Month: December 2024

Merry Christmas, Henry Cole

On December 22, 2024

Henry Cole (1808-1882) combined administrative skills with a practical flair for production and design. Between 1837-40 when he worked as an assistant to Rowland Hill, these twin talents became apparent. He played a key role in the introduction of the Penny Post and was responsible for the design of the world’s first postage stamp, the Penny Black.

Under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly he created his own award-winning designs, including a tea service produced by Minton. But it was his organisational talents which were truly breath taking. In 1851 Cole proposed an International Great Exhibition of Culture and Industry to celebrate, and to stimulate the improvement of, modern manufacture and decoration. He sought to promote international trade, providing a platform for British products; British manufacturers were to get the best locations at the exhibition. Despite opposition from Parliament, and the press doubting the success of his venture, he launched his scheme, and under his management it became an enormous success, the first in a series of World Fairs.

Joseph Paxton designed the massive glasshouse, the Crystal Palace, in which the Great Exhibition was held at Hyde Park. The prefabricated structure with a cast iron frame was an engineering triumph. Within it more than a million objects were displayed, with sectors showcasing raw materials, machinery, manufactured goods, and fine arts. A massive pink glass fountain stood in the centre. William Morris found the latter in bad taste, but the public loved it.

Exhibits included the entire process of cotton production, electric telegraphs, steam powered machines, a lighthouse, locomotives, scientific tools, microscopes, barometers, surgical instruments, kitchen appliances, an early adding machine, an umbrella which doubled as a weapon, a neo-gothic medieval court designed by Pugin, Indian textiles, musical instruments including a folding piano, silks, porcelain, tapestries, majolica. From glass vitrines the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the eighth century Tara Brooch flaunted their mystique. Who would not have wanted to be there amid the extravagant opulence and exciting new inventions? Everyone did: in the sixth months of the exhibition six million people, a third of the population, visited. The railways offered discounted tickets and Thomas Cook arranged one of his earliest excursions, bringing 150,000 people from the North and Midlands.

The Crystal Palace witnessed the first international chess tournament, and played host to the first modern pay toilets, use of the latter priced at one old penny, bringing a new coy euphemism into the English language. Canny businessman that he was, Henry Cole persuaded Schweppes, the world’s first soft drink company, to sponsor the exhibition, and organised a tempting line in souvenirs with stereoscopic cards, fans, and plates. A huge financial as well as a popular success, the exhibition made a profit of £186,000, around £34 million in today’s money.

This enabled Cole to embark on his next great project, the founding of the South Kensington Museum for Education in Applied Art and Science. With the profits of the Great Exhibition, he organised the purchase of land in South Kensington, supervised the building works, and became the first director of the museum from 1857-73. It subsequently became the Victoria and Albert museum, specialising in decorative arts and design, while the Science and Natural History museums became independent entities. Always concerned with the educational function of the collections, Cole also helped to develop the Royal Colleges of Art and Music, and the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Under Cole’s guidance the Victoria and Albert Museum became a magnificent show case for outstanding designs of furniture, textiles, glass and metal work, and ceramics. Determined to instruct people in superior design and good taste, Cole also set up a Gallery of False Principles, displaying what he perceived as bad designs. These included fabrics and wallpapers with naturalistic images of foliage and flowers, which he considered excessive and illogical ornamentation. Their failings were spelled out on their labels, and alongside them sat “correct” versions. The Gallery proved popular and caused much amusement, but the display was closed after two weeks following complaints from manufacturers whose work was pilloried there. But the memory of the intended lesson lives on, for Charles Dickens, more sentimental and sympathetic towards anyone who might like something pretty, satirised Cole’s judgment in Hard Times when the Utilitarian School Board Superintendent visits Gradgrind’s schoolroom:

Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these examinations.

‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.

‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it. What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—’

‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

Yet, notwithstanding a little pomposity and a common weakness for conflating his own taste with good taste, Cole gave us something very precious in the V and A. It is magical at any time but especially in winter when the rainbow colours of the textiles and costumes, the gleam and shine of the jewellery and metalwork, triumph over the prevailing gloom of the December skies. I choose a few favourite objects to visit, perhaps Shah Jahan’s winecup or Tipu’s tiger, the carved oak facade of Paul Pindar’s sixteenth century house or the Hereford screen, or Dale Chihuly’s extravagant glass sculpture, before heading for the refreshment rooms.

The V and A was the first museum in the world to have a catering service, and what sublime trio of rooms they are. Ensconced in the warmth with a cup of tea and a bun, surrounded by the magnificently eclectic décor featuring ceramics, stained glass, panelling and enamelling, in the Gamble, Poynter or Morris Room, all is right with the world. I could go into semi-hibernation here, sleeping at night in the Great Bed of Ware, by day wandering the labyrinthine corridors from one gallery to another, taking my meals in the refreshment rooms, emerging to the garden court only in Spring. There to meet with the spirit of Jim, Henry Cole’s Yorkshire terrier, who accompanied his master on his daily site inspections as the museum buildings rose from the ground, and who is buried somewhere here in the garden.

