Battersea Rise literary connections EM Forster

Battersea Rise runs from the corner of Clapham Common Northside up to  the Roundhouse pub by the railway bridge and forms part of the south circular road. The literary connections are associated with the section from the junction with Northcote Road at the bottom of the Hill which is slightly more salubrious. This is alluded to by Pamela Hansford Johnson one of our three authors who lived here as did John Walsh -journalist and author – whereas EM Forster once visited the house called Battersea Rise in which his paternal great grandparents had lived and which he commemorated in the book Marianne Thornton who was his patron and great aunt. Though attempts to preserve the house failed, its memory has been
perpetuated in books by two great-grandchildren of Henry Thornton as Dorothy
Pym wrote Battersea Rise (1934) aslo.

In the Survey of London Battersea, which has become somewhat of a bible for those researching the area, dubiously states: No doubt for snobbish reasons residents usually gave their addresses as being in Clapham, Clapham Common or Wandsworth, but Battersea very seldom, unless Battersea Rise, a name with cachet. 

I think that remark about Battersea residents, even the more recent ones,  about their address is wrong and subjective. It has been businesses that have often used Clapham in their title. It is not only Google that is to is to blame as the misnaming of Clapham Junction which is in Battersea has caused confusion. This was noted at the time of the disturbances in 2011 when reporters referred to riots in in Clapham High Street opposite Clapham Junction station. The is a campaign about getting the name right.Battersea Junction – the ‘SW11tch’ campaign continues …

BATTERSEA RISE HOUSE and EM Forster

The Survey volume 50, chapter Between the commons has all the information about these villas owned mostly by bankers, of course. Battersea Rise House was bought in 1792 by Henry Thornton who was a banker and one of the celebrated Clapham Sect. By 1751 if not before it was in the possession of John Akerman, a City glas and china merchant who was among the pioneers in promoting diamond-cut glass.  In 1755 Akerman leased from Lord Bolingbroke three acres with a messuage or tenement, coach- house and stables, described as previously belonging to John King, whose predecessors had held property here since c.1719.
When he died his  son, Isaac, also a City merchant, was expanding his father’s domain and in 1756 he leased from Bolingbroke a strip of eight acres running north from Clapham Common through to Lavender Hill, undertaking to build two substantial houses. These became the so-called Sister Houses, of which one survives as Gilmore House, 113 Clapham Common North Side which became the Deaconate run by Deaconess Isabella Gilmore (sister of William Morris).

Henry Thornton (1760-1815) was a philanthropist and economist. In 1780 he entered his father’s counting-house, and two or three years later became a partner, then he joined the bank of Downe, Free & Thornton, of which he was an active member until his death. In 1782 Thornton was elected MP for Southwark, and he held the seat until the end of his life. He was an influential member of the ‘Clapham Sect’, and a friend, supporter and cousin of William Wilberforce. In 1792 he bought a house at Battersea Rise on Clapham Common and lived there initially with Wilberforce.   In 1796 Thornton married Marianne Sykes.  Wilberforce went to live at Broomfield (later Broomwood) House on his marriage in 1797. It was  on the grounds of Battersea Rise House.

Henry and Marianne had nine children including Marianne, who didn’t marry and was great aunt to EM Forster. Her sister Laura married  the Rev. Charles Forster. The marriage of Charles and Laura Forster produced Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect, who married Lily and their only son was Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), novelist and man of letters. There was a mix up with the names at EMs christening who came to be known as Morgan. His  great aunt Marianne, known as Monie left him £8,000, which enabled him to go to Cambridge and be financially independent enough to exist as a writer. He repaid his debt by writing her biography in 1956.

Two of Thornton’s brothers, Samuel and Robert, owned villas on Clapham Common Southside and Thornton’s aim in buying Battersea Rise House and the land surrounding it was to create a community of like-minded and high-minded friends. Two substantial houses, Glenelg and Broomfield later renamed Broowoood were built in the grounds, with Wilberforce moving into Broomfield House when he married in 1797.

Battersea Rise House became the centre of, and meeting place, for the Clapham Sect dedicated to, in Wilberforce’s words “the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners”. Thornton was the prime organiser and financier of the campaign and Wilberforce provided its heart and charismatic leadership. God and Mammon easily went hand in hand.

The pièce de résistance of the house was the library in the south-west position. Part of the 1790s additions ,it was higher and longer than the front rooms. It was latterly called the Pitt Room because of the Thornton family tradition that William Pitt designed it. Apparently, the story is considered plausible, as Pitt was close to Wilberforce when the room was created, and interested in architecture. As Battersea Rise house evolved, it became an amalgam of cherished rooms, possessions and Thornton family memories. The house sometimes has been described as ‘Queen Anne’.

When Battersea Rise house was sold by Isaac Akerman the auction notice refers to ‘an excellent spacious dwelling-house, containing an elegant suit of rooms, fitted up in the genteelest stile, with suitable bed-chambers and dressing rooms’, also a dairy, greenhouse, double coachhouse, stabling for eight horses, a ‘lofty grove’ shading the approach to the house and sheltered by plantations; also gardens ‘laid out in the present taste, with lawns, canals, serpentine gravel, and shrubbery walks of more than a mile in extent, fully cropped, and stored with choice fruit-trees’, beyond which came a 15-acre paddock and four meadows. This was the origin of the famous Battersea Rise garden.

