London’s Pleasure Gardens, Vauxhall Gardens

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

Vauxhall Gardens, 1751 perspective

Vauxhall Gardens, 1751 perspective

Vauxhall Gardens (English pronunciation: /ˈvɒksɔːl/) was a pleasure garden, one of the leading venues for public entertainment in London, England, from the mid 17th Century to the mid 19th Century. Originally known as New Spring Gardens, the site was believed to have opened before the Restoration of 1660 with the first mention being made by Samuel Pepys in 1662. The Gardens consisted of several acres of trees and shrubs with attractive walks. Initially, entrance was free with food and drink being sold to support the venture.

The site became Vauxhall Gardens in 1785, and admission was charged to gain its many attractions. The Gardens drew all manner of men and supported enormous crowds, with its paths being noted for romantic assignations. Tightrope walkers, hot air balloon ascents, concerts and fireworks provided amusement. The rococo “Turkish tent” became one of the Gardens’ structures; the interior of the Rotunda became one of Vauxhall’s most viewed attractions, and the chinoiserie style was a feature of several buildings. A statue depicting George Frederic Handel, which later found its way to Westminster Abbey, was erected in the Gardens. In 1817, the Battle of Waterloo was re-enacted with 1,000 soldiers participating.

Vauxhall was closed in 1840 after its owners suffered bankruptcy, but re-opened in 1841. It changed hands in 1842, and was permanently closed in 1859. Vauxhall Gardens was located in Kennington on the south bank of the River Thames, which was not part of the built-up area of the metropolis until towards the end of the Gardens’ existence. Part of the site is now a small public park called Spring Gardens.

Cultural Significance
Eminent 18th century scholar John Barrell, writing in Times Literary Supplement, brings out Vauxhall’s significance. “Vauxhall pleasure gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, entertained Londoners and visitors to London for 200 years. From 1729, under the management of Jonathan Tyers, property developer, impresario, patron of the arts, the gardens grew into an extraordinary business, a cradle of modern painting and architecture, and… music…. A pioneer of mass entertainment, Tyers had to become also a pioneer of mass catering, of outdoor lighting, of advertising, and of all the logistics involved in running one of the most complex and profitable business ventures of the eighteenth century in Britain.” References to Vauxhall are, for 150 years, as ubiquitous as references to “Broadway” later would be.

History
The Gardens are believed to have opened just before the Restoration of 1660, on property formerly owned by Jane Fauxe, or Vaux, widow, in 1615. Whereas John Nichols in his History of Lambeth Parish conjectures that she was the widow of Guy Fawkes, executed in 1606, John Timbs in his 1867 Curiosities of London states for a fact that there was no such connection, and that the Vaux name derives from one Falkes de Breauté, a mercenary working for King John who acquired the land by marriage. Jane is stated to be the widow of John, a vintner. Perhaps the earliest record is Samuel Pepys’ description of a visit he made to the New Spring Gardens on the 29th May 1662. The then name distinguished the gardens from the Old Spring Gardens at Charing Cross; however Pepys implies that there were both Old and New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall; and indeed Spring Gardens appears to have been a longstanding appellation for a variety of entertainment enterprises.

The Gardens consisted of several acres laid out with walks. Initially admission was free, the proprietors making money by selling food and drink. John Evelyn described “the New Spring Garden at Lambeth” as a “very pretty contrived plantation” in 1661. John Aubrey, in his Antiquities of Surrey gives us the following account:

At Vauxhall, Sir Samuel Morland built a fine room, anno 1667, the inside all of looking-glass, and fountains very pleasant to behold, which is much visited by strangers: it stands in the middle of the garden, covered with Cornish slate, on the point of which he placed a punchinello, very well carved, which held a dial, but the winds have demolished it.

A plan of 1681 shows the circular central feature planted with trees and shrubs, and the formal allées that were to remain a feature as long as the Gardens lasted.

Sir John Hawkins, in his General History of Music (1776), says:

The house seems to have been rebuilt since the time that Sir Samuel Morland dwelt in it. About the year 1730, Mr. Jonathan Tyers became the occupier of it, and, there being a large garden belonging to it, planted with a great number of stately trees, and laid out in shady walks, it obtained the name of Spring Gardens; and the house being converted into a tavern, or place of entertainment, was much frequented by the votaries of pleasure. Mr. Tyers opened it with an advertisement of a Ridotto al Fresco, a term which the people of this country had till that time been strangers to. These entertainments were repeated in the course of the summer, and numbers resorted to partake of them. This encouraged the proprietor to make his garden a place of musical entertainment, for every evening during the summer season. To this end he was at great expense in decorating the gardens with paintings; he engaged a band of excellent musicians; he issued silver tickets at one guinea each for admission, and receiving great encouragement, he set up an organ in the orchestra, and, in a conspicuous part of the garden, erected a fine statue of Mr. Handel.

The ‘supposed’ last night of the gardens was on 5 September 1839 when it attracted 1089 people. Vauxhall was sold at auction on 9 Sept 1841 for £20,000, following bankruptcy of the owners, after which it re-opened, but it was permanently closed in 1859, and most of the land sold for building purposes.

The Spring Gardens and the Rococo in England
The Spring Gardens were the most prominent vehicle in England for the public display of the new Rococo style. The earliest pictorial representation of Tyers’ Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, is the “Vauxhall fan” (1736), an etching printed in blue designed to be pasted to a fan; it shows the earliest groups of pavilions, in a sober classical taste, but the interiors of the supper boxes were painted by members of Hogarth’s St. Martin’s Lane Academy, prominent among them Francis Hayman. Hayman provided most of the subjects, which were rapidly executed by students and assistants; Hubert Gravelot provided designs for two others, and Hogarth’s designs were pressed into service in hastily dashed-off copies that filled the back of every box. At a certain hour, all the paintings were let down at once, to offer some security to the companies at supper and a suitable backdrop, one observer thought, for the live beauties of London. Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had come to England with his father George II in 1728 and who was a prominent patron of the Rococo, took sufficient interest in the Gardens to have his own pavilion built from the very first.

The first fully Rococo structure erected at the Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, was the “Turkish Tent” that was still a novelty in 1744; “this fantastic structure introduced that element of frivolous impermanence which became so characteristic of Vauxhall,” David Coke has remarked. In the course of the 1740s it was joined by other examples of Rococo chinoiserie and above all by the Rotunda, with the most-viewed Rococo interior decoration in England, designed by George Michael Moser, another member of the St. Martin’s Lane Academy; the ornaments were “Executed by French and Italians” George Vertue noted.

The Experience
Enormous crowds could be accommodated at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall. In 1749 a rehearsal of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks attracted an audience of 12,000, and in 1786 a fancy dress jubilee to celebrate the proprietor’s long ownership was thronged with 61,000 revellers. Many of the best known musicians and singers of the day performed at the Gardens, for example Sophia Baddeley. In 1732, their fashionable status was confirmed by a fancy dress ball attended by Frederick, Prince of Wales. At that time access from the West End was by water, but the opening of Westminster Bridge in the 1740s made access easier though less charming.

An entertainment in Vauxhall Gardens in c.1779 by Thomas Rowlandson. The two women in the centre are Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Duncannon. The man seated at the table on the left is Samuel Johnson, with James Boswell to his left and Oliver Goldsmith to his right. To the right the actress and author Mary Darby Robinson stands next to the Prince of Wales, later George IV

An entertainment in Vauxhall Gardens in c.1779 by Thomas Rowlandson. The two women in the centre are Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Duncannon. The man seated at the table on the left is Samuel Johnson, with James Boswell to his left and Oliver Goldsmith to his right. To the right the actress and author Mary Darby Robinson stands next to the Prince of Wales, later George IV

The main walks were lit at night by hundreds of lamps. Over time more features and eye catchers were added: additional supper boxes, a music room, a Chinese pavilion, a gothic orchestra that accommodated fifty musicians, and ruins, arches, statues and a cascade. An admission charge was introduced from the beginning and later James Boswell wrote:

Vauxhall Gardens is peculiarly adapted to the taste of the English nation; there being a mixture of curious show, — gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear; — for all of which only a shilling is paid; and, though last, not least, good eating and drinking for those who choose to purchase that regale.

The unlighted ‘dark walks’ or ‘close walks’ were known as a place for amorous adventures. Thomas Brown in “Works Serious and Comical in Prose and Verse” (1760) says:

The ladies that have an inclination to be private, take delight in the close walks of Spring-Gardens, where both sexes meet, and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way; and the windings and turnings in the little wildernesses are so intricate, that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters.”

A great part of the entertainment was offered by the well-dressed company itself. Pauses between pieces of music were intentionally long enough to give the crowd time to circulate the Gardens anew. M. Grosely, in his Tour to London (1772) says, relating to Ranelagh Gardens and Vauxhall:

These entertainments, which begin in the month of May, are continued every night. They bring together persons of all ranks and conditions; and amongst these, a considerable number of females, whose charms want only that cheerful air, which is the flower and quintessence of beauty. These places serve equally as a rendezvous either for business or intrigue. They form, as it were, private coteries; there you see fathers and mothers, with their children, enjoying domestic happiness in the midst of public diversions. The English assert, that such entertainments as these can never subsist in France, on account of the levity of the people. Certain it is, that those of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, which are guarded only by outward decency, are conducted without tumult and disorder, which often disturb the public diversions of France. I do not know whether the English are gainers thereby; the joy which they seem in search of at those places does not beam through their countenances; they look as grave at Vauxhall and Ranelagh as at the Bank, at church, or a private club. All persons there seem to say, what a young English nobleman said to his governor, Am I as joyous as I should be?

The new name Vauxhall Gardens, long in popular use, was made official in 1785. After Boswell’s time the admission charge rose steadily: to two shillings in 1792, three-and-sixpence in the early 19th century, and 4/6 in the 1820s. Season tickets were also sold. Entertainment in this period included hot air balloon ascents, fireworks, and tightrope walkers. In 1813 there was a fête to celebrate victory at the Battle of Vitoria, and in 1827 the Battle of Waterloo was re-enacted by 1,000 soldiers.