Memorial to Jim, on the wall of the garden court. He is buried somewhere in the garden

And at this time of year, I remember Henry Cole for something else, because in 1843 he designed and produced the first Christmas card. Depicting three generations his family raising a toast, with representations of charity and almsgiving around the margins, it is surely an image with which Dickens would have sympathised.

When I was a child our living room filled with cards at Christmas, for my grandparents came from the days of extended families and had a wide circle of friends. We strung the cards in loops across the chimney breast, and cascading down the walls. More jostled on the mantlepiece. Others surrounded and concealed the fruit bowl on the sideboard with its seasonal cargo of tangerines wrapped in tissue paper which when rolled into a cylinder and lit would float magically and weightlessly up to the ceiling. The post came twice a day: cards fell through the letterbox before I left for school, and a second pile arrived in the afternoon, saved for me to open when I came home.

Now there are fewer cards each Christmas, my grandparents long gone and my own contemporaries beginning to slip away. Moreover, the world has changed. Christmas greetings arrive by email. It is an easier way to communicate, quicker, more immediate, and very much cheaper. For in the 50s and 60s not only were boxes of Woolworths cards in the reach even of a child’s pocket money, but so were stamps. And if an envelope contained no other enclosure than a card, and if the flap were tucked in rather than sealed, then an even cheaper stamp would guarantee delivery. Today the annual purchase of books of stamps offers a sharp lesson in inflation, “How much?” we gasp in horror. Yet I cannot resist the pleasure of choosing and writing cards, and while it is nice to receive the emails, I am glad when friends still send those cheery, colourful, paper greetings which nudge each other on my bookshelves basking in the reflected lights of the tree.

So, thank you Henry Cole for the Victoria and Albert, and for Christmas cards. When I first visited your grave in Brompton, it looked a little sad and neglected, but last week I was not your only visitor for someone had taken ivy and plaited a Christmas wreath for you. Merry Christmas, Henry Cole.

Crouching Lions, Intriguing Graves: Three Unusual Tombs

By Gravedigger

On December 8, 2024

In Animals, Entertainers

There are hourglasses, skulls, extinguished torches, broken columns, urns, anchors, arches, open books, angels, cherubs, lambs, clasped hands, myrtle and oak leaves, ivy, lilies, doves, swallows, trumpets, sheaves of wheat, fingers pointing upward or downward, rope circles, burning flames. The symbols commonly found on graves arouse little curiosity for their meanings are well known. Less obvious is the significance of a life-sized crouching lion atop a tomb. Yet I am familiar with three such lions, seemingly benign presences dozing above their occupants, casting the occasional contemptuous glance at the lesser memorials scattered beneath their eminence.

“Gentleman” John Jackson (1769-1845)

In Brompton Cemetery lies “Gentleman” John Jackson, Bare Knuckle Boxing Champion of England. The cognomen reflected his background, his father was a wealthy builder at a time when most pugilists came from the poorer classes. Moreover, John Jackson combined an urbane manner with refined speech and stylish dress. Though a keen amateur boxer, in his early days he worked with his father, and being tall and muscular, was also in demand as an artists’ model for sculptors and painters including Thomas Lawrence.

Remarkably, his fame in the ring was based on only three public matches, one of which he lost. In 1788 he defeated William Fewtrell in Birmingham. A year later he was beaten by George “the Brewer” Ingleston when he slipped on a wet stage breaking a bone in his leg. He offered to be strapped to a chair to continue the fight if his opponent would do the same, but Ingleston refused. He did not fight again until 1795, but it was this final match against the reigning champion, Daniel Mendoza, which assured his fame. Such was his public profile following the bout that he was able to retire from the ring and open a successful Boxing Academy in Bond Street, where he numbered Byron amongst his pupils. The latter described him as “The Emperor of Pugilism.”

In 1814 Jackson helped to establish the Pugilistic Club which regulated prize fighting, exposing crooked behaviour like match fixing, and introducing new rules limiting fights to fists alone with no kicking or hair holding – this last ironic since Jackson had won his match against Mendoza with precisely that expedient, grabbing his opponent’s long hair in one hand while delivering his blows with the other.

Nonetheless, Jackson was a popular figure, organising exhibitions by other boxers to raise money for charities. The lion, symbolising skill and strength, was erected on his tomb in Brompton Cemetery and paid for after his death by friends and admirers.

Tomb of “Gentleman” John Jackson, Brompton Cemetery

The lion, symbol of skill and strength, looks benign today

John Jackson and Elizabeth, his niece and adopted daughter

George Wombwell (1777-1850)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries boxing matches often took place at fairs, and my second lion sits on the tomb of a frequent visitor to those fairs, but in a different capacity to Jackson. George Wombwell worked as a shoemaker, until the day he bought two boa constrictor snakes on the London docks for the considerable sum of £75. He soon found that he could make more money exhibiting them in taverns than he could making shoes. Scouring the docks he bought more exotic animals from ships trading with Africa, Australia, and South America. He established Wombwell’s Travelling Menagerie, touring the country to exhibit at fairs. Soon he was travelling with fifteen wagons housing giraffes, gorillas, bears, elephants, lions, monkeys, panthers, tigers, and zebra. A brass band travelled in front; garish posters announced their arrival.

