersea Rise, near the front gate of a beautiful house called “The Sisters.” For a long time we called it “Our house”; but it was just a little bit of fun. One day during the hot summer of 1891, seeing a furniture van at the door, I was curious enough to ask if the people were leaving. “Gentleman dead,” was the reply. A fortnight later a board appeared, “This house to let.”. We found out that a Mr. Wallis had bought it, who lived in the other Sister house. I was shown into a magnificent library. “Come in, I know all about you.” “That is so nice, because I want you to let us have the house next door.” “Of course I will!” However, though he was willing we should have the house, his lawyers were not. I asked if he would take me for his tenant, giving him my banker’s address. I got it, on a seven years’ lease It was a stately mansion with acres of garden–no iron fence but a “ha-ha” . There are two busts in niches of Milton and Shakespeare which I think is pretentious
She was lucky again as when Wallis died a Mr. Shepherd Cross MP bought it. It transpired was a friend of Isabella’s mother’s and she persuaded him to sell her the house and he had the Sister House demolished.
She established many heavily subsidized forms of philanthropic organization, such as the provision of clothing for small loans, provident clubs, an industrial society, and girls’ preventive home. She hated alcohol and deaconesses were expected to break up fights. Alongside their parochial visiting they liaised with different agencies: the relieving officer, the school attendance officer, the local doctor, local hospitals, and charities.
She set up The Girls Preventive Home, provided care or girls from abusive or neglectful family circumstances received a basic education and training to prepare them for domestic service or seamstresses, adjacent to the Deaconess Institution and run by a series of matrons. To support the Home, Isabella travelled on separate fundraising appeals. Jane Morris contributed to the Home annually in her own name (the only Morris family member to do SO).
Chapel at Gilmore House designed by Phillip Webb. When (1894), Isabella’s mother died, she left her a substantial sum which she decided to use on a chapel. Philip Webb designed a simple chapel in the arts and crafts style, as well as the furniture and a cross for it. It has Burne Jones designed windows.
Though the chapel survives, unfortunately it was stripped of most of its furniture in the 1970s. and more recently was converted to a studio apartment as part of the 2007–8 redevelopment scheme.
Gilmore House continued training till 1970 before becoming a student hostel. She served under three bishops who fortunately were supportive though she was trepidatious every time a new one was installed. Deaconess Glossop, of Lucknow writes of her. She was a most capable woman, abounding in zeal and devotion for her work amongst the poores tin the slums of South London. She never spared herself, and certainly her love for the sick and for children won them. Her keen sense of fun and real enjoyment of all the experiences that came to her and to us brought plenty of life and brightness into the House. There was never anything narrow or ‘goody-goody’ about her, and she had boundless sympathy. One Deaconess said ‘what impressed me most was her dealing with the people she visited, her humour, her tenderness, her shrewdness, and her knowledge of human nature’
Her “insistence on rigorous standards in training, and on the independent status of ordained deaconesses, who were paid (her own services were given free), had important implications for the professionalization of women’s work.Isabella was a member of the first executive of the National Union of Women Workers..” Morris is said to have remarked to his sister once, “I preach socialism you practice it’
In 1906, when she retired from the Rochester Institution she had presented forty-five of her students for ordination.
In 1914, moved to Kew the two nieces. She died on 15 March 1823 and was buried at St. Michael’s, Lyme Regis, beside her husband.
Isabella deserves to have a commemorative plaque on Gilmore House but a recent application to English Heritage was turned down which seems unfair to me as the house wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for her. She paved the way for the ordination of women. She is remembered with a commemoration in the Calendar of Saints and a bas-relief plaque in Southwark cathedral which was set up the following year.
Me on the Jerry Springer Show
I was revisiting some of my blog pages and came across this one about the time I appeared on The Jerry Springer Show on ITV when he took over the Jeremy Kyle Show. Apparently, it was only for four weeks, according to Jeremy. Both shows are now history. The Jerry Springer Show finished in 2018 and Jeremy Kyle Show was cancelled permanently May 2019 after a participant died shortly after appearing on the trashy exploitative daytime show.
I found this item about Jerry V Jeremy and a bum tattoo. Jeremy Kyle makes shock dig at TV rival Jerry Springer.
https://www.entertainmentdaily.co.uk/tv/jeremy-kyle-makes-shock-dig-at-tv-rival-jerry-springer/
Turning to the camera, Jeremy ranted: “With the greatest of respect for a man that was the number one daytime talk show in America for 19 years… But he only lasted four weeks over here.” In fact, The Jerry Springer Show ran for 27 years in the US from 1991 to 2018, starting when Jeremy was still a radio presenter.
I
Of course, we could also point out to Kyle that there was Jerry Springer the Opera which was a great success and got much publicity but no one bothered with an opera homage to his second rate English imitator.
I was contacted as a Humanist Celebrant, via the British Humanist Association, sometime in the noughties by the Jerry Springer team who were putting on an edition of THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW in the Jeremy Kyle Show slot. There were to be two couples, each with one of the pair a transsexual, who were committed to each other and wanted to have a wedding commitment ceremony on the show. Back then, before civil celebrants, we were the obvious go to for a secular wedding commitment ceremony. The BHA knew that I would probably be up for it having done some solo comedy. But, being the Jerry Springer Show there also had to be an extra slant to this too, involving some discord from their families.
Anyone who puts themselves forward for that show is seeking/happy for the publicity and their few minutes of TV exposure. As well, they would be getting a little trip to London, a stay in a hotel, receive a makeover and be supplied with a wedding outfit from wardrobe department. But they did also have to bring along their modicum of ‘family dynamics’ involving some disapproval, of course.
I was asked if I would act as celebrant and agreed that I would if I thought the couples were genuinely committed to each other- as much as one can make such a judgement about folk wishing to undergo the ‘Jerry Springer’ treatment. I asked that I be given the opportunity to talk/interview the couples to ensure that they did want to make a commitment to each other as well as getting to understand more why they wanted a public ceremony and what the dissenting ‘issues’ were around it. I also have to ask if any of them are virgins as I do not marry virgins as I would deem it irrational to do so! They assured me that they were not virgins. This got me into bother with Humanists UK and the Ministry of Justice. That’s another story. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/i-dont-marry-virgins/
In the first case it was the woman X whose mother objected to her daughter’s relationship because her partner Y had been a man when they first started to go out together. Mother was not going to budge on this and was not going to give them her blessing.
With the second couple there was hardly a problem but they manufactured one by getting the transsexual female’s son to state that he could not call his Dad ‘Mum’ but he was prepared to be the best man. His Dad was not asking him to call him Mum despite Jerry trying to stir it up! The son had, of course, accepted the situation, seemed to like his Dad’s partner and obviously was glad to see his Dad happy.