The fullest description of the Battersea Rise grounds comes from author Dorothy Pym (1934), another descendant who visited often in the 1890s. She names many flowers and shrubs, and underlines the high standards of horticulture and maintenance: ‘the paths at Battersea Rise were as speckless and spotless as the carpets themselves’.

The one unifying factor was the garden. In his essay of 1844,‘The Clapham Sect’, Sir James Stephen recalled it as the meeting point for the community of Clapham adherents and their children in debate or play, and depicted the key members issuing forth into it from their surrounding houses.

The eldest son, Henry Sykes Thornton, became titular head of the clan, and continued the family’s evangelical connections, participating invarious religious initiatives in Battersea. But the guardianship of the family’s intellectual and moral traditions passed to his older sister, Marianne Thornton. In 1852 a rift occurred when Henry Sykes Thornton elected to marry his deceased wife’s sister, Emily Dealtry—technically still an illegality. It was this which led Marianne Thornton to leave Battersea Rise for Clapham village. He died in 1881, and his will allowed for his widow to retain a life-interest in the House, which was to be sold after her death, which happened in 1907.

When we bought our house in 1968 there were two local estate agents -Reginald Harris and Edwin Evans. Edwin Evans only closed down in 2014.  A consortium headed by Edwin Evans who was both developer and estate agent bought the twenty-two acres for £51,000 that were auctioned and plans were approved for the building of 475 houses, a church and a school. It seems that it was only at this point that the importance of Battersea Rise House was realised as the focus of the anti-slavery movement and a campaign was got up to save the house as a memorial.

There is a Wandsworth Council green plaque on 4 Canford Road commemorating Battersea Rise House where the Clapham Sect met and organised the campaign for the abolition of the the transatlantic slave trade.

Evans offered to sell at ‘cost price’ the house and two acres of land to Battersea Council, but because he was a prominent Conservative and the Council was in ‘Progressive’ hands, the offer was rejected and the demolition went ahead. Oh dear! I am sorry to see these progressives did not believe in conservation.

Nearby was Broomwood House where William Wilberforce moved to when Henry Thornton married which was built on the grounds of Battersea Rise House.

This is the background to the Battersea Rise House that EM wrote about. He understood the significance of home and house which is reflected in Howards End and in his attachment to his own home Rooksnest.

His book is based ‘almost entirely upon family papers’. Parts of Forster’s narrative call into question the family values. His decision to focus upon her rather than one of his more publicly famous ancestors enabled him to emphasise the private implications of public life and give pride of place to the inner life. She had lived there most of her life with her brother and his family till the rift occurred.

EM did not share his predecessor’s particular religious views and this is why he identified more with Marianne and her more down-to-earth attitudes. He also questioned inherited wealth, the wealth that he felt produced the imaginative poverty of Henry Thornton and his spiritual materialism. EM was an avowed Humanist which is, of course, one reason why he would appeal to me.

Forster wrote about his Humanism in a famous essay entitled What I Believe. He was President of the National Council for Civil Liberties, now Liberty. Forster called himself a humanist, and was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 to his death. He was a Vice-President of the Ethical Union in the 1950s, and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from its foundation in 1963.
His work and viewpoint were summed up in a series on British Authors (Cambridge University Press) as:“the voice of the humanist – one seriously committed to human values while refusing to take himself too seriously. Its tone is inquiring, not dogmatic. It reflects a mind aware of the complexities confronting those who wish to live spiritually satisfying, morally responsible lives in a world that increasingly militates against individual’s needs. Sensitively and often profoundly, Forster’s fiction explores the problems such people encounter.” He shared many ideas with, and was friendly with, members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Sadly, the first of these Battersea Rise literary connections has lost its house.

Pamela Hansford Johnson CBE 1912-1981 is the second of these Battersea Rise literary connections. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/pamela-hansford-johnson-battersea-born-novelist/

and the home where she was born and grew up in at 53 Battersea Rise is still there but not so recognisable as the semi-basement is now Farrago Restaurant sadly closed down because of the pandemic. The steps up to the hall door have been demolished. It now has a Battersea Society commemorative plaque which I organised which was unveiled by her daughter Lady Lindsay Avebury and there is a connection with Battersea Rise House which would have undoubtedly appealed to the somewhat snobbish Pamela. Lindsay was married to the late Eric Lubbock ( Orpington Man) who was a Liberal MP and then became a very dilligent hard working peer in the House of Lords when he became the 4th Baron Avebury. He was a good friend of Lord Alf Dubs who was our Battersea MP. Battersea Rise House was purchased from Akerman in 1787 by Sir John Lubbock the banker, later Ist Baronet Avebury Eric is his descendant inheriting the title. Lubbock soon sublet to Gerard (‘Single Speech’) Hamilton, MP, who remained the tenant until Henry Thornton’s purchase in 1792. Lubbock’s acquaintance with these gentlemen helps to explain his anti-slavery stance. Eric was a human rights campaigner and when he died, he was the longest serving Liberal Democrat peer. Local history is fun when connections are made.

John Walsh, journalist and author of The Falling Angels – a memoir of growing up second generation Irish on Battersea Rise refers to EM Forster when talking of Battersea Rise and contrasting it with his own view of it growing up there in the sixties. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/the-falling-angels/

The bit of the south circular road alongside Clapham Common has some fascinating history which I like to share and am aware of when I walk there every few days and I think I am lucky living so near a green space like Clapham Common.