The menagerie proved extremely popular at all levels of society, for Wombwell not only profited at the fairs but was also a favourite at the royal court, appearing three times before queen Victoria and her consort. At his death he left three travelling menageries managed by himself and other family members.

Apologists for Wombwell point out that the concept of animal rights was alien to Victorians, that it is a questionable exercise to judge the behaviour of one era by the norms and values of another. But it is difficult to comprehend how anyone could fail to be repelled and saddened by the sight of wild animals imprisoned in cages. Wombwell’s defenders argue that the shows were educational, and indeed the early ones were accompanied by lectures in natural history, and it is understandable that people were fascinated by their first sight of these creatures in the days before ubiquitous natural history documentaries.

The lectures however were soon superseded by animals trained to perform tricks. One of the most egregious displays involved lion baiting with a pack of bulldogs for which tickets were sold for between one and five guineas. When the docile lion Nero failed to be provoked Wombwell replaced him with the more aggressive Wallace whom he had bred in captivity, and who promptly mauled the dogs. Even his contemporaries were prompted to raise questions of animal cruelty, but Wombwell’s only response was that the lions were unharmed and that he would never be so foolish as to risk damage to such valuable pieces of property. Of the dogs he did not comment.

Often the poor creatures in the menagerie died even without being subjected to these torments, for indigenous to hot climates they were ill suited to survival in Britain.Wombwell may have spent a great deal on veterinary care, but his motive was always economic. He was an inveterate entrepreneur able to turn any situation to his advantage. One year at Bartholomew Fair his elephant died enabling his rival Atkins to display a sign advertising “The only live elephant in the fair.” Wombwell responded immediately with a notice proclaiming, “The only dead elephant in the fair.” The latter proved the greater attraction for people could poke and prod the poor carcass as much as they wanted; meanwhile Atkins’ menagerie was deserted.

Wombwell also sold dead animals to medical schools and taxidermists, and specimens can still be found in the zoology museums of Cambridge and Aberdeen, and in Norwich castle and museum. He donated Wallace to the natural history museum in his native Saffron Walden where he remains on display.

Wisely, Wombwell himself, who is buried in Highgate West, chose to rest under a statue of the more compliant Nero.

Tomb of George Wombwell, Highgate West Cemetery

Frank C. Bostock (1866-1912)

Frank C. Bostock was a great grandson of George Wombwell, born into the travelling show, Bostock and Wombwell, run by his parents. After their death, his older brother took over the show and Frank toured Europe and America with his own travelling menagerie. At Coney Island he established Bostock’s Arena, where audiences numbered 16, 000 a day between 1894-1903.

His animals were claimed by his admirers to be healthy and long-lived, and his entertainments were supplemented by educational talks about habits and habitats, but animal welfare organisations raised concerns about the animals’ living conditions. Nonetheless Bostock became known as “The Animal King” on account of his skill in training wild animals. His supporters wrote of the close bond he had with his animals and of his high standards in care and training, introducing “positive reinforcement.” The photographs of him seated surrounded by a dozen or more lions are appealing, but it seems unlikely that their training was very humane, the more so since he is credited with the realisation that lions are intimidated by upturned chairs which can therefore be used to control them. Nor does the fact that he introduced the first boxing kangaroos speak of a man much concerned with animal wellbeing.

Moreover, Bostock had a cavalier attitude towards human safety. When he returned to England, he set up another show, “The Jungle,” at Earl’s Court, before touring the country. In Birmingham one of his lions escaped and entered the sewers at an open manhole. It made its way roaring under the city causing widespread panic. Bostock’s response was to smuggle out a more biddable second lion in a covered cage and pretend to find and recapture the original lion. The latter facilitated his deception by ceasing to roar. Bostock was hailed as a hero and the publicity increased his takings that evening. Worried about the possible consequences of the free ranging lion however Bostock confessed his deception to the police the next day. They supplied five hundred armed men to assist its recapture, and at midnight, to keep the danger secret from the public, the expedition set out. They chased the lion with shouts and fireworks until it became trapped in a hole in the sewer and Bostock was able to regain possession of it.

Bostock popularised circus shows and amusement parks across America, Australia, Europe, and South Africa. He produced animal training manuals which, disturbingly, are still in print. He completed the transformation begun by his ancestor George Wombwell in democratizing menageries, where previously they had been the prerogative of the wealthy and aristocratic at locations like Versailles and the Tower of London.

I like Bostock’s tomb in Abney Park Cemetery which echoes that of Wombwell, and bears my third crouching lion, but I have little sympathy with his legacy.