Here I am supporting Equal Civil Partnerships.
I helped the couples to write their own vows for the show as I refuse to do a formulaic repeat-after-me scenario as this is a hangover from a time when many people were illiterate. Instead, the couples write and read their own vows to each other. We had some fun preparing their promises/vows. We all had our makeover done. I thought I looked okay in a heavily made-up sort of way and it was evident that my tendency to become flushed was not apparent. Three of the four got their virginal white wedding dresses and veils and looked suitably bridal with bouquets as befits a JERRY SPRINGER wedding event.
The first part of the show was about the ‘set-ups’ with their families, then I performed a very brief ceremony, they duly read their vows to each other and I pronounced them wedded and gave them permission to kiss – as you do. There was whooping and cheering as there usually is. Then they got Xs mother to storm off shouting obscenities to her daughter and her bride whilst the bestman son congratulated his ‘Dad’ and her husband. And we all went off to enjoy some ITV champagne.
JERRY SPRINGER SHOW is daytime and the only person who told me he saw it was Roger who was a local gay friend. For me it was just another interesting event in my life as a Humanist celebrant.
The ITV Televison Centre was only recently sold to Mitsubishi. According to an article in the Architects Journal. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/make-set-to-redevelop-itvs-former-south-bank-headquarters/10046730.article
Make Architects has been selected to redevelop the former ITV headquarters building on London’s South Bank by its new owner Mitsubishi Estate in an all-cash transaction, reportedly worth £146 million, in November last year. Managing director and chief executive Yuichiro Shioda said: ’The size and South Bank location of this site present a unique opportunity to create something that is truly a destination in its own right.‘While our exact plans for the site are still being finalised, we will be working towards a scheme that contributes to both the local community and cultural focus the area enjoys, and will be seeking an open dialogue throughout with Lambeth Council.’ There are objections to the scheme.
Jerry Springer the Opera started life at BAC and we were there when it was ‘scratched’ with Richard Thomas and collected a lot of tins of lager which Joan and I insisted were shared around.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/feb/24/theatre1 Richard said; ” In February 2001, I performed a late-night lecture called How to Write an Opera about Jerry Springer. I spoke for about 40 minutes and I also bought several crates of beer to give to the audience in return for some feedback and ideas. This went down well.Alone at the piano, he invited members of the audience ( double figures on a good night) to make suggestions for the show’s content.
By May 2001, I had written the first-half libretto and about 20 minutes of music. I had four singers perform it and I also sang at the piano. I am a terrible singer but the material still worked well. That was a good sign. The evening attracted great press and some investment to pay singers and move the project forward. It also attracted Stewart Lee (who was also thinking about giving up), who came on board as co-librettist and director.
In August 2001, we performed a one-act version at the BAC Opera festival. This went stupidly well, but we still carried on trying new material because we wanted to do a two-act show.
In August 2001, we performed a one-act version at the BAC Opera festival. This went stupidly well, but we still carried on trying new material because we wanted to do a two-act show.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/didnt-they-do-well-7287242.html The critics have pronounced it as “triumph, tragedy and trailer trash, as high art meets low”, “utter, impure theatrical pleasure” and “an exhilarating foulmouthed fiesta”.
Of course, there were objections from the religious prigs shouting blasphemy and how it offends them. As ever they are told they don’t have go to see it but can’t prevent others from enjoying such entertainment.
The show was then performed in concert at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002, selling out. Jerry Springer came to see the show and endorsed it, stating, “I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Following the Festival run, Nicholas Hytner offered to include the show in his opening season as director of the National Theatre in London.
It is still being revived. it was staged at the Hope Mill Theatre Manchester last August. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/aug/14/jerry-springer-the-opera-review-hope-mill-theatre-manchester-stewart-lee
In the age of Trump, certain lines jump out. “You could run for Senate or even president,” Jerry’s warm-up man tells him, greeted with a chorus of bitter laughs. The show’s questioning of the moral responsibility of TV also feels newly pertinent after the axing of The Jeremy Kyle Show.
Ethel Mannin 1900-1984
Ethel Mannin was a popular British novelist, travel writer, political activist, socialist who was born in 28 Garfield Road off Lavender Hill. She was of Irish descent and had inherited her socialist values from her father Bob who was a postal worked. She is now one of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill. She was a prodigious author of over a 100 books!
Ethel bought Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon in 1929 and lived there till 1974. I went to check it out on a hot day in July 2020 and took photos from the street but then knocked on the door. The Japanese man answered, I told him why I was there, he produced some of Ethel’s books and said his wife would probably be interested in speaking to me but she was having a bath. He took me to their Japanese style back garden where I waited and his wife Alison came and we had a long chat! She is Director of the Royal Asiatic Society. I will apply for a plaque for Oak Cottage rather than for the Garfield Road house.
This working class self-educated woman born in 1900 was a lifelong political maverick, was a pacifist, an anarchist, and an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause was. She was twice married and had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell who featured in Impressions as Portrait of a First Class Mind. These affairs were between husbands and this time and her views came back to haunt her later.
She was described in The Socialist Review as ‘a successful author, activist and fighter for sexual liberation, has truly been hidden from history. She moved in the same circles as George Orwell, CLR James and other radicals in the 1930s, yet few have heard of her today.’……. an opponent of censorship, a champion of sexual liberation and of progressive child-centred education. http://socialistreview.org.uk/428/ethel-mannin-hidden-history
I was amused that she was miffed at Isadora Duncan referring to herself as the ‘female Casanova of America’ stating that I have been called “a modern George Sand”(“but so much better looking, my dear”) but I have never gone about making a sort of slogan of it. She appears in most photos with a severe hairstyle with a middle parting.
Ethel Edith was the eldest of the three children of Robert Mannin, a postal worker and Edith Gray, a farmer’s daughter from Devon. Her father Bob worked in the Post Office. She wrote a piece about Lavender Hill on a Saturday night, when she was in a little wooden pushcart, in her first memoirs Confessions and Impressions written in 1930. This is the only book of hers that I have read so far.
She talked of the ‘flairs on the street stalls, red as fire against the night-dark sky…..The crowds were more dense too which was an added excitement… the yellow glare of lights from the shop fronts, the warm smell of the people pressed close together , the bunches of walllflowers stacked on barrows, the pungent smell of oranges and the great glowing blaze of their colour, the bunches of grapes, white and black suspended like Japanese lanterns from the awnings, the white nakedness of the scrubbed celery heads gleaming wantonly in the flicker and shadow, the rhythmic rows of shining apples And the black shawled gipsy-looking women who sold these things and their rough men-folk and brass earrings in their ears… infinitely romantic….clutching string bags costers shouting prices, a din of traffic… myself safe being pushed through it all like a dexterously manipulated ship on a dark sea, in my little chair on wheels.’