The contributor to the Edinburgh Encyclopedia (1830 edition) comments that:
the garden’s great attraction arises from their being splendidly illuminated at light with about 15,000 glass lamps. These being tastefully hung among the trees, which line the walks, produce an impression similar to that which is called up on reading some of the stories in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. On some occasions there have been upwards of 19,000 persons in them, and this immense concourse, most of whom are well dressed, seen in connection with the illuminated walks, add not a little to the brilliant and astonishing effect of the whole scene.

Charles Dickens wrote of a daylight visit to Vauxhall Gardens, in Sketches by Boz, published in 1836:
We paid our shilling at the gate, and then we saw for the first time, that the entrance, if there had been any magic about it at all, was now decidedly disenchanted, being, in fact, nothing more nor less than a combination of very roughly-painted boards and sawdust. We glanced at the orchestra and supper-room as we hurried past—we just recognised them, and that was all. We bent our steps to the firework-ground; there, at least, we should not be disappointed. We reached it, and stood rooted to the spot with mortification and astonishment. That the Moorish tower—that wooden shed with a door in the centre, and daubs of crimson and yellow all round, like a gigantic watch-case! That the place where night after night we had beheld the undaunted Mr. Blackmore make his terrific ascent, surrounded by flames of fire, and peals of artillery, and where the white garments of Madame Somebody (we forget even her name now), who nobly devoted her life to the manufacture of fireworks, had so often been seen fluttering in the wind, as she called up a red, blue, or party-coloured light to illumine her temple!

The Gardens feature in a number of other works of literature. They are the scene for a brief but pivotal turning point in the fortunes of anti-heroine Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 19th-century novel Vanity Fair, as well as a setting in his novel Pendennis. Thomas Hardy sets scenes in his The Dynasts in the Gardens. As well as Cecilia by Frances Burney where the character Mr Harrell commits suicide.

The Gardens passed through several hands. In 1840, the owners went bankrupt and the Gardens closed. They were revived the following year, and again in 1842 under new management, but in 1859 they closed for good.

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, Georgian Era, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Victorian era | Tagged , | Comments Off on London’s Pleasure Gardens, Vauxhall Gardens

The Pentridge Uprising: Foiled by Oliver the Spy and Lord Sidmouth

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

The Pentridge Uprising plays a role in my Work in Progress, A Touch of Love, which is book 6 in my highly popular Realm Series. I thought I would share some of my research on the event.

The Pentrich (originally Pentridge) rising was an armed uprising in 1817 that began around the village of Pentrich, Derbyshire, in the United Kingdom. It occurred on the nights of 9/10 June 1817. The name is controversial. While much of the planning took place in Pentrich, two of the three ringleaders were from South Wingfield and the other was from Sutton in Ashfield; the ‘revolution’ itself started from Hunt’s Barn in South Wingfield, and the only person killed died in Wingfield Park.

A gathering of some two or three hundred men (stockingers, quarrymen and iron workers), led by Jeremiah Brandreth (‘The Nottingham Captain’), an unemployed stockinger, and claimed by Gyles Brandreth as an ancestor – although unlikely since Brandreth’s children emigrated to America, set out from South Wingfield to march to Nottingham. They were lightly armed with pikes, scythes and a few guns, which had been hidden in a quarry in Wingfield Park, and had a set of rather unfocussed revolutionary demands, including the wiping out of the National Debt.

The organizer of the event turned out to be a government spy, who became known as Oliver the Spy and the uprising was quashed soon after it began. William (J) Oliver aka ‘Oliver the Spy’ aka W.J Richards – was a 19th-century informer, and suspected agent provocateur, employed by the English Home Office against the Luddites and similar groupings. He appears to have played a significant role in thwarting the Pentridge or Pentrich Rising of 1817, leading to the execution of Brandreth, Ludlam and Turner.
William Oliver was a building surveyor who had been imprisoned for debt before he was recruited by the foreign office. His shadowy role is commemorated in Charles Lamb’s poem,’The Three Graves.’Three men were hanged for their participation in the Pentridge uprising,including Brandreth.

Historical Background
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 a number of factors combined to drive the country into a severe depression. The increased industrialisation of the country, combined with the demobilisation of the forces, led to mass unemployment. The Corn Laws led to massive increases in the price of bread, while the repeal of Income Tax meant that the war debt had to be recovered by taxing commodities forcing their prices even higher. In addition, 1816 was unusually wet and cold, producing a very poor harvest.

The loss of production of war materials had affected engineering companies like the Butterley Company, the price of iron ore had slumped, and the production of coal had fallen by a third. The hosiery trade had also been falling away for about five years.

There was, in addition, a wider political picture. Since the previous century, there had been calls for parliamentary reform, particularly an end to the rotten boroughs. Subsequently there had been the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and it appeared that any reform would be accompanied by violence, which Pitt’s government set out to pre-empt by increasingly punitive measures.

Prelude
Since 1811, there had been minor local uprisings, with stocking frames being smashed in protest at the employment of unskilled workers to produce low quality stockings. Further afield, there had been food riots in many of the big cities.

Around the country there were a number of secret revolutionary committees. The one at Nottingham was headed by a needle maker, William Stevens, and its representative from Pentrich was a framework knitter called Thomas Bacon. Several meetings were held at Pentrich during which Bacon asserted that preparations for an uprising were well advanced, and he had made enquiries at the ironworks and elsewhere about procuring weaponry.

The person appointed by Stevens to be his deputy was Jeremiah Brandreth, an unemployed stocking knitter with a wife and two children. Opinion of him at the time seems to have been somewhat mixed, but he promised the men that they would go to Nottingham, invading Butterley ironworks on the way, where they would kill the three senior managers and ransack it for weapons. At Nottingham they would receive bread, beef and ale, and a sum of money, and they would take over the barracks. They would then proceed by boat down the River Trent and attack Newark. He told them that there were sixteen thousand ready to join them.

Among those present were Isaac Ludlam, a bankrupted farmer who owned a small quarry where he had built up a small cache of pikes, and William Turner an ex-soldier. The plan was to assemble at ten o’clock on the 8th June, where Ludlam’s pikes would be distributed and further weapons would be acquired by requisitioning a man and a gun from each house that they passed.

The March

St Matthew's Church, Pentrich, Derbyshire, UK

St Matthew’s Church, Pentrich, Derbyshire, UK

Around fifty men assembled in South Wingfield and for four hours ranged around the neighbourhood for weapons and extra men. At one house a widow, Mary Hepworth, lived with her two sons. When she refused to open up, the rioters broke a window and Brandreth fired a shot through it, killing a servant. Some of the party were appalled at this wanton act, but Brandreth threatened to shoot them also if they did not remain.

Eventually the group set out for the Butterley Company works. When they arrived they were confronted by George Goodwin the factory agent, who, with a few constables, faced them down. One or two of the party defected and, increasingly demoralised, the remainder headed for Ripley.

There was no police force at that time. Order was maintained by the various semi-private armies such as the yeomanry, while intelligence was gathered by the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, from a network formed of local magistrates and paid informers. One such, William Oliver, was among the group. Indeed there were accusations that Oliver was something more—an agent provocateur under the Home Office’s instruction. Be that as it may, Sidmouth was well aware of what was afoot.

Through Ripley they pressed more followers into service and at Codnor and Langley Mill they awoke various publicans for beer, bread and cheese. It was now raining heavily and yet more men defected.

At Giltbrook they were met by a small force of soldiers: twenty men of the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons. The revolutionaries scattered and, while about forty were captured, the leaders managed to escape, to be arrested over the following months.

Retribution
Altogether, eighty-five of the marchers were placed in Nottingham and Derby gaols, to be brought to trial at the County Hall in Derby, charged in the main of “maliciously and traitorously [endeavouring]…by force of arms, to subvert and destroy the Government and the Constitution.” Twenty-three were sentenced, three to transportation for fourteen years and eleven for life. Brandreth, Ludlam and Turner were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Although the customary quartering was remitted by the Prince Regent, the three were publicly hanged and beheaded at Nuns Green in front of Friar Gate Gaol in Derby.

There is little to be seen nowadays of the event, but the hexagonal office, where Goodwin stood his ground, still exists in the yard of the Butterley Company’s works.
E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class sees this rising as a transitional event between the earlier Luddite actions and the later populist Radicalism of 1818–20 and 1830–32. (Note that Thompson refers to the village throughout as ‘Pentridge,’ not the modern spelling.)

Posted in British history, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Pentridge Uprising: Foiled by Oliver the Spy and Lord Sidmouth

Regency Celebrity: Princess Caraboo, Extraordinary Imposter

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

"Princess Caraboo" From an engraving by Henry Meyer, after a picture by Edward Bird

“Princess Caraboo” From an engraving by Henry Meyer, after a picture by Edward Bird

Mary Baker (née Willcocks) (1791 – 24 December 1864) was a noted impostor who went by the name Princess Caraboo. She pretended to be from a far away island and fooled a British town for some months.

Biography
On 3 April 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, England, met an apparently disoriented young woman with exotic clothes, who was speaking a language no one could understand. The cobbler’s wife took her to the Overseer of the Poor, who left her in the hands of the local county magistrate, Samuel Worrall, who lived in Knole Park. Worrall and his American-born wife Elizabeth could not understand her either; all they could determine was that she called herself ‘Caraboo’ and that she was interested in Chinese imagery. They sent her to the local inn, where she identified a drawing of a pineapple with the word ‘ananas,’ which means pineapple in many Indo-European languages, and insisted on sleeping on the floor. Samuel Worrall declared she was a beggar and should be taken to Bristol and tried for vagrancy.

During her imprisonment, a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso (or Enes) said he knew the language and translated her story. According to Enes, she was Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean. She had been captured by pirates and after a long voyage she had jumped overboard in the Bristol Channel and swam ashore.

The Worralls brought Caraboo back to their home. For the next ten weeks, this representative of exotic royalty was a favourite of the local dignitaries. She used a bow and arrow, fenced, swam naked and prayed to a god, whom she termed Alla-Tallah. She acquired exotic clothing and a portrait made of her was reproduced in local newspapers. Her authenticity was attested to by a Dr Wilkinson who identified her language using Edmund Fry’s Pantographia and stated that marks on the back of her head were the work of oriental surgeons.