There was a lovely post office opposite the library on Lavender Hill which got demolished. Perhaps that is where Bob was a mail sorter. Her father was also a fan of John Burns MP and she writes about walking on Clapham Common with her Dad as a young girl and them meeting Burns with his son.
And coincidentally she also has a chapter on actors Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton – Portrait of a Strange Pair. She probably didn’t know that Elsa also grew up near Clapham Common in Leathwaite Road and was also aware of John Burns and seeing him when she walked along Clapham Common Northside on her way to school. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/
When I read it I realised that she lived off Lavender Hill and not in Clapham as is usually stated and discovered, with the help of Emma, from the Heritage Library, that the family lived at 28 Garfield Road. It is a landlorded house now with red painted bricks and pvc windows and door. I’m sure it would have looked more elegant from the outside when the Mannin’s lived there. She wrote about ‘mounting the steep stairs of the old tall house into the small room with green cloth on the table and the canary covered up for the night and the kitchen range shining …a room mysterious with the blue-grey dimness of the turned-down gas.’
Soon after she was six she was sent to a private school in a small house. ‘I was dreadfully unhappy and tormented here’ From there she went to a Board School, which was overcrowded, and the syllabus had little connection with real life she said. I suspect this could have been Wix’s Lane School. She failed to get a scholarship to secondary school. She began writing stories and the first of these appeared in the Lady’s Companion in 1910.
In 1915 she won a scholarship to attend a commercial school and she fell in love with one of her teachers who was a member of the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society. After leaving school she found employment as a typist for the advertising agency, Charles F. Higham Ltd and soon he promoted her to the post of copywriter. ‘
‘At sixteen I was writing advertisements, running two house-organs – business magazines – and when I was seventeen was publishing my own stories, articles, verses, in a monthly magazine which Higham bought and left to me to produce.” Her employer was to have a great influence on her career.
She began a relationship with a New Zealand artist : “I was deeply religious until I was sixteen, and then the artist… who was my real education, put into my hands the essays of Robert Green Ingersoll and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, together with a Rational Press Association Annual, and I became an agnostic’ He was a conscientious objector during the WWI and in 1917 he returned to New Zealand.
She became romantically involved with John Porteous who was the general manager at Highams. They married in 1919 and soon after gave birth to her only child Jean.With a young baby to look after, she worked from home writing advertisements and editing journals. Mannin was a supporter of progressive education and sent her daughter to Summerhill School.
In 1929 Ethel and John Porteous separated and she bought Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon.I checked this house out on Zoopla, the estimated price was £4,157,000!! In a book by Lucy Pethridge on interiors she wrote of Oak Cottage. ‘Inside it was not in the least cottagey. It was a riot of shiny lacquered blue, black and orange with a Egyptian runners on the wall, a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the fireplace and the cabinet gramophone painted in bright zigzags. Oak Cottage exemplified the new aesthetic of the twenties. ‘Modernity’ wrote Mannin ‘was cube shaped and jazz patterned’.
Paul Tanqueray photographed her. His work was often shown in The Tatler and The Sketch. This is Ethel in her back garden at Oak Cottage and reading to her daughter Jean.
The website Neglected Books has an appraisal of Ethel’ s memoirs which concluded that with such a prodigious output, it was bound to be uneven. She was lucky to have the connections she made with publishers and the competition today is so much greater to find a publisher. She knew that she would have no trouble getting her books published and so she kept writing them.
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3354 Confessions was one of her most successful and popular books, going into multiple printings and being reissued a few years later as an early Penguin paperback. Its success owed much to the novelty of Mannin’s scandalous confessions, such as falling in love with one of her female teachers, enduring the abuse of another (psychopathic) teacher who refused to let her pupils use the toilet and kept them hostage until they wet themselves and were duly punished, and having several affairs, including one with an unnamed man so distraught over their break-up that he committed suicide. Heady stuff for its time.
But, at the same time, Confessions and Impressions offers an early clue to the secret of Ethel Mannin’s success as a word producer and failure as a writer. After the war, Mannin seems to have latched onto a formula guaranteed to keep her production rate high.
Over the next decades, she would write and publish at a furious pace, producing 30 novels by 1952. She had set set for herself early on in her career of writing two books a year, one fiction and one nonfiction.
This website includes Ethel Mannin in a list of authors whose books won’t be pulped https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/latest-news/forgotten-writers-who-won-t-be-pulped-fiction-1-4048956
Motherhood brought forth an interest in various facets of education and child-rearing, subjects about which she developed strong opinions and dealt with in several books. Her politics and views on schooling were progressive, and the ideas of A.S. Neill, the radical advocate of child-centered education
In 1931 she published Common Sense and the Child, a book about the educational theories of A. S. Neill. She argued that “all outside compulsion is wrong… inner compulsion is the only value”. She also suggested that “there is no such thing as the naughty child… there are only happy children and unhappy children.” She produced a novel, Linda Shawn (1932), on the subject of progressive education. Love’s Winnowing (1932) was her first openly politically novel
All of her books are in one way or another manifestations of her sympathy for the underdog, particularly the working classes. The various crises of the 1930s only served to heighten her sense of social justice. During these years, she joined the Independent Labour Party, which advocated taking a strong position against the growing threat of Fascism. She traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936, a visit she recorded in South to Samarkand, and the sharply critical observations of the Stalinist regime included in the work made her very unpopular in British Marxist and pro-USSR circles.
During the Spanish Civil War she helped American anarchist veteran Emma Goldman organize meetings in London to create public support for Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist factions. The novel, which centered on the triangular relationship between Goldman, her lover Alexander Berkman, and Berkman’s inamorata Emmy Eckstein , remains an important source on Goldman’s life and personality according to her entry in Women’s Encylopedia. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mannin-ethel-1900-1984 She wrote The Blossoming Bough (1943), in which an Irishman goes to Paris and thence to the Spanish Civil War, remaining faithful to his actress-cousin Katherine O’Donal.
In 1938 she married the Quaker pacifist writer Reginald Reynolds. He was perhaps best known as a critic of British Imperialism in India, who collaborated with Gandhi for his 1937 work The White Sahibs in India. For many years he was also New Statesman’s weekly satirical poet.