Baker’s Javasu Writing
Eventually the truth came out. A boarding-house keeper, Mrs. Neale, recognised her from the picture in the Bristol Journal and informed her hosts. The would-be princess was actually a cobbler’s daughter, Mary Baker (née Willcocks) from Witheridge, Devon. She had been a servant girl in various places all over England but had not found a place to stay. She had invented a fictitious language out of imaginary and gypsy words and created an exotic character. The strange marks on her skin were the scars from a crude cupping operation in a poorhouse hospital in London. The British press had a field day at the expense of the duped rustic middle-class.

Her hosts arranged for her to leave for Philadelphia, and she departed 28 June 1817.
On 13 September 1817, a letter was printed in the Bristol Journal, allegedly from Sir Hudson Lowe, the official in charge of the exiled Emperor Napoleon on St. Helena. It claimed that after the Philadelphia-bound ship bearing the beautiful Caraboo had been driven close to the island by a tempest, the intrepid princess had impulsively cut herself adrift in a small boat, rowed ashore and so fascinated the emperor that he was applying to the Pope for a dispensation to marry her. The story is unverified.

In the USA, she briefly continued her role, appearing on-stage at the Washington Hall, Philadelphia, as ‘Princess Caraboo,’ but with little success. Her last contact with the Worralls was a letter from New York in November 1817, in which she complained of her notoriety. She appears to have returned to Philadelphia until she finally left America in 1824, returning to England.

In 1824 she returned to Britain and briefly exhibited herself in New Bond Street, London, as ‘Princess Caraboo’ but her act was no longer very successful. She may have briefly travelled to France and Spain in her guise but soon returned to England. In September 1828, she was living as a widow in Bedminster under the name Mary Burgess (in reality the name of a cousin). There she married a Richard Baker, and gave birth to a daughter the next year. In 1839, she was selling leeches to the Bristol Infirmary Hospital. She died on 24 December 1864 and was buried in the Hebron Road cemetery in Bristol.

Film
The hoax was the basis of the 1994 film Princess Caraboo, written by Michael Austin and John Wells, which added some fictional incidents to the true story.

Posted in British history, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

The Scotsman, a Regency Era Newspaper, Which Has Survived to Modern Times

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

The_Scotsman The Scotsman is a Scottish compact newspaper published from Edinburgh. It was a broadsheet until 16 August 2004. Its sister publication, the Sunday newspaper Scotland on Sunday, remains a broadsheet. The Scotsman Publications Ltd also issues the Edinburgh Evening News and the Herald & Post series of free newspapers in Edinburgh, Fife, and West Lothian.

As of November 2012, it had an audited print circulation of 28,500, down from 35,949 in 2012 (Jan – Aug average) and 42,581 in August 2011. Scotsman.com websites, including the news site, job site, property site, mobile site and others have an average of 105,959 visitors a day.

History
The Scotsman was launched in 1817 as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren in response to the “unblushing subservience” of competing newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment. The paper was pledged to “impartiality, firmness and independence.”

William Ritchie (1781 – 4 February 1831) was a Scottish lawyer, journalist and newspaper owner. He was born at Lundin Mill, Fife, where his father had a flax dressing business.
At the age of 19 he moved to Edinburgh, and after some years employment in the offices of two firms of solicitors, he joined the Society of Solicitors in the Supreme Courts of Scotland in 1808.

After contributing to various publications for a number of years, in 1816 he joined with Charles Maclaren, his elder brother John Ritchie and John Ramsay McCulloch in founding The Scotsman newspaper, the first number of which appeared the following year. Ritchie was joint editor of the paper with Maclaren until Ritchie’s death in 1831.

In 1824 he published Essays on Constitutional Law and Forms of Process and in 1827 was appointed a commissioner under the Improvements Act. He campaigned for reform of policing and prison conditions, especially for poor debtors.

Charles Maclaren FRSE FGS (7 October 1782 – 10 September 1866) was a Scottish journalist and geologist. He co-founded The Scotsman newspaper, and edited the 6th Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Maclaren was born in Ormiston, Haddingtonshire, the son of a farmer and cattle-dealer. He was almost entirely self-educated, and when a young man became a mercantile clerk in Edinburgh. In 1817, with John Ritchie, John Ramsay McCulloch and William Ritchie, he established The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh and at first acted as its editor. Offered a post as clerk in the custom house, he resigned his editorial position, resuming it in 1820, and resigning it again in 1845. In 1820, Maclaren was appointed editor of the sixth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. From 1864-1866 he was president of the Edinburgh Geological Society, in which city he died in 1866.

Its modern editorial line is firmly anti-independence. After the abolition of newspaper stamp tax in Scotland in 1850, The Scotsman was relaunched as a daily newspaper priced at 1d and a circulation of 6,000 copies.

In 1953 the newspaper was bought by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson who was in the process of building a large media group. The paper was bought in 1995 by David and Frederick Barclay for £85 million. They moved the newspaper from its Edinburgh office on North Bridge, which is now an upmarket hotel, to modern offices in Holyrood Road designed by Edinburgh architects CDA, near the subsequent location of the Scottish Parliament Building.

In December 2005, The Scotsman was acquired, in a £160 million deal, by its present owners Johnston Press a company founded in Scotland and now one of the top three largest local newspaper publishers in the UK.

Ian Stewart has been the editor since June 2012, after a reshuffle of senior management in April 2012, during which John McLellan who was the paper’s Editor-in-Chief was dismissed. Ian Stewart was previously editor of Edinburgh Evening News and remains as the editor of Scotland on Sunday.

In 2012, The Scotsman was named Newspaper of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards.

Editors
1817: William Ritchie
1817: Charles Maclaren
1818: John Ramsay McCulloch
1843: John Hill Burton (acting)
1846: Alexander Russel
1876: Robert Wallace
1880: Charles Alfred Cooper
1905: John Pettigrew Croal
1924: George A. Waters
1944: James Murray Watson
1955: John Buchanan (acting)
1956: Alastair Dunnett
1972: Eric MacKay
1985: Chris Baur
1988: Magnus Linklater
1994: Andrew Jaspan
1995: James Seaton
1997: Martin Clarke
1998: Alan Ruddock
2000: Tim Luckhurst
2000: Rebecca Hardy
2001: Iain Martin
2004: John McGurk
2006: Mike Gilson
2009: John McLellan
2012: Ian Stewart
Source: The Scotsman Digital Archive

Scotsman.com
Since 1998, the Scotsman has had an internet portal that features the latest news, sports, business, property, motors and sport in different sections of the site. It has had live webcams and panoramas around Scotland. It also has sections for other Scotsman Publications including Scotland on Sunday and the Evening News.

Posted in British history, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities, Scotland, Victorian era | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on The Scotsman, a Regency Era Newspaper, Which Has Survived to Modern Times

Historic Covent Garden

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

Royal Opera House

Royal Opera House

Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin’s Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as “Covent Garden.” The district is divided by the main thoroughfare of Long Acre, north of which is given over to independent shops centred on Neal’s Yard and Seven Dials, while the south contains the central square with its street performers and most of the elegant buildings, theatres and entertainment facilities, including the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the London Transport Museum.

Though mainly fields until the 16th century, the area was briefly settled when it became the heart of the Anglo-Saxon trading town of Lundenwic. After the town was abandoned, part of the area was walled off by 1200 for use as arable land and orchards by Westminster Abbey, and was referred to as “the garden of the Abbey and Convent”. The land, now called “the Covent Garden,” was seized by Henry VIII, and granted to the Earls of Bedford in 1552. The 4th Earl commissioned Inigo Jones to build some fine houses to attract wealthy tenants. Jones designed the Italianate arcaded square along with the church of St Paul’s. The design of the square was new to London, and had a significant influence on modern town planning, acting as the prototype for the laying-out of new estates as London grew. A small open-air fruit and vegetable market had developed on the south side of the fashionable square by 1654. Gradually, both the market and the surrounding area fell into disrepute, as taverns, theatres, coffee-houses and brothels opened up; the gentry moved away, and rakes, wits and playwrights moved in. By the 18th century it had become a well-known red-light district, attracting notable prostitutes. An Act of Parliament was drawn up to control the area, and Charles Fowler’s neo-classical building was erected in 1830 to cover and help organise the market. The area declined as a pleasure-ground as the market grew and further buildings were added: the Floral Hall, Charter Market, and in 1904 the Jubilee Market. By the end of the 1960s traffic congestion was causing problems, and in 1974 the market relocated to the New Covent Garden Market about three miles (5 km) south-west at Nine Elms. The central building re-opened as a shopping centre in 1980, and is now a tourist location containing cafes, pubs, small shops, and a craft market called the Apple Market, along with another market held in the Jubilee Hall.

Covent Garden, with the postcode WC2, falls within the London boroughs of Westminster and Camden, and the parliamentary constituencies of Cities of London and Westminster and Holborn and St Pancras. The area has been served by the Piccadilly line at Covent Garden tube station since 1907; the journey from Leicester Square, at 300 yards, is the shortest in London.

History
Early History
The route of the Strand on the southern boundary of what was to become Covent Garden was used during the Roman period as part of a route to Silchester, known as “Iter VII” on the Antonine Itinerary. Excavations in 2006 at St Martin-in-the-Fields revealed a Roman grave, suggesting the site had sacred significance. The area to the north of the Strand was long thought to have remained as unsettled fields until the 16th century, but theories by Alan Vince and Martin Biddle that there had been an Anglo-Saxon settlement to the west of the old Roman town of Londinium were borne out by excavations in 1985 and 2005. These revealed Covent Garden as the centre of a trading town called Lundenwic, developed around 600 AD, which stretched from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Alfred the Great gradually shifted the settlement into the old Roman town of Londinium from around 886 AD onwards, leaving no mark of the old town, and the site returned to fields.

Around 1200 the first mention of an abbey garden appears in a document mentioning a walled garden owned by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of St. Peter, Westminster. A later document, dated between 1250 and 1283, refers to “the garden of the Abbot and Convent of Westminster.” By the 13th century this had become a 40-acre (16 ha) quadrangle of mixed orchard, meadow, pasture and arable land, lying between modern-day St. Martin’s Lane and Drury Lane, and Floral Street and Maiden Lane. The use of the name “Covent”—an Anglo-French term for a religious community, equivalent to “monastery” or “convent”—appears in a document in 1515, when the Abbey, which had been letting out parcels of land along the north side of the Strand for inns and market gardens, granted a lease of the walled garden, referring to it as “a garden called Covent Garden”. This is how it was recorded from then on.

The Bedford Estate (1552–1918)
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, Henry VIII took for himself the land belonging to Westminster Abbey, including the convent garden and seven acres to the north called Long Acre; and in 1552 his son, Edward VI, granted it to John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford. The Russell family, who in 1694 were advanced in their peerage from Earl to Duke of Bedford, held the land from 1552 to 1918.

Russell had Bedford House and garden built on part of the land, with an entrance on the Strand, the large garden stretching back along the south side of the old walled-off convent garden. Apart from this, and allowing several poor-quality tenements to be erected, the Russells did little with the land until the 4th Earl of Bedford, Francis Russell, an active and ambitious businessman, commissioned Inigo Jones in 1630 to design and build a church and three terraces of fine houses around a large square or piazza. The commission had been prompted by Charles I taking offence at the condition of the road and houses along Long Acre, which were the responsibility of Russell and Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth. Russell and Carey complained that under the 1625 Proclamation concerning Buildings, which restricted building in and around London, they could not build new houses; the King then granted Russell, for a fee of £2,000, a licence to build as many new houses on his land as he “shall thinke fitt and convenient.” The church of St Paul’s was the first building, begun in July 1631 on the western side of the square. The last house was completed in 1637.

The houses initially attracted the wealthy, though when a market developed on the south side of the square around 1654, the aristocracy moved out and coffee houses, taverns, and prostitutes moved in. The Bedford Estate was expanded in 1669 to include Bloomsbury, when Lord Russell married Lady Rachel Vaughan, one of the daughters of the 4th Earl of Southampton.

By the 18th century Covent Garden had become a well-known red-light district, attracting notable prostitutes such as Betty Careless and Jane Douglas. Descriptions of the prostitutes and where to find them were provided by Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, the “essential guide and accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure.” In 1830 a market hall was built to provide a more permanent trading centre. In 1913, Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford agreed to sell the Covent Garden Estate for £2 million to the MP and land speculator Harry Mallaby-Deeley, who sold his option in 1918 to the Beecham family for £250,000.

Governance
The Covent Garden estate was originally under the control of Westminster Abbey and lay in the parish of St Margaret. During a reorganisation in 1542, it was transferred to St Martin in the Fields, and then in 1645 a new parish was created, splitting governance of the estate between the parishes of St Paul Covent Garden and St Martin, both still within the Liberty of Westminster. St Paul Covent Garden was completely surrounded by the parish of St Martin in the Fields. It was grouped into the Strand District in 1855 when it came within the area of responsibility of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

In 1889 the parish became part of the County of London and in 1900 it became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1922. Since 1965, Covent Garden falls within the London boroughs of Westminster and Camden, and is in the Parliamentary constituencies of Cities of London and Westminster and Holborn and St Pancras.

Modern Changes
Charles Fowler’s 1830 neo-classical building restored to use as a retail market
The Covent Garden Estate was part of Beecham Estates and Pills Limited from 1924 to 1928, after which time it was managed by a successor company called Covent Garden Properties Company Limited, owned by the Beechams and other private investors. This new company sold some properties at Covent Garden, while becoming active in property investment in other parts of London. In 1962 the bulk of the remaining properties in the Covent Garden area, including the market, were sold to the newly established government-owned Covent Garden Authority for £3,925,000.

By the end of the 1960s, traffic congestion had reached such a level that the use of the square as a modern wholesale distribution market was becoming unsustainable, and significant redevelopment was planned. Following a public outcry, buildings around the square were protected in 1973, preventing redevelopment. The following year the market moved to a new site in south-west London. The square languished until its central building re-opened as a shopping centre in 1980. An action plan was drawn up by Westminster Council in 2004 in consultation with residents and businesses to improve the area while retaining its historic character. The market buildings, along with several other properties in Covent Garden, were bought by a property company in 2006.

Geography

Staple Inn, with its distinctive timber-framed façade, on the south side of High Holborn.

Staple Inn, with its distinctive timber-framed façade, on the south side of High Holborn.

Historically, the Bedford Estate defined the boundary of Covent Garden, with Drury Lane to the east, the Strand to the south, St. Martin’s Lane to the west, and Long Acre to the north. However, over time the area has expanded northwards past Long Acre to High Holborn. Shelton Street, running parallel to the north of Long Acre, marks the boundary between Westminster Council and Camden London Borough Council. Long Acre is the main thoroughfare, running north-east from St Martin’s Lane to Drury Lane.

The area to the south of Long Acre contains the Royal Opera House, the market and central square, and most of the elegant buildings, theatres and entertainment facilities, including the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the London Transport Museum; while the area to the north of Long Acre is largely given over to independent retail units centred on Neal Street, Neal’s Yard and Seven Dials; though this area also contains residential buildings such as Odhams Walk, built in 1981 on the site of the Odhams print works, and is home to over 6,000 residents.

Economy
The area’s historic association with the retail and entertainment economy continues. In 1979, Covent Garden Market reopened as a retail centre; in 2010, the largest Apple Store in the world opened in The Piazza. The central hall has shops, cafes and bars alongside the Apple Market stalls selling antiques, jewellery, clothing and gifts; there are additional casual stalls in the Jubilee Hall Market on the south side of the square. Long Acre has a range of clothes shops and boutiques, and Neal Street is noted for its large number of shoe shops. London Transport Museum and the side entrance to the Royal Opera House box office and other facilities are also located on the square. During the late 1970s and 1980s the Rock Garden music venue was popular with up and coming punk rock and New Wave artists.

The market halls and several other buildings in Covent Garden were bought by CapCo in partnership with GE Real Estate in August 2006 for £421 million, on a 150-year head lease. The buildings are let to the Covent Garden Area Trust, who pay an annual peppercorn rent of one red apple and a posy of flowers for each head lease, and the Trust protects the property from being redeveloped. In March 2007 CapCo also acquired the shops located under the Royal Opera House. The complete Covent Garden Estate owned by CapCo consists of 550,000 sq ft (51,000 m2), and has a market value of £650 million.

Landmarks
The Royal Opera House, often referred to as simply “Covent Garden,” was constructed as the “Theatre Royal” in 1732 to a design by Edward Shepherd. During the first hundred years or so of its history, the theatre was primarily a playhouse, with the Letters Patent granted by Charles II giving Covent Garden and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane exclusive rights to present spoken drama in London. In 1734, the first ballet was presented; a year later Handel’s first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premières here. It has been the home of The Royal Opera since 1945, and the Royal Ballet since 1946.

The current building is the third theatre on the site following destructive fires in 1808 and 1857. The façade, foyer and auditorium were designed by Edward Barry, and date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive £178 million reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,268 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The stage performance area is roughly 15 metres square. The main auditorium is a Grade 1 listed building. The inclusion of the adjacent old Floral Hall, previously a part of the old Covent Garden Market, created a new and extensive public gathering place. In 1779 the pavement outside the playhouse was the scene of the murder of Martha Ray, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, by her admirer the Rev. James Hackman.

Covent Garden Square

Balthazar Nebot's 1737 painting of the square before the 1830 market hall was constructed

Balthazar Nebot’s 1737 painting of the square before the 1830 market hall was constructed

The central square in Covent Garden is simply called “Covent Garden”, often marketed as “Covent Garden Piazza” to distinguish it from the eponymous surrounding area. Laid out in 1630, it was the first modern square in London, and was originally a flat, open space or piazza with low railings. A casual market started on the south side, and by 1830 the present market hall was built. The space is popular with street performers, who audition with the site’s owners for an allocated slot. The square was originally laid out when the 4th Earl of Bedford, Francis Russell, commissioned Inigo Jones to design and build a church and three terraces of fine houses around the site of a former walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey. Jones’s design was informed by his knowledge of modern town planning in Europe, particularly Piazza d’Arme, in Leghorn, Tuscany, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Piazza Santissima Annunziata in Florence, and the Place des Vosges in Paris. The centrepiece of the project was the large square, the concept of which was new to London, and this had a significant influence on modern town planning in the city, acting as the prototype for the laying-out of new estates as the metropolis grew. Isaac de Caus, the French Huguenot architect, designed the individual houses under Jones’s overall design.

The church of St Paul’s was the first building, and was begun in July 1631 on the western side of the square. The last house was completed in 1637. Seventeen of the houses had arcaded portico walks organised in groups of four and six either side of James Street on the north side, and three and four either side of Russell Street. These arcades, rather than the square itself, took the name Piazza; the group from James Street to Russell Street became known as the “Great Piazza” and that to the south of Russell Street as the “Little Piazza.” None of Inigo Jones’s houses remain, though part of the north group was reconstructed in 1877–79 as Bedford Chambers by William Cubitt to a design by Henry Clutton.

Covent Garden Market
The first record of a “new market in Covent Garden” is in 1654 when market traders set up stalls against the garden wall of Bedford House. The Earl of Bedford acquired a private charter from Charles II in 1670 for a fruit and vegetable market, permitting him and his heirs to hold a market every day except Sundays and Christmas Day. The original market, consisting of wooden stalls and sheds, became disorganised and disorderly, and the 6th Earl requested an Act of Parliament in 1813 to regulate it, then commissioned Charles Fowler in 1830 to design the neo-classical market building that is the heart of Covent Garden today. The contractor was William Cubitt and Company. Further buildings were added—the Floral hall, Charter Market, and in 1904 the Jubilee Market for foreign flowers was built by Cubitt and Howard.

By the end of the 1960s, traffic congestion was causing problems for the market, which required increasingly large lorries for deliveries and distribution. Redevelopment was considered, but protests from the Covent Garden Community Association in 1973 prompted the Home Secretary, Robert Carr, to give dozens of buildings around the square listed-building status, preventing redevelopment. The following year the market relocated to its new site, New Covent Garden Market, about three miles (5 km) south-west at Nine Elms. The central building re-opened as a shopping centre in 1980, with cafes, pubs, small shops and a craft market called the Apple Market. Another market, the Jubilee Market, is held in the Jubilee Hall on the south side of the square. The market halls and several other buildings in Covent Garden have been owned by the property company Capital & Counties Properties (CapCo) since 2006.