He resigned from the Independent Labour Party (1939) over the issue of British policies toward the Arab population of British-occupied Palestine, and she soon followed. During the next decades, she would become deeply involved with issues relating to the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, eventually emerging as one of the most vocal and eloquent defenders of Palestinians at a time when most British intellectuals championed the Zionist-led cause of the Jewish population of Palestine.
Ending what she called “the bitter, dangerous 1930s” with a better understanding of politics, society and literature, she had far more respect for her working-class friends and acquaintances, whom she saw as “good comrades of the class struggle,” than for the “suede-shoed communists with Oxford accents and about as much knowledge of working class life and problems as they have of the word ‘Left.'”
In the years after 1945, Ethel traveled around the globe for material for new books. She first spent time in Ireland and writing of Connemara Journal (1947). A stay in war-ravaged occupied Germany resulted in German Journey (1948), while a number of other books were based on visits to Brittany, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, and Sweden.
Although her trips were usually brief, her sharp powers of observation often resulted in considerable insights in her travel books. Some of these insights also found their way into her fiction, as was the case in her 1956 novel The Living Lotus. Set in rural upper Burma (now Myanmar), the book has been described as a realistic work with not only entertainment value but also information about the Burmese.
Her 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by historian Robert Graham as setting forth “an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society”
In the 1960s, she became greatly interested in the Middle East. A long trip through Iraq and Kuwait in 1963 produced A lance for the Arabs in 1963 and the novel, The Road to Beersheba which she saw as a pro-Palestinian counter to Leon Uris’ huge pro-Israeli best-seller, Exodus. She returned to Jordan in 1965, producing The Lovely Land (1965) (travelogue) and The Burning Bush (1965), also favoring the Palestinian cause.
Besides her Battersea connection I was also interested in her Irish sojourn in Connemara and how she came to be sometimes acclaimed as an Irish writer especially as she got included in the badge-of-honour of Irish banned books and authors. Ethel claimed she inherited her father’s fair hair and Celtic imagination as he knew ‘all the lore and legend of the little people’. Mannin is an old Irish name and claim direct descent from King Brian Boru. Melough Castle is a ruined Mannin stronghold in east Galway and Ethel chose to settle and buy a cottage near Clifden a few miles from Mannin Bay.
Ethel lived near Clifden in the late 1930s and early 1940s. My eldest sister Ida remembered our mother pointing out Ethel’s cottage on car trip. During those years she was also a regular visitor to Dublin, where she numbered Yeats, Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington among her friends. Two of her most famous books are closely associated with the Clifden area: Connemara Journal (an account of her stay there);dedicated to Maude Gonne McBride and Late Have I Loved Thee (her best-selling novel, which is partly set there)was dedicated to her friend the late Isabel Foyle, of Foyle’s Hotel in Clifdenhttps://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/ethel-mannin-1.185991
She returned to Connemara, feeling ‘romantically and sentimentally in love with the country’, in Nov. 1945, when she bought the cottage, previously rented; spoke at public meetings against the Partition of Ireland – ‘the imperialist problem nearest home’ – and elected Chairman of West London Area of Anti-Partition Committee. She bought a 12-sailing boat called Kathleen in Connemara, June 1949.
Late Have I Loved Thee (1948) was popular in Ireland because it is about Francis Sable who converts to Catholicism and joins the Jesuits in Milltown, Ireland, after his much-loved sister Cathyn Sable dies in a climbing accident; based on the story of Fr. John Sullivan, S.J., son of the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland a convert, the novel was was said to be responsible for many vocations, and was adopted by the Women Writers’ Club (Sec. Dr. Lorna Reynolds); Ethel and her husband dined there with Earl of Wicklow, Sean MacBride, Kate O’Brien, Mrs. Isabel Foyle – the dedicatee of the novel who had prompted it with information about O’Sullivan – and Elizabeth Rivers.
A reviewer on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3529618-late-have-i-loved-thee wrote: This has been on my shelf for years. When I read that it was Pope Francis’ favorite book, I knew I had to read it asap. A wonderful and inspiring read. I love conversion stories as they remind me that God love is greater than any shackles of sin. Reminds me of Brideshead! and another A novel of conversion, written by a noncatholic anarchist. Loved it.
Ethel issued Every Man a Stranger (1949), a novel based on the life of William Joyce Lord Haw Haw, who was born In Galway, for which Rivers refused the dedication saying that the theme turned her ‘sideways with distaste’
She wrote an illustrated parody Comrade O Comrade – a forgotten satire of the British and Irish left set in the late 30s, which tells the story of a British communist’s quest to transform a Galway farmer Larry into a Marxist revolutionary. https://goodbyetwilight.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/comrade-o-comrade-a-forgotten-satire-of-the-british-and-irish-left/ but a reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald didn’t like it.https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/27901732/1007554
Her other Irish connection was her affair with WB Yeats in the thirties. Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats writes: ‘Ethel Mannin was a rationalist and skeptical, he mystical and credulous. Politics divided them too. She was left-wing, just short of being a Marxist, his leanings were firmly the other way. But that hardly mattered when, as a companion, she was brilliant, fun, and full of the salty talk that Yeats adored. She was not worried about his cultural baggage: “Yeats full of Burgundy and racy reminiscence was Yeats released from the Celtic Twilight and treading the antic hay with abundant zest.” When their relationship became actively sexual is not known. [Norman] Haire had enlisted Ethel specifically to reassure Yeats about the success of the Steinach operation, and she had … dress[ed] as seductively as possible.’ (Privileged Spectator, London 1939, p.81; Maddox, p.281.)
Mannin whom Yeats addressed as ‘Mother Goddess,’ telling her ‘You are doubly a woman, first because of yourself & secondly because of the Muses whereas I am but once a woman.’ from the book A foolish, Passionate Man: Margot Ruddock and Ethel Mannin by Joseph M Hasset.
Jonathan deBurca Butler wrote in the Irish Independent newspaper an article titled The Many Women of W B Yeats. Yeats had a Steinach operation, a type of vasectomy, which was said by its supporters to increase energy and sexual vigour in men. According to Yeats, the procedure worked and he claimed to go through what he called “a second puberty”. Shortly after the operation, Ethel Mannin, a 34-year-old writer and member of the World League for Sexual Reform, was called on to “test the operation’s efficacy”.
Roy Foster in an article Poetry of Women from Yeats: A Life; wrote: ” Affairs with people such as Bertrand Russell had left her with something of a reputation as an apostle of “free love”, which later came back to haunt her…. Crescendo, described as a “saga of sex”. A few years later her Women and the Revolution argued straightforwardly for free love, equal sexual rights and opportunities for men and women, instant divorce and abortion on demand. “https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-poetry-of-women-xn98xlwb0lp
She continued to live in her beloved home of Oak Cottage, Wimbledon, after the 1958 death of her husband. He died unexpectedly, on an Australian lecture tour. There are further incidents/people in her life like appearing in court as a character-witness for a robber, befriended by her husband and herself and visited in prison on previous occasions!