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Interior of the Drury Lane Theatre by Pugin and Rowlandson, 1808

Interior of the Drury Lane Theatre by Pugin and Rowlandson, 1808

The current Theatre Royal on Drury Lane is the most recent of four incarnations, the first of which opened in 1663, making it the oldest continuously used theatre in London. For much of its first two centuries, it was, along with the Royal Opera House, a patent theatre granted rights in London for the production of drama, and had a claim to be one of London’s leading theatres. The first theatre, known as “Theatre Royal, Bridges Street,” saw performances by Nell Gwyn and Charles Hart. After it was destroyed by fire in 1672, English dramatist and theatre manager Thomas Killigrew engaged Christopher Wren to build a larger theatre on the same spot, which opened in 1674. This building lasted nearly 120 years, under leadership including Colley Cibber, David Garrick, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In 1791, under Sheridan’s management, the building was demolished to make way for a larger theatre which opened in 1794; but that survived only 15 years, burning down in 1809. The building that stands today opened in 1812. It has been home to actors as diverse as Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, child actress Clara Fisher, comedian Dan Leno, the comedy troupe Monty Python (who recorded a concert album there), and musical composer and performer Ivor Novello. Since November 2008 the theatre has been owned by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and generally stages popular musical theatre. It is a Grade I listed building.

London Transport Museum
The London Transport Museum is in a Victorian iron and glass building on the east side of the market square. It was designed as a dedicated flower market by William Rogers of William Cubitt and Company in 1871, and was first occupied by the museum in 1980. Previously the transport collection had been held at Syon Park and Clapham. The first parts of the collection were brought together at the beginning of the 20th century by the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) when it began to preserve buses being retired from service. After the LGOC was taken over by the London Electric Railway (LER), the collection was expanded to include rail vehicles. It continued to expand after the LER became part of the London Passenger Transport Board in the 1930s and as the organisation passed through various successor bodies up to TfL, London’s transport authority since 2000. The Covent Garden building has on display many examples of buses, trams, trolleybuses and rail vehicles from 19th and 20th centuries as well as artefacts and exhibits related to the operation and marketing of passenger services and the impact that the developing transport network has had on the city and its population.

St Paul’s Church
St Paul’s, commonly known as the Actors’ Church, was designed by Inigo Jones as part of a commission by Francis Russell in 1631 to create “houses and buildings fitt for the habitacons of Gentlemen and men of ability.” Work on the church began that year and was completed in 1633, at a cost of £4,000, with it becoming consecrated in 1638. In 1645 Covent Garden was made a separate parish and the church was dedicated to St Paul. It is uncertain how much of Jones’s original building is left, as the church was damaged by fire in 1795 during restoration work by Thomas Hardwick; though it is believed that the columns are original—the rest is mostly Georgian or Victorian reconstruction.

Culture
The Covent Garden area has long been associated with both entertainment and shopping, and this continues. Covent Garden has 13 theatres, and over 60 pubs and bars, with most south of Long Acre, around the main shopping area of the old market. The Seven Dials area in the north of Covent Garden was home to the punk rock club The Roxy in 1977, and the area remains focused on young people with its trendy mid-market retail outlets.

Street Performance
Street entertainment at Covent Garden was noted in Samuel Pepys’s diary in May 1662, when he recorded the first mention of a Punch and Judy show in Britain. Impromptu performances of song and swimming were given by local celebrity William Cussans in the eighteenth century. Covent Garden is licensed for street entertainment, and performers audition for timetabled slots in a number of venues around the market, including the North Hall, West Piazza, and South Hall Courtyard. The courtyard space is dedicated to classical music only. There are street performances at Covent Garden Market every day of the year, except Christmas Day. Shows run throughout the day and are about 30 minutes in length. In March 2008, the market owner, CapCo, proposed to reduce street performances to one 30-minute show each hour.

Pubs and Bars
The Covent Garden area has over 60 pubs and bars, with several of them listed buildings as well as being on CAMRA’s National Inventory. The Harp in Chandos Place has received several awards, including London Pub of the Year in 2008 by the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood, and National Pub of the Year by CAMRA in 2011. It was at one time owned by the Charrington Brewery, when it was known as The Welsh Harp; in 1995 the name was abbreviated to just The Harp, before Charrington sold it to Punch Taverns in 1997. It has been owned by the landlady since 2010. The Lamb & Flag in Rose Street has a reputation as the oldest pub in the area, though records are not clear. The first mention of a pub on the site is 1772 (when it was called the Cooper’s Arms – the name changing to Lamb & Flag in 1833); the 1958 brick exterior conceals what may be an early 18th-century frame of a house replacing the original one built in 1638. The pub acquired a reputation for staging bare-knuckle prize fights during the early 19th century when it earned the nickname “Bucket of Blood.” The alleyway beside the pub was the scene of an attack on John Dryden in 1679 by thugs hired by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester,with whom he had a long-standing conflict. The Salisbury in St. Martin’s Lane was built as part of a six-storey block around 1899 on the site of an earlier pub that had been known under several names, including the Coach & Horses and Ben Caunt’s Head; it is both Grade II listed, and on CAMRA’s National Inventory, due to the quality of the etched and polished glass and the carved woodwork, summed up as “good fin de siècle ensemble.”

Cultural Connections
Covent Garden, and especially the market, have appeared in a number of works. Eliza Doolittle, the central character in George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, and the musical adaptation by Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady, is a Covent Garden flower seller. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film Frenzy about a Covent Garden fruit vendor, who becomes a serial sex killer, as set in the market where his father had been a wholesale greengrocer. The daily activity of the market was the topic of a 1957 Free Cinema documentary by Lindsay Anderson, Every Day Except Christmas, which won the Grand Prix at the Venice Festival of Shorts and Documentaries.

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, Georgian Era, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bedford Estate, a Central London Estate

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

Looking north across Bloomsbury Square on the Bedford Estate with Bedford House behind, c1725, London town house of the Dukes of Bedford

Looking north across Bloomsbury Square on the Bedford Estate with Bedford House behind, c1725, London town house of the Dukes of Bedford

The Bedford Estate is a historic central London estate owned by the Russell family. who possess the peerage of Duke of Bedford. The estate was originally based in Covent Garden, then stretched to include Bloomsbury in 1669. The Covent Garden property was sold for £2 million in 1913, by Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, to the MP and land speculator Harry Mallaby-Deeley, who sold his option to the Beecham family for £250,000; the sale being finalised in 1918.

History

Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, statue by Richard Westmacott in Russell Square on the Bedford Estate.

Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, statue by Richard Westmacott in Russell Square on the Bedford Estate.

In 1669, the Bloomsbury Estate came into ownership of the Russell family when William, son of William Russell, 1st Duke and 5th Earl of Bedford (1616–1700), married Lady Rachel Vaughan, one of the daughters of Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of Southampton (1607–1667). She had recently inherited the agricultural fields now known as Bloomsbury from her father.

Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford (1765–1802) came of age in 1786. He was a spendthrift gambler, with an interest in farming on the Woburn estate. However, he was not interested in Bedford House in Bloomsbury, instead living in the West End. In 1800, the contents of Bedford House were put up for auction, and the house was demolished. It was replaced by a wide avenue, Bedford Place, leading north to the large Russell Square, with Montague Street running parallel to the west. Francis Russell commissioned James Burton (1761–1837) to develop the land into a residential area with Russell Square forming the focal point, landscaped by Humphrey Repton after the success of his work for Francis Russell on his Woburn estate.

The development of Bloomsbury was continued by Francis Russell’s brother, John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford (1766–1839). The firm of Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855) were involved towards the end of the development. Eventually, the entire estate north of Russell Square was filled with squares and houses. John Russell was also responsible for the building of the Covent Garden Market to the south of the main estate.

Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford (1858–1940) succeeded to the title in 1893. By then, there was a move against the owners of large estates. Herbrand Russell began to sell off the estates under his control. The sale contract for Covent Garden was signed in 1914 and finalised with Sir Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) in 1918.

The Bedford Estates
The British Museum and the University of London replaced large parts of the estate and the remnants are owned by The Bedford Estates, mainly residential property that has been converted for office and hotel use, together with private residential property. The company is the largest private landowner in Bloomsbury and is managed from the Bedford Office in Montague Street, within the estate.

Geography
The main Bedford Estate originally extended between Tottenham Court Road, Euston Road, Southampton Row, and New Oxford Street. There were also two separate parts on the other side of Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road. To the south, the Covent Garden Estate north of the Strand was also part of the Bedford Estate.

Torrington Square

Torrington Square

Garden squares in the main Bedford Estate include:
Bedford Square
Bloomsbury Square
Gordon Square
Russell Square
Tavistock Square
Torrington Square
Woburn Square
Tavistock Square

Tavistock Square

Bloomsbury Square

Bloomsbury Square

Bedford Square

Bedford Square

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, Georgian Era, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Bedford Estate, a Central London Estate

The “Real” Mr. Selfridge

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

I am a bit obsessed with the PBS series “Mr. Selfridge,” starring Jeremy Piven. My obsession does not come from the intrigue, but from the history behind the show. My son teaches Business courses, and he and I have been talking about some of Selfridge’s marketing techniques. So, below is some of the things I have discovered about the “Real” Mr. Selfridge:

381px-Harry_Gordon_Selfridge_circa_1910 Harry Gordon Selfridge, Sr., (11 January 1856 – 8 May 1947) was an American-born British retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges. His 30-year leadership of Selfridges led to his becoming one of the most respected and wealthy retail magnates in the United Kingdom. His property portfolio included Highcliffe Castle in Dorset.

Born in Ripon, Wisconsin, Selfridge delivered newspapers and left school at 14 when he found work at a bank in Jackson, Michigan. After another series of jobs, Selfridge found a position at Marshall Field in Chicago, where he stayed for the next 25 years. In 1890 he married Rose Buckingham of the prominent Chicago Buckingham family. 454px-Rosalie_Selfridge_circa_1910

In 1906, following a trip to London, Selfridge invested £400,000 in his own department store in what was then the unfashionable western end of Oxford Street. The new store opened to the public on 15 March 1909, and Selfridge remained chairman until he retired in 1941. In later life, Selfridge lost most of his fortune.

He died in 1947, in Putney, London, aged 91 and was buried in St Mark’s Churchyard at Highcliffe, Dorset.

Early Life
Selfridge was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, on January 11, 1856, one of three boys. Within months of his birth, the family moved to Jackson, Michigan, as his father had acquired the town’s general store. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, his father Robert Oliver Selfridge joined the Union Army. Rising to the rank of major, although he had been honorably discharged, he chose not to return home after the war ended.

This left his mother Lois to bring up three young boys. Unfortunately, Harry’s two brothers died at a very young age shortly after the war ended, so Harry became his mother’s only child. She found work as a schoolteacher and struggled financially to support both of them. She supplemented her low income by painting greeting cards, and eventually became headmistress of Jackson High School. Harry and his mother enjoyed each other’s company and they were good friends; they lived together all their lives.

Career
At the age of 10, Selfridge began to contribute to the family income by delivering newspapers. Aged 12, he started working at the Leonard Field’s dry-goods store. This allowed him to fund the creation of a boys’ monthly magazine with schoolfriend Peter Loomis, making money from the advertising carried within.

Selfridge left school at 14 and found work at a bank in Jackson. After failing his entrance examinations to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Selfridge became a bookkeeper at the local furniture factory of Gilbert, Ransom & Knapp. However, the company closed down four months later, and Selfridge moved to Grand Rapids to work in the insurance industry.

In 1876, his ex-employer, Leonard Field, agreed to write Selfridge a letter of introduction to Marshall Field in Chicago, who was a senior partner in Field, Leiter & Company, one of the most successful stores in the city (which became Marshall Field and Company, later bought by Macy’s). Initially employed as a stock boy in the wholesale department, over the following 25 years, Selfridge worked his way up the commercial ladder. He was eventually appointed a junior partner, married Rosalie Buckingham (of the prominent Chicago Buckinghams) and amassed a considerable personal fortune.

While at Marshall Field, he was the first to promote Christmas sales with the phrase “Only _____ Shopping Days Until Christmas”, a catchphrase that quickly was picked up by retailers in other markets. Either he or Marshall Field is also credited with popularizing the phrase “The customer is always right.” Later, Hotelier César Ritz advertised in 1908, ‘Le client n’a jamais tort’ (‘The customer is never wrong’). John Wanamaker also took note of the advertising, and was soon using that phrase in promoting his Philadelphia-based department store chain.

Selfridges
In 1906, Selfridge travelled to the United Kingdom on holiday with his wife. Unimpressed with the quality of British retailers, he noticed that the large stores in London had not adopted the latest selling ideas that were being used in the United States. Selfridge decided to invest £400,000 in building his own department store in what was then the unfashionable western end of Oxford Street. The new store opened to the public on 15 March 1909, setting new standards for the retailing business.

Selfridge promoted the radical notion of shopping for pleasure rather than necessity. The store was extensively promoted through paid advertising. The shop floors were structured so that goods could be made more accessible to customers. There were elegant restaurants with modest prices, a library, reading and writing rooms, special reception rooms for French, German, American and “Colonial” customers, a First Aid Room, and a Silence Room, with soft lights, deep chairs, and double-glazing, all intended to keep customers in the store as long as possible. Staff members were taught to be on hand to assist customers, but not too aggressively, and to sell the merchandise. Oliver Lyttleton observed that, when one called on Selfridge, he would have nothing on his desk except one’s letter, smoothed and ironed.

Selfridge also managed to obtain from the GPO the privilege of having the number “1” as its own phone number, so anybody had to just dial 1 to be connected to Selfridge’s operators. In 1909, Selfridge proposed a subway link to Bond Street station; however, contemporary opposition quashed the idea.

In 1941, Selfridge left Selfridges. The provincial stores were sold to the Lewis Partnership in the 1940s, and in 1951 the original Oxford Street store was acquired by the Liverpool-based Lewis’s chain of department stores, which was in turn taken over in 1965 by the Sears Group owned by Charles Clore. Expanded under the Sears group to include branches in Manchester and Birmingham, in 2003 the chain was acquired by Canada’s Galen Weston for £598 million.

Personal Life
In 1890 Selfridge married Rosalie “Rose” Buckingham of the prominent Buckingham family of Chicago. Her father was Benjamin Hale Buckingham, who was a member of a very successful family business established by her grandfather. A 30-year-old successful property developer, she had inherited money and expertise from her family. Rose had purchased land in Harper Ave, Hyde Park, Chicago and built 42 villas and artists cottages within a landscaped environment. The couple had four children, three girls and a boy.

At the height of his fortune, from 1916 Selfridge leased as his family home Highcliffe Castle in Hampshire (now Dorset), from Major General Edward James Montagu-Stuart-Wortley. In addition, he purchased Hengistbury Head, a mile-long promontory on England’s southern coast, where he planned to build a magnificent castle; the land was put up for sale in 1930. Although only a tenant at Highcliffe, he set about fitting modern bathrooms, installing steam central heating and building and equipping a modern kitchen. During World War I, Rose opened a tented retreat called the Mrs Gordon Selfridge Convalescent Camp for American Soldiers in the castle grounds. Selfridge gave up the lease in 1922.

Selfridge’s wife Rose died in the influenza pandemic of 1918; his mother died in 1924. Selfridge did not do well after this, and squandered his money. As a widower, Selfridge had numerous liaisons, including those with the celebrated Dolly Sisters and the divorcée Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, who would later become better known as the decorator Syrie Maugham. He also began and maintained a busy social life with lavish entertainment at his home in Lansdowne House located at 9 Fitzmaurice Place, in Berkeley Square. Today there is a blue plaque noting that Gordon Selfridge lived there from 1921 to 1929.

Later Life and Death
During the years of the Great Depression, Selfridge watched his fortune rapidly decline and then disappear—a situation not helped by his continuous free-spending ways. In 1941, he left Selfridges and moved from his lavish home and travelled around London by bus. In 1947, he died in straitened circumstances, at Putney, in south-west London. Selfridge was buried in St Mark’s Churchyard at Highcliffe, Dorset, next to his wife and his mother.

Selfridge’s grandson, Oliver, who died in 2008, became a pioneer in artificial intelligence.

Writings
Selfridge authored a book, The Romance of Commerce, published by John Lane-The Bodley Head, in 1918, but actually written several years prior. In it, he has chapters on ancient commerce, China, Greece, Venice, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Fuggers, the Hanseatic League, fairs, guilds, early British commerce, trade and the Tudors, the East India Company, north England’s merchants, the growth of trade, trade and the aristocracy, Hudson’s Bay Company, Japan, and representative businesses of the 20th century.

Among the more popular quotations attributed to Selfridge:
“People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.”
“The boss drives his men; the leader coaches them.”
“The boss depends upon authority, the leader on goodwill.”
“The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm.”
“The boss says ‘I’; the leader, ‘we.'”
“The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown.”
“The boss knows how it is done; the leader shows how.”
“The boss says ‘Go’; the leader says ‘Let’s go!'”
“The customer is always right.”

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, Regency era | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

London’s Red Lion Square

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

450px-FennerBrockwaystatue Red Lion Square is a small square on the boundary of Bloomsbury and Holborn in London. The square was laid out in 1684 by Nicholas Barbon, taking its name from the Red Lion Inn. According to some sources the bodies of three regicides – Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton – were placed in a pit on the site of the Square.
By 1720 it was a fashionable area: the eminent judge Bernard Hale was a resident.

The centre-piece of the garden today is a statue by Ian Walters of Fenner Brockway (a British anti-war activist), which was installed in 1986. There is also a memorial bust of Bertrand Russell. Ian Homer Walters (9 April 1930 – 6 August 2006) was an English sculptor. Born in Solihull, Walters was educated at Yardley Grammar school and under William Bloye at the Birmingham School of Art. After National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he taught sculpture first at Stourbridge College of Art and then from 1957 to 1981 at Guildford School of Art.

A committed socialist from his schooldays, Walters took part in Josip Broz Tito’s public sculpture programmes in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s and worked with the African National Congress in the 1970s. His work includes the memorial to the International Brigades in Jubilee Gardens South Bank, London and a large head of Nelson Mandela (now outside the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London). He had finished the 9-foot-tall (2.7 m) clay sculpture for the statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square, but died of cancer before it was cast in bronze. He also sculpted a statue of Fenner Brockway in London, a statue of Harold Wilson in Huddersfield. A statue of Stephen Hawking at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge was his last public work. Conway Hall—which is the home of the South Place Ethical Society and the National Secular Society—opens on to the Square. On 15 June 1974 a meeting by the National Front in Conway Hall resulted in a protest by anti-fascist groups. The following disorder and police action left one student – Kevin Gately from the University of Warwick – dead.

Red Lion Square, today, is home to the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the College of Emergency Medicine. Lamb’s Conduit Street is nearby and the nearest underground station is Holborn.

The first headquarters of the Marshall, Faulkner & Co, which was founded by William Morris, was at 8 Red Lion Square.

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, Georgian Era, Living in the Regency, real life tales | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Regency Era Celebrity: John Nash, the Prince Regent’s Architect

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

John_Nash John Nash (18 January 1752 – 13 May 1835) was a British architect responsible for much of the layout of Regency London under the patronage of the Prince Regent, and during his reign as George IV. Nash was also a pioneer in the use of the Picturesque in architecture. His best known buildings are the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, and Buckingham Palace (though the facade to the mall is not Nash’s work).

Background and Early Career
Born during 1752 in Lambeth, London, the son of a Welsh millwright also called John (1714-1772). From 1766 or 67, John Nash trained with the architect Sir Robert Taylor, the apprentiship was completed in 1775 or 1776.
On the 28 April 1775, at the now demolished church of St Mary Newington, Nash married his first wife Jane Elizabeth Kerr, daughter of a surgeon. Initially he seemed to have pursued a career as a surveyor, builder and carpenter. This gave him an income of around £300 a year. The couple set up home at Royal Row Lambeth. He established his own architectural practice in 1777 as well as being in partnership with a timber merchant, Richard Heaviside. The couple had two children, both were baptised at St Mary-at-Lambeth, John on 9 June 1776 and Hugh on the 28 April 1778.

In June 1778 “By the ill conduct of his wife found it necessary to send her into Wales in order to work a reformation on her,” the cause of this appears to have been the claim that Jane Nash “Had imposed two spurious children on him as his and her own, notwithstanding she had then never had any child” and she had contracted several debts unknown to her husband, including one for milliners’ bills of £300. The claim that Jane had faked her pregnancies and then passed babies she had acquired off as her own was brought before the Consistory court of the Bishop of London.