At the end of her writing career, when she was in her 70s, she moved to “Overhill”, Shaldon, Devonshire, in the 1960s – a house found for her by Jean to be near her. In 1976, she published her last novel, The Late Miss Guthrie. The next year, she published her final book, a last volume of autobiography, Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977). In this work, she addressed her many loyal readers as old friends and demonstrated the charm that had kept them faithful to her even when in some instances her opinions were by no means palatable to every reader.
Virginia Nicholson in Among the Bohemians wrote: Ethel Mannin: ” didn’t resent the passing of youth, but she felt displaced in the post-War world of the 1950s… In old age her pleasures were correspondingly elderly – good wine, good books, and her roses. Her robust impatience with humbug remained vigorous however. She continued to travel, espoused Buddhism, and signed up to a variety of liberal causes. Passion, she felt, was for the young, but ‘the unending struggle against injustice and barbarism in the world’ was perennial.
Neglected Books thought that in her final memoir Sunset over Dartmoor that she did an imitation of a Tory old fogey: “We who were young in the Twenties are intensely aware of the Seventy’s scene because we have no part in it–nor want any.” and that it could have been the summing up of a remarkable career and life. Instead, it was the last lap of a writer who’d already run too long and was just going through the motions she’d drilled into her muscle memory through sheer repetition.
Ethel died in Devon on December 5, 1984 in Teignmouth Hospital after she had a fall.
Ethel was a woman with so many facets and phases to her life politically and as a writer. Her earlier life which helped inform her political views, early motherhood, her lifestyle and affairs in her thirties, her anarchist phase, her marriage to a pacifist Quaker, her socialism, Spanish civil war, the travel after the war and all the time churning out books and it seemed to have become a way of life for her. So she could switch between her novels and travel books with the latter inspiring the former, reflecting the politically changing world around her and revised her own attitudes and campaigning accordingly. She could write about her cat, children’s books, she could speak at meetings, join Reg in his work, writing magazine articles. She must have spent so much of her time at her typewriter in her study in Oak Cottage.
She has made an impact in many different fields as she aged and her interests changed which is why she is still of interest to younger people who are discovering her work and writing and blogging about her. From the PhD student discovering her parody Comrade O Comrade to Peter Faulkner writing about Ethel Mannin and William Morris for The Morris Society. http://www.morrissociety.org/JWMS/13.2Spring1999/SP99.13.2.Faulkner.pdf
There is the middle eastern scholar Ahmed Al Rawi writing his paper on the Post Colonial novels of Desmond Stewart (1924–81) and Ethel Mannin (1900–84) who are both unique among British fiction writers because they offered different portrayals of the post-colonial Arab world than what was mostly found in Western mainstream writings…. Mannin focused on the postcolonial era which followed the British occupation and was represented in the Palestinian national movements. and offered a more complex and diverse view of the Arab world that was far different from many other stereotypical fictional depictions.
The blog Inspiring older readers says: grab her books while you can and explore the world of one of literature’s great radicals. Ethel Mannin : novelist, travel writer and Socialist http://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2016-08-03/ethel-mannin-novelist-travel-writer-and-socialist
The website Kate Sharpley Library on anarchy and anarchists have written about her as one of their own. Ethel Mannin the novelist in fact did a great deal of work for the anarchist movement, in particular during the Spanish struggle, and continued to give us support during the war…The great quality in her novels was a zest for life. She owed a lot to her father, an old-time socialist who kept the faith. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/0zpcq4 as has Albert Meltzer https://libcom.org/library/on-ethel-mannin-albert-meltzer
The Neglected Books website in 2017 revised its view of her on reading No More Mimosa “After writing a fairly disparaging piece about Ethel Mannin’s six volumes of memoirs two years ago, I wouldn’t have counted on finding her work on my reading list again” https://neglectedbooks.com/?tag=ethel-mannin
When I am researching someone’s life or when I am writing and compiling a funeral tribute I find that I become quite intensely absorbed in these people’s lives. I also wonder if I would have liked them, if I would have got on with them or have been likely to have socialised with them. I think I would have been a bit intimidated by her and that she would be haughty. I think, she was inevitably somewhat shallow and misplaced in her allegiances. But, I would liked to have gossiped and nattered with over a glass of wine and I am so pleased to have found another notable women of Lavender Hill and Battersea making up three significant women authors of the 2Oth century who lived in Battersea close to Clapham Common.
Rosanne Rabinowitz wrote a short story The Shiftings for The Far Tower: Stories for WB Yeats from Swan River Press which is a musing from Ethel on Willy Yeats when she is in her 80s in her Devon rose garden and I was chuffed when she mentioned this blog as a summary for Ethel’s life and work.
Other works
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Catherine Gurney OBE 1848-1930 a Notable woman of Lavender Hill
Catherine Gurney was born on 19 June 1848, at Normanby House Lavender Hill Battersea, south London. Her parents were Joseph, who worked at the firm of William Brodie Gurney, shorthand writers to Parliament, and Harriet (nee Tritton). The Trittons were a banking family.
The Survey of London Batterse. ‘The house was occupied for many years by members of the Gurney family, ‘England’sgreat stenographic dynasty’. It was demolished in the 1880s and the site covered by Kathleen Road.’
The Gurneys were non-conformist. Their affluent and religious middle-class family was related to the Gurney banking family of Norwich. Most of her early life was spent in Wandsworth. Then when her father died the family moved to Notting Hill.
Her grandfather WB Gurney played a leading role in the abolition of slavery as did her great aunt Martha Gurney. The prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney) was another relative. Colin Salter https://www.colinsalter.co.uk/ writes about his Gurney predecessors in his blog Tall Tales from the Trees from which a lot of this information comes and the photographs and I am grateful to him. http://talltalesfromthetrees.blogspot.com/2012/03/catherine-gurney-obe-1848-1930-and-her.html
Mary Gurney was Catherine’s step-sister born in 1836. Mary was dedicated to girl;s education. She wrote a book ‘Are we to have education for out middle class girls? She was one of the co-founders of the Girls Public Day School Trust in 1871 for the establishment of schools open to all those girls whose educational needs were not covered by the education act of 1870. 38 schools were opened between 73 and 1901. She dedicated herself to these schools she helped establish till she died in 1917. She was a horsewoman, linguist extremely musical and gave lessons to her her young step-sisters including Catherine.
Mary Gurney step-sister to Catherine.
ée Gurney;
W B Gurney & Sons LLP (Gurney’s) was established in 1735 by Thomas Gurney and is one of the country’s longest surviving businesses. In 1737 Thomas was appointed shorthand writer to the court at the Old Bailey and in 1750. He published a book concerning his own version of shorthand. https://stenographylondon.co.uk/history.html
Thomas Gurney, his son and grandson worked extensively for Parliament on an ad hoc basis from the 1770s. In 1813 by resolution of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, Thomas’s grandson, William Brodie Gurney, was formally appointed Official Shorthand Writer to the Houses of Parliament. This title was retained by the senior partner of Gurney’s until the post was abolished in 2010. There is a a sample page written by Charles Dickens of the shorthand.
Catherine challenged the social mores of that time which dictated that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’. The first indication of her drive and initiative came when, in the early 1870s, Catherine first began a Bible Class at Wandsworth Prison.
lding part in the abolition of slavery.
A chance remark from one of the policemen who made safe her journey from Wandsworth back to her home in Notting Hill – “What? D’you think a police officer has a soul?” – led her to found the Christian Police Association in 1883 in her home initially. To accommodate the Association she opened London’s first Police Institute at 1 Adelphi Terrace WC2 a drop-in centre for comfort and conversation. It served as headquarters and for members of the police force from the UK and overseas. It is still operating under the title CPA https://www.cpauk.net
(Neighbours included Richard D’Oyly Carte at 4 Adelphi Terrace and Charles Booth at no 9 compilied his Life and Labour, one of the earliest attempts to make a scientific investigation into the working and depressed classes of London.) https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol18/pt2/pp103-108) . The building was demolished in 1936.
The Police Institute founded by Catherine at Adelphi Terrace WC2
In 1889 she helped an ailing officer find a place in a convalescent home, only to see him check out again when he found his neighbour in the next bed was a violent criminal whom he had put behind bars. She realised the need for a dedicated sanctuary for policemen recovering from injury or illness, and founded the Police Convalescent Seaside Home at Clarendon Villas, Hove West Brighton in 1890. Over 100 police officers were cared for there in its first year. The first three years of the rent was paid by a Miss Bell. https://www.stgeorgesharrogate.org/stg01gurney.htm
Police Convalescent Home 51 Clarendon Villas Hove
The need for this kind of care became so apparent that she initiated further fund raising and set up the Southern Police Convalescent Home and Orphanage in 1893. Children were being sent to the south coast orphanage from as far away as Manchester in the north. The success of the home highlighted its shortcomings in the number of men it could offer accommodation to at any one time and so proposals were made for a purpose built Convalescent Seaside Home and work began on planning and fund raising in 1891. The new premises were located at 11 Portland Place Hove catering for 457 men and five children in its first year.
11 Portland Place Hove
The Southern Provincial Police Orphanage was relocated to Sutton temporarily before being opened up in Redhill in 1895 at Gatton Lodge London Road. This property was purchased and presented to the charity by Miss Bell. 735 children passed through from its founding in 1890 to 1939 and it finally closed in 1947 and its work was replaced by the Gurney Benevolent Fund becoming The Gurney Fund in 2014. The first child admitted to the northern orphanage was Minnie Smith from Sunderland and she was followe by 643 children catered for before ir closed in 1956.
In 1897, while visiting Harrogate, Catherine negotiated the purchase of St George’s College building and grounds. She then built the Northern Police Convalescent Home. in 1901 within the grounds.
All these institutions were paid for through the personal fund-raising efforts of Catherine Gurney amongst her friends, family and other wealthy patrons in the north and south of England. Where funding fell short, she arranged loans on which she paid the interest herself.
In 1901 she had built in the grounds the Northern Police Convalescent Home now called The Police Treatment Centre.
She remained closely associated with them throughout her life. She was on hand to show him around when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, opened a new chapel at the southern Home in 1923.
Catherine served as World’s Superintendent of Work among Policemen, and was the Honorary Secretary of the International Christian Police Association. The work which was started in her own home with six members, in 1893, became an International Association with branches in the United Kingdom, America, Australia, India, China, Japan and South Africa. https://christianpolice.org.uk/about/
The basis of the association was entirely nonsectarian and non-political, its object being the spiritual and temporal welfare of the police. It also aimed to establish institutes, convalescent homes and orphanages, and had a police temperance union connected with it. For twenty-one years, Catherine was a temperance worker. She recognised the connection between alcohol and violent crimes. The Gurney Fund continues her legacy by providing for the children of deceased or medically retired police officers.. http://policecharitiesuk.org/charities-list/for-families-loved-ones/the-gurney-fund/
Flint House Police Rehabilitation Centre in Goring-on-Thames opened in 1988 and is provided for 4000 police officers in 2013. In 1996 a new Police Treatment Centre Castlebrae was opened in Auchterarder in Perthshire.
As one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary said of her, ‘The nursing profession have their Florence Nightingale but the Police Service has Catherine Gurney and we must never let them forget her.’
Catherine was made an OBE in 1930 shortly before her death.
Catherine died on 13th August and was buried at All Saints Church Cemetery Harrow Hill Harrogate near the two homes St George’s and St Andrew’s that she had originated.
plaque by the Harrogate Civic Society in her memory was unveiled in 2012 at St Andrews Police Treatment Centre Harlow Moor Road Harrogate. Thousands of police officers have benefited from the convalescent homes, and continue to do so through the St George’s Trust. Attitudes to orphanages have changed, but the fatherless children of policemen are still cared for in Britain by the Gurney Fund.
So, I now have another addition to my roster of Notable Women of Lavender Hill and what an interesting and varied lot they are and all deserve commemoration. .ttps://christianpolice.org.uk/about/ome is derived from regular subscriptions from the Police Forces, donations, legacies and ihttp://policecharitiesuk.org/charities-list/for-families-loved-ones/the-gurney-fund/nvestment income and being registered charitable trusts, operate according to the aims of the respective trust deeds, which is, to provide and distribute grants and assistance to needy orphan children for police orphans
Lady Battersea Constance de Rothschild
Obviously, when I discovered that there was a Lady Battersea I had to blog about her if she was interesting. I think she is another women from the past who has been overlooked. Also she was another women whom it transpires was married to a man who preferred men. There were a lot more men and women who married although one, other or both were gay or bisexual, which went unacknowledged or tacitly accepted. It reminds me of another Battersea connected woman Elsa Lanchester who was married to Charles Laughton. One significant difference being that Lord Battersea was a very handsome man and she and her husband came from an upper class background. She was a wealthy Rothschild.