His wife was sent to Aberavon to lodge with Nash’s cousin Ann Morgan, but she developed a relationship with a local man Charles Charles. In an attempt at reconciliation, Jane returned to London in June 1779, but she continued to act extravagantly so Nash sent her to another cousin Thomas Edwards of Neath, but Mrs Nash gave birth just after Christmas, and acknowledged Charles Charles as the father. In 1781 Nash instigated action against Jane for separation on grounds of adultery; the case was tried at Hereford in 1782. Charles who was found guilty was unable to pay the damages of £76 and subsequently died in prison. The divorce was finally read 26 January 1787.

Nash’s career was initially unsuccessful and short-lived. After inheriting £1000 in 1778 from his uncle Thomas, he invested the money in building his first known independent works, 15-17 Bloomsbury Square and 66-71 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury. But the property failed to let, and he was declared bankrupt on 30 September 1783. His debts were £5000, including £2000 he had been lent by Robert Adam and his brothers.

Welsh Interlude
Nash left London in 1784 to live in Carmarthen, to where his mother had retired, her family being from the area. In 1785, he and a local man Samuel Simon Saxon reroofed the town’s church for 600 Guineas. Later, Nash and Saxon worked as building contractors and suppliers of building materials. Nash’s London buildings had been standard Georgian terrace houses, and it was in Wales he matured as an architect. His first major work in the area was the first of three prisons he would design, Carmarthen 1789-92; this prison was planned by the penal reformer John Howard, and Nash developed this plan into the finished building. He went on to design the prisons at Cardigan (1791–96) and Hereford (1792–96). It was at Hereford that Nash met Richard Payne Knight, whose theories on the picturesque as applies to architecture and landscape would influence Nash. The commission for Hereford Gaol came after the death of William Blackburn, who was to have designed the building, Nash’s design was accepted after James Wyatt approved of the design.

By 1789, St David’s Cathedral was suffering from structural problems, the west front was leaning forward by one foot, Nash was called in to survey the structure and develop a plan to save the building; his solution completed in 1791 was to demolish the upper part of the facade and rebuild it with two large but inelegant flying buttresses.

800px-20100614-DSC_1535 In 1790, Nash met Uvedale Price, whose theories of the Picturesque would have a major future influence on Nash’s town planning. In the short term, Price would commission Nash to design Castle House Aberystwyth (1795); its plan took the form of a rightangled triangle, with an octagonal tower at each corner, sited on the very edge of the sea. This marked a new and more imaginative approach to design in Nash’s work.

Llanacheron One of Nash’s most important developments were a series of medium-sized country houses that he designed in Wales; these developed the villa designs of his teacher Sir Robert Taylor. Most of these villas consist of a roughly square plan with a small entrance hall with a staircase offset in the middle to one side, around which are placed the main rooms; there is then a less prominent Servants’ quarters in a wing attached to one side of the villa. The buildings are usually only two floors in height; the elevations of the main block are usually symmetrical. One of the finest of these villas is Llanerchaeron, at least a dozen villas were designed throughout south Wales.

He met Humphry Repton at Stoke Edith in 1792 and formed a successful partnership with the landscape garden designer. One of their early commissions was at Corsham Court in 1795-6. The pair would collaborate to carefully place the Nash-designed building in grounds designed by Repton. The partnership ended in 1800 under recriminations, Repton accusing Nash of exploiting their partnership to his own advantage.

As Nash developed his architectural practice, it became necessary to employ draughtsmen: the first in the early 1790s was Augustus Charles Pugin, then a bit later in 1795 John Adey Repton son of Humphry.

In 1796, Nash spent most of his time working in London, this was a prelude to his return to the capital in 1797.

Return to London

Nash's own house, East Cowes Castle, on the Isle of Wight, (demolished)

Nash’s own house, East Cowes Castle, on the Isle of Wight, (demolished)

In June 1797, he moved into 28 Dover Street, a building of his own design. He built a larger house next door at 29, into which he moved the following year. Nash married 25-year-old Mary Ann Bradley on 17 December 1798 at St George’s, Hanover Square. In 1798, he purchased a plot of land of 30 acres (120,000 m2) at East Cowes on which he erected 1798-1802 East Cowes Castle as his residence. It was the first of a series of picturesque Gothic castles that he would design.

Nash’s final home in London was No.14 Regent Street that he designed and built 1819–23, No. 16 was built at the same time the home of Nash’s cousin John Edwards, a lawyer who handled all of Nash’s legal affairs. Located in Lower Regent Street, near Waterloo Place, both houses formed a single design around an open courtyard. Nash’s drawing office was on the ground floor, on the first floor was the finest room in the house, the 70-foot-long picture and sculpture gallery; it linked the drawing room at the front of the building with the dining room at the rear. The house was sold in 1834, and the gallery interior moved to East Cowes Castle.

The finest of the dozen country houses that Nash designed as picturesque castles include the relatively small Luscombe Castle Devon (1800–04), Ravensworth Castle (Tyne and Wear) begun 1807 only finally completed in 1846, was one of the largest houses by Nash, Caerhays Castle in Cornwall (1808–10), Shanbally Castle, County Tipperary (1818–1819) was the last of these castles to be built. These buildings all represented Nash’s continuing development of an asymmetrical and picturesque architectural style, that had begun during his years in Wales, at both Castle House Aberystwyth and his alterations to Hafod Uchtryd. This process would be extended by Nash in planning groups of buildings, the first example being Blaise Hamlet (1810–1811); there a group of nine asymmetrical cottages was laid out around a village green. Nikolaus Pevsner described the hamlet as “the ne plus ultra of the Picturesque movement.” Nash developed the asymmetry of his castles in his Italianate villas; his first such exercise was Cronkhill (1802), others included Sandridge Park (1805) and Southborough Place, Surbiton, (1808).

He advised on work to the buildings of Jesus College, Oxford in 1815, for which he required no fee but asked that the college should commission a portrait of him from Sir Thomas Lawrence to hang in the college hall.

Architect to the Prince Regent
Nash was a dedicated Whig and was a friend of Charles James Fox through whom Nash probably came to the attention of the Prince Regent (later King George IV). In 1806 Nash was appointed architect to the Surveyor General of Woods, Forests, Parks, and Chases. From 1810 Nash would take very few private commissions and for the rest of his career he would largely work for the Prince.

The Quadrant, Regent Street, since rebuilt

The Quadrant, Regent Street, since rebuilt

His first major commissions in (1809–1826) from the Prince were Regent Street and the development of an area then known as Marylebone Park. With the Regent’s backing, Nash created a master plan for the area, put into effect from 1818 onwards, which stretched from St James’s northwards and included Regent Street, Regent’s Park (1809–1832) and its neighbouring streets, terraces and crescents of elegant town houses and villas. Nash did not design all the buildings himself; in some instances, these were left in the hands of other architects such as James Pennethorne and the young Decimus Burton. Nash went on to re-landscape St. James’s Park (1814–1827), reshaping the formal canal into the present lake, and giving the park its present form. A characteristic of Nash’s plan for Regent Street was that it followed an irregular path linking Portland Place to the north with Carlton House, London (replaced by Nash’s Carlton House Terrace (1827–1833) to the south. At the northern end of Portland Place Nash designed Park Crescent, London (1812) & (1819–1821), this opens into Nash’s Park Square, London (1823–24), this only has terraces on the east and west, the north opens into Regent’s Park.

The terraces that Nash designed around Regent’s park though conforming to the earlier form of appearing as a single building, as developed by John Wood, the Elder, are unlike earlier examples set in gardens and are not orthoganal in their placing to each other. This was part of Nash’s development of planning, this found it is most extreme example when he set out Park Village East and Park Village West (1823–34) to the north-east of Regent’s Park, here a mixture of detached villas, semi-detached houses, both symmetrical and assymmetrical in their design are set out in private gardens railed off from the street, the roads loop and the buildings are both classical and gothic in style. No two buildings were the same, and or even in line with their neighbours. The park Villages can be seen as the prototype for the Victorian suburbs.

The Royal Pavilion Brighton
800px-Brighton_-_Royal_Pavilion_Panorama Nash was employed by the Prince from 1815 to develop his Marine Pavilion in Brighton, originally designed by Henry Holland. By 1822 Nash had finished his work on the Marine Pavilion, which was now transformed into the Royal Pavilion. The exterior was based on Mughal architecture, giving the building its exotic form, the Chinoiserie style interiors are largely the work of Frederick Crace.

Nash was also a director of the Regent’s Canal Company set up in 1812 to provide a canal link from west London to the River Thames in the east. Nash’s masterplan provided for the canal to run around the northern edge of Regent’s Park; as with other projects, he left its execution to one of his assistants, in this case James Morgan. The first phase of the Regent’s Canal was completed in 1816 and finally completed in 1820.

Together with Robert Smirke and Sir John Soane, he became an official architect to the Office of Works in 1813, (the appointment ended in 1832) at a salary of £500 per annum, following the death in September of that year of James Wyatt, this marked the high point in his professional life. As part of Nash’s new position he was invited to advise the Parliamentary Commissioners on the building of new churches from 1818 onwards.

Nash produced ten church designs, each estimated to cost around £10,000 with seating for 2000 people, the style of the buildings were both classical and gothic. In the end Nash only built two churches for the Commission, the classical All Souls Church, Langham Place (1822–24) terminating the northern end of Regent Street, and the gothic St. Mary’s Haggerston (1825–27), bombed during The Blitz in 1941.

Nash was involved in the design of two of London’s theatres, both in Haymarket. The King’s Opera House (now rebuilt as Her Majesty’s Theatre) (1816–1818) where he and George Repton remodelled the theatre, with arcades and shops around three sides of the building, the fourth being the still surviving Royal Opera Arcade.

The other theatre was the Theatre Royal Haymarket (1821), with its fine hexastyle Corinthian order portico, which still survives, facing down Charles II Street to St. James’s Square, Nash’s interior nolonger survives (the interior now dates from 1904).

In 1820 a scandal broke, when a cartoon was published showing a half dressed King George IV embracing Nash’s wife with a speech bubble coming from the King’s mouth containing the words “I have great pleasure in visiting this part of my dominions.” Whether this was based on just a rumour put about by people who resented Nash’s success or if there is substance behind is not known.