Constance Rothschild later Lady Battersea was born in 1843 at 107 Piccadilly. She was known as Connie. She and her sister Anne were the daughters of Baron Anthony and Louise (née Montefiore) de Rothschild who were cousins. Her father belonged to one of the wealthiest and most distinguished Jewish banking families in England. The Rothschild’s enjoyed pre-eminence among the network of aristocratic cousins who ruled Anglo-Jewish society in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Niall Ferguson states in his History of the House of Rothschild that by the mid-19th century they regarded themselves as the nearest thing the European Jews had to a royal family and the equals of royalty. Yet antisemitic feelings were prevalent in the upper echelons of society; particularly so among those closest to the Queen at court, where following the death of the Prince Albert in 1861 the Rothschilds became pointedly excluded.
This information on Constance Rothschild came from the Jewish Women’s Archive written by Linda Gordon Kuzmack. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rothschild-constance-lady-battersea Linda Gordon Kuzmack
Constance spent her earliest years in Paris with her family. In 1847, she moved back to London where she had been born on 29 April 1843. She enjoyed a thorough education, including drawing lessons, which was enlivened by sessions of whist with her father. https://guide-to-the-archive.rothschildarchive.org/rothschild-family-collection/depts/english-family-papers/constance-lady-battersea-nee-de-rothschild-1843-1931
Anne de Rothschild sister of Constance Lady Battersea
Constance’s mother Louise Lady Rothschild launched Anglo-Jewish women into organized philanthropy when she founded the first serious volunteer philanthropic organization of Jewish women in Victorian England. In so doing, she inspired many upper- and middle-class Anglo- Jewish women to emerge out of the home and into public life for the first time. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rothschild-lady-louise
So, with this influence Constance and her sister inherited their mother’s strong sense of duty to the poor, a sense of confidence and an independent spirit as women to be part of elite English society. As girls they taught in the village schools surrounding their home and as young women at the Jews’ Free School for the poor in London. Together, the girls wrote a popular children’s book entitled The History and Literature of the Israelites, which was highly praised by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Aston ClintonHouse was their opulent home. https://houseandheritage.org/2018/06/11/aston-clinton-house/
In October 1902, The Sketch visited Aston Clinton House, to the south-east of the village of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, thought to have been the most charming of the country houses belonging to various members of the Rothschild family and their immediate descendants. As one observer said: “This typically English homestead gains rather than loses by contrast with its stately neighbour, Waddesdon.”
Both Lady Battersea and her mother showed a practical interest in the welfare of their poorer neighbours. Anthony Hall, a building erected by Sir Anthony’s widow in memory to him, formed a centre not only for those in the neighbourhood, but also for the many practical philanthropists who met there at the invitation of Lord Battersea. The Aston Clinton Coffee Tavern was another familiar benefaction conferred on the village by the Rothschild family, and successful had been the Training Home for Girls, an institution that had solved locally ‘that difficult modern problem – the servant question’.
Both were keenly concerned in what was going on in the political, artistic, and philanthropic worlds. The Sketch painted a lavish portrayal. “They are among those whom the nation should delight to honour, for they have done all in their power to make happier and better the many large circles of human beings with whom they are brought in contact. Lady Battersea has the energy of her wonderful race, and she is ardently interested in all that affects the welfare of her own sex.”
When Lady de Rothschild died in 1910, Aston Clinton reverted to the Rothschild estate, but Lady Battersea and her sister, Annie Henrietta (1844-1926), remained in occupation until the First World War. It was given over to the Commanding Officer of the 21st Infantry Division, then based on the Halton estate.
The Rothschild estate sold Aston Clinton for £15,000 in 1923 – a house with seven reception rooms, billiard room, ballroom, thirteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, seventeen secondary and servants’ bedrooms, four bathrooms and domestic offices. To commemorate the sale the Rothschilds placed a tablet in the wall of the portico recording that the family had owned Aston Clinton between 1853 until 1923, a period of 70 years.
The elite social circle of the Rothschild daughters, who were raised in a home where their parents entertained the leaders of English politics and society, was almost entirely Christian except for their cousins. These Christian visitors, combined with their mother’s discomfort with Judaism, influenced the sisters’ ambivalent attitude to Judaism as a religion. However, Constance never converted, but remained dedicated to Jews as a people, even though she and her sister Anne both married Christians, despite their parents’ acute unhappiness. Constance married Cyril Flower (1843–1907), later Lord Battersea, in 1877, while Anne married Eliot Yorke in 1873. Both marriages were childless.
Constance and Cyril Flower had met in 1864 through his friendship with her cousin, Leopold de Rothschild. He had been called to the bar and became a Liberal MP and was a patron of art and was widely referred to as “the most handsome man in the House of Commons”, was said he possessed a genius for friendship and was a great favourite of Gladstone[ who, in 1892, raised him to the peerage as Baron Battersea.
We don’t know if Constance was aware of Cyril’s sexual orientation when she married him when she was thirty four and had known him for many years before that. He was popular and had many friends. A close friend and possible lover was the psychical researcher Frederic Myers and other friends included Henry James and Edward Burne –Jones. There are indications that Constance disapproved of some of his friends. (. Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power by Derek Wilson [15] and in her memoirs she cautiously comments that she had intuitively felt that “some of the very ardent and sudden likings he occasionally took to certain persons might lead to misplaced friendship”.
http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2009/11/dandy-in-aspic-cyril-flower-lord.html
Rich, Handsome, Intelligent, Energetic, Politically Active, Enthusiastic Sportsman, Businessman, Art Lover, Ideal Victorian Gentleman
Cyril Flower was one of nine children born to Philip William Flower, of Furze Down, Streatham, Surrey, and his first wife, Mary, daughter of Jonathan Flower. His father was a prosperous East Indian merchant who had earlier established a successful merchant house in Sydney, Australia. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Cyril was called to the Bar, Inner Temple, in 1870 at the age of 27. This started him on the career of being an innovative and upcoming barrister.
During this time, Cyril’s best friend was Leopold de Rothschild from the famous banking family. It was through this connection that he met his future wife and Leopold’s cousin, Constance de Rothschild. Daughter to Sir Anthony de Rothschild, 1st bart, Constance was an heiress in her own right and was soon drawn to the mind and body of Cyril. It was not long before the marriage of the banker’s daughter and the man, whom many considered the handsomest of his day, occurred in 1877.
In 1880 he entered Parliament for Breconshire, a seat he held until 1885 when the constituency was abolished, and then represented Luton until 1892. It was also during that time he served as Whip to the Liberal Party. Additionally, he served briefly as a Junior Lord of the Treasury from February to July 1886 in the third Liberal administration of William Ewart Gladstone.
Receiving a peerage in 1892 Flower was raised to noble rank and conferred with the title, Baron Battersea, of Battersea in the County of London and of Overstrand in the County of Norfolk. Apart from his political career he was also a great collector and patron of art. He was a patron of James McNeill Whistler and was involved with the Pre-Raphaelite set commissioning many pieces from Edward Burne-Jones.
Here is the Battersea connection. In the 1890s Cyril Flower began to acquire vacant land on the south side of Prince of Wales Drive Battersea from the Commissioners for Development. His first first mansion block to be developed along Prince of Wales Drive was Overstrand Mansions, which was begun in 1893. In 1894, most of the other mansions blocks were begun by Cyril Flower: Cyril Mansions was started on 26 April, Norfolk Mansions was started on 27 October, and both Sidestrand Mansions (now Park Mansions) and Primrose Mansions in November. These blocks were under construction, by different builders, at much of the same time, and are of an architecture style inspired by the Arts and Craft Movement. The leases for these buildings were taken up with enthusiasm when built.
The names of these five mansion blocks were selected by Cyril Flower and Constance. Sidestrand Mansions (now Park Mansions), Norfolk Mansions and Overstrand Mansions were named after “Poppyland which was popularised by Clement Scott the theatre critic for The Daily Telegraph. This was the name he gave to the area of the Norfolk coast which included the village of Overstrand was a fashionable holiday destination during this time and this was where Constance and Cyril built their country home The Pleasaunce.https://family.rothschildarchive.org/estates/67-the-pleasaunce
(Another snippet from Survey of London. In 1906, 69 Primrose Mansions was in the possession of Mrs Edith Karno, the estranged wife of comedy impresario Fred Karno. From here, with a number of Music Hall friends, she helped to run the first office of the Ladies Music Hall Guild—founded in September 1906 with Marie Lloyd as its President. Edith Karno was its first treasurer.)
Cyril Mansions was named after himself, and Primrose Mansions was named after Constance’s cousin, Hannah, who was married to Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosberry. Rosebery Villa abuts Primrose Mansions on Alexandra Road. Another, interesting story as Lord Roseberry eventually became Prime Minister. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Primrose,_Countess_of_Rosebery
After her marriage to Cyril Flower, Constance combined a lavish social life with charitable activities. The Rothschild daughters’ marriages and subsequent gilded lifestyle among the Christian aristocracy continued the process of isolating them from Judaism as a religion. Moreover, Constance felt Judaism regarded her as inferior because she was a woman. Disillusioned with Orthodoxy, Constance felt some sympathy for the new Liberal Judaism that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, but never joined the movement. She attended church services because she liked the spirit of public worship.
She became active in philanthropy, and in the temperance movement as she became aware of the need for temperance when her servants abused liquor and joined the British Women’s Temperance Association in the 1890s and became a leader of temperance campaigns in London and the provinces. Constance was introduced to the women’s movement in 1881 by suffragist and temperance worker Fanny Morgan (whom she helped to undertake a political career that resulted in her election as mayor of Brecon).
Her reputation for social activism led her to become involved in the movement for reforms of English women’s prisons. She only encountered three Jewish female convicts during her visits to Aylesbury prison.
In 1885 she was jolted into struggling with the issue of white slavery by a an exposés of child prostitution and white slavery—trafficking in girls and women. The articles by journalist W. T. Stead’s also fanned prejudice against Jewish immigrants by accusing East European Jews of being the source of the traffic in prostitutes and of corrupting English girls and women. Also a crusade against the sweatshop system of employing immigrant garment workers fuelled further prejudice against Jews. Constance learnt that Jewish prostitutes believed that only Christian missions would give them food and lodging and that no Jew would help them.
The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women JAPGW was composed of Jewish women closely connected to women’s temperance, suffrage and educational campaigns.
They worked closely with feminist and inter-denominational anti-white slavery organizations. Founding the JAPGW launched these Anglo-Jewish women into organized English feminism and established the roots of an Anglo-Jewish woman’s movement seventeen years before the founding of the Union of Jewish Women.
She had to overcome the resistance of the organized Jewish community, which was reluctant to even admit there was Jewish prostitution in England. She also had to overcome English feminists’ resistance to accepting Jewish women.
Constance and her women’s committee handled the rescue, job training and provision of residential homes for women and girls and after World War I, after the partial winning of votes for women they joined the male JAPGW representatives in the leadership of international rescue operations. She continued to lead the organization and to represent the JAPGW at international meetings through the early 1920s.
Her work in temperance, prison reform and white slavery had drawn her into the English woman’s movement by the 1890s. She was introduced to the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW) of Great Britain and Ireland (later the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland), which became the umbrella organization for all women’s philanthropic groups in Great Britain.
She brought Jewish women into the Union, encouraging them partly for the opportunity the organization afforded middle-class women to become active outside the home, partly to help less fortunate women, and partly because she and others saw membership as a sign of social acceptance for Jews. Jewish women’s involvement ultimately helped to broaden the movement’s political base, thereby strengthening English feminism.
Lord Battersea died in 1907 aged 64 . He seems to have faded from political life by then.
Constance had some books published. You can read them here. https://archive.org/details/waifsstrays00batt/page/24
Reminiscences, Lady Battersea (Constance) de Rothschild Longmans, Green, 1871
A Buckingham Story of 1663, Baroness Constance Flower Battersea Watson and Hazell, 1875 – 107 pages,
Waddesdon Manor NT another Rothschild’s home has this letter on display from Constance to the mother of the bride about the wedding of Connie’s cousin Jimmy to Dorothy Pinto https://waddesdon.org.uk/blog/family-letters-brilliant-affair/
Constance died in 1931 at The Pleasunce.
According to her obituary in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency khttps://www.jta.org/1931/11/24/archive/death-of-lady-battersea Lady Battersea was the friend of Queen Victoria, King Edward and Queen Alexandra, and eight Prime Ministers, including Disraeli and Gladstone, and was well known to many distinguished men and women, among them Thackeray and Lord Morley.
Here is a photo of her in Overstrand with her neighbour Lady Shackleton. 
https://www.northnorfolknews.co.uk/news/man-who-brought-einstein-and-carnivals-to-cromer-area-1-763453
Constance died at The Pleasaunce on 22 November 1931, the anniversary of her marriage. She is undoubtedly another interesting woman associated with Battersea. I don’t know if she ever visited our Borough or the mansions in Prince of Wales Drive and the Park Town Estate that was bult by Lord Battersea but nevertheless I think her life is quite fascinating despite her privilege and her contribution to Jewish women’s involvement in social and political life is worthy of being remembered.
sheelanagigcomedienne
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