Buckingham Palace East front as designed by Nash

Buckingham Palace East front as designed by Nash

Further London commissions for Nash followed, including the remodelling of Buckingham House to create Buckingham Palace (1825–1830), and for the Royal Mews (1822–24) and Marble Arch (1828) The arch was originally designed as a triumphal arch to stand at the entrance to Buckingham Palace. It was moved when the east wing of the palace designed by Edward Blore was built, at the request of Queen Victoria whose growing family required additional domestic space. Marble Arch became the entrance to Hyde Park and The Great Exhibition.

Retirement and Death
Nash’s career effectively ended with the death of George IV in 1830. The King’s notorious extravagance had generated much resentment and Nash was now without a protector. The Treasury started to look closely at the cost of Buckingham Palace. Nash’s original estimate of the building’s cost had been £252,690, but this had risen to £496,169 in 1829, the actual cost was £613,269 and the building was still unfinished. This controversy ensured that Nash would not receive any more official commissions nor would he be awarded the Knighthood that other contemporary architects such as Jeffry Wyattville, John Soane and Robert Smirke received. Nash retired to the Isle of Wight to his home, East Cowes Castle.

On 28 March 1835 Nash was described as “very poorly and faint.” This was the beginning of the end. On 1 May Nash’s solicitor John Wittet Lyon was summonsed to East Cowes Castle to finalise his will. By 6 May he was described as ‘very ill indeed all day’,[67] he died at his home on 13 May 1835. His funeral took place at St. James’s Church, East Cowes on 20 May, where he was buried in the churchyard, where the monument takes the form of a stone sarcophagus.

His widow acted to clear Nash’s debts (some £15,000), she held a sale of the Castle’s contents, including three paintings by J. M. W. Turner painted on the Isle of Wight, two by Benjamin West and several copies of old master paintings by Richard Evans. These artworks were sold at Christie’s on 11 July 1835 for £1,061. His books, medals, drawings and engravings were bought by a bookseller named Evans for £1,423 on 15 July. The Castle itself was sold for a reported figure of £20,000 to Richard Boyle, 4th Earl of Shannon within the year.

Nash’s widow retired to a property Nash had bequeathed to her in Hampstead where she lived until her death in 1851; she was buried with her husband on the Isle of Wight.

Assistants and Pupils
Nash had many pupils and assistants including Humphry Repton’s sons, John Adey Repton and George Stanley Repton, as well as Anthony Salvin, John Foulon (1772–1842), Augustus Charles Pugin, F.H. Greenway, James Morgan, James Pennethorne, the brothers Henry, James and George Pain.

Posted in British history, buildings and structures, castles, Georgian Era, gothic and paranormal, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities, Victorian era | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Regency Era Celebrity: John Nash, the Prince Regent’s Architect

Regency Era Events: The Cato Street Conspiracy, Murder Most Foul

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Regina Jeffers

arrest of the conspirators

arrest of the conspirators

The Cato Street Conspiracy was an attempt to murder all the British cabinet ministers and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1820. The name comes from the meeting place near Edgware Road in London. The Cato Street Conspiracy is notable due to dissenting public opinions regarding the punishment of the conspirators. While some supported the attempts to ensure that the Spencean Philanthropists were found guilty, others remained conflicted due to the demand of Parliamentary reform.

Origins
The conspirators were called the Spencean Philanthropists, a group taking their name from the British radical speaker Thomas Spence. The group was known for being a revolutionary organization, involved in minor unrest and propaganda.

Some of them, particularly Arthur Thistlewood, had been involved with the Spa Fields riots in 1816. Thistlewood came to dominate the group with George Edwards as his second in command. Most of the members were angered by the Six Acts and the Peterloo Massacre, as well as with the economic and political depression of the time. They planned to assassinate a number of cabinet ministers, overthrow the government, and establish a “Committee of Public Safety” to oversee a radical revolution, similar to the French Revolution. According to the prosecution at their trial, they had intended to form a provisional government headquartered in the Mansion House.

Governmental Crisis

Arthur Thistlewood (1774–1820), one of the Cato Street conspirators, depicted by Abraham Wivell.

Arthur Thistlewood (1774–1820), one of the Cato Street conspirators, depicted by Abraham Wivell.

Industrialization in the early 1800s created serious social unrest, disrupting the peaceful agricultural society to which the British were accustomed. This evolution from rural to urban, and the complications that arose from it–such as inflation and shifts in employment needs- created an environment conducive to radicals like the Cato Street conspirators. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 further disturbed the delicate situation by returning job-seeking soldiers to the homeland. Then, King George III’s death on January 29, 1820, created a new governmental crisis. In a meeting held on February 22, one of the Spenceans, George Edwards, suggested that the group could exploit the political situation and kill all the cabinet ministers. They planned to invade a cabinet dinner at the home of Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council, armed with pistols and grenades. Thistlewood thought the act would trigger a massive uprising against the government. James Ings, a coffee shop keeper and former butcher, later announced that he would have decapitated all the cabinet members and taken two heads to exhibit on Westminster Bridge. Thistlewood spent the next hours trying to recruit more men for the attack. Twenty-seven men joined the effort.

Discovery

William Davidson (1781–1820), one of the Cato Street conspirators.

William Davidson (1781–1820), one of the Cato Street conspirators.

When Jamaican-born William Davidson, who had worked for Lord Harrowby, went to find more details about the cabinet dinner, a servant in Lord Harrowby’s house told him that his master was not at home. When Davidson told this to Thistlewood, he refused to believe it and demanded that the operation commence at once. John Harrison rented a small house in Cato Street as the base of operations. However, George Edwards was working for the Home Office and had become an agent provocateur; in fact, some of the other members had suspected him, but Thistlewood had made him his aide-de-camp. Edwards had presented the idea with the full knowledge of the Home Office, who had also put the advertisement about the supposed dinner in The New Times. When he reported that his would-be-comrades would be ready to follow his suggestion, the Home Office decided to act.

Arrest
On February 23, Richard Birnie, Bow Street magistrate, and George Ruthven, another police spy, went to wait at a public house on the other side of the street of the Cato Street building with 12 officers of the Bow Street Runners. Birnie and Ruthven waited for the afternoon because they had been promised reinforcements from the Coldstream Guards, under the command of Lieutenant FitzClarence, the late king’s grandson. Thistlewood’s group arrived during that time. At 7:30 P.M., the Bow Street Runners decided to apprehend the conspirators themselves. In the resulting brawl, Thistlewood killed a police officer, Richard Smithers, with a sword. Some conspirators surrendered peacefully, while others resisted forcefully. William Davidson failed to fight his way out. Thistlewood, Robert Adams, John Brunt and John Harrison slipped out through the back window, but they were arrested a few days later.

Charges
“1. Conspiring to devise plans to subvert the Constitution. 2. Conspiring to levy war, and subvert the Constitution. 3. Conspiring to murder divers of the Privy Council. 4. Providing arms to murder divers of the Privy Council. 5. Providing arms and ammunition to levy war and subvert the Constitution. 6. Conspiring to seize cannon, arms and ammunition to arm themselves, and to levy war and subvert the Constitution. 7. Conspiring to burn houses and barracks, and to provide combustibles for that purpose. 8. Preparing addresses, &c. containing incitements to the King’s subjects to assist in levying war and subverting the Constitution. 9. Preparing an address to the King’s subjects, containing therein that their tyrants were destroyed, &c., to incite them to assist in levying war, and in subverting the Constitution. 10. Assembling themselves with arms, with intent to murder divers of the Privy Council, and to levy war, and subvert the Constitution. 11. Levying war.”

Trial

Print from May 1820 showing establishment figures dancing around a maypole (a reference to the date of the conspirators' execution, May Day 1820). On top of the maypole are the heads of: John Thomas Brunt (1782–1820); William Davidson (1781–1820); James Ings (1794–1820); Arthur Thistlewood (1774–1820); and, Richard Tidd (1773–1820).

Print from May 1820 showing establishment figures dancing around a maypole (a reference to the date of the conspirators’ execution, May Day 1820). On top of the maypole are the heads of:
John Thomas Brunt (1782–1820);
William Davidson (1781–1820);
James Ings (1794–1820);
Arthur Thistlewood (1774–1820);
and, Richard Tidd (1773–1820).

During the trial, the defence argued that the statement of Edwards, a government spy, was unreliable, and he was, therefore, never called to testify. Police persuaded two of the men, Robert Adams and John Monument, to testify against other conspirators in exchange for dropped charges.

Most of the accused were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason on April 28. All sentences were later commuted, at least in respect of this medieval form of execution, to hanging and beheading. The death sentences of Charles Cooper, Richard Bradburn, John Harrison, James Wilson and John Strange were commuted to transportation for life.

John Brunt, William Davidson, James Ings, Arthur Thistlewood, and Richard Tidd were hanged at Newgate Prison on the morning of May 1, 1820, in front of a large crowd, with some paying as much as three guineas for a good vantage point, from the windows of houses overlooking the scaffold. Infantry were stationed close-by, but out of sight of the crowd and two troops of Life Guards were present. Large banners had been prepared with a painted order to disperse. These would be displayed to the crowd if trouble caused the authorities to invoke the Riot Act.

The hangman was John Foxton, who was assisted by Thomas Cheshire in this high profile execution. After their bodies had hung for half an hour, they were lowered one at a time and an unknown individual in a black mask decapitated them with a small knife. Each beheading was accompanied by shouts, booing and hissing from the crowd. Each head was given to the assistant executioner in turn, who raised and displayed it to the assembled spectators and declaring it to be the head of a traitor before placing it in the coffin with the remainder of the body.

Legacy
The British government used the incident to justify the Six Acts that had been passed two months prior. However, in the House of Commons, Matthew Wood MP, accused the government of purposeful entrapment of the conspirators to smear the campaign for Parliamentary reform. The otherwise pro-government newspaper The Observer ignored the order of the Lord Chief Justice Sir Charles Abbott not to report the trial before the sentencing.

The conspiracy is the subject of many books, as well as one play, Cato Street, written by the actor and author Robert Shaw. The conspiracy was also the basis for a 2001 radio drama, Betrayal: The Trial of William Davidson by Tanika Gupta, on BBC Radio 4.

Posted in British history, Living in the Regency, real life tales, Regency era, Regency personalities | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments