Mrs McCulloch’s house

If last week’s post about postcard photography was about the value of the close examination of photographs this week’s is about the value of curiosity. A few weeks ago we received a small packet contain a badly creased photograph and a few pages from an old magazine. They came to us by a circuitous route. A lady who had worked in a building demolished in 1971, 184 Queen’s Gate had kept them and sent them to the Bulgarian Embassy which now occupies 186-188 in the same street. The Embassy had no use for them so they passed them to the Mayor’s Office who in turn sent them to us. I looked at them and became curious:

Mr George McCulloch and his wife Mary are sitting in one of the many rooms in the house they had built full of paintings they collected. They look like a prosperous late Victorian or Edwardian couple (the photo could have been taken as early as 1894 but no later than 1907).  They look grand but relaxed and a little casual. Look at Mr McCulloch with his hand in his pocket. Mrs McCulloch is wearing a smart dress but she looks comfortable enough with her feet up on a footstool. Have a closer look at her:

She’s a woman in early middle age – she would have been called handsome by her contemporaries I think with what you might call strong features and a determined expression.

Mr McCulloch liked to get behind the camera as well and he took other pictures of his wife and his art collection. Here she is in another, in front of another group of paintings.

Did Mr McCulloch intend to step in and occupy the empty chair himself?

She looks as though she’s dressed to go out but has still found time to sit down with one leg crossed over the other settling herself patiently while her husband takes his picture. In another picture she looks slightly less patient:

She stands clutching her gloves. It seems to me that she might be in a hurry to get somewhere else. There is something about Mrs McCulloch which told me that while she was comfortable enough in her expensive dresses and her grand home she had also experienced a different kind of life.

By the way I’m not entirely dead to the significance of the pictures on the wall.  Just over her left shoulder is Ophelia by J W Waterhouse.

Go back to the picture of Mr and Mrs McCulloch – the central picture is the Garden of the Hesperides by our very own Lord Leighton.

For the record, George McCulloch, who had made a fortune from mining in Australia was a serious art collector who owned a number of famous paintings.

If you can spot any more well known works in these pictures let me know. I’d  like to know the identity of the pictures hanging in this domed dining room particularly the one in the centre with the two lions.

Mr McCulloch died in 1907 leaving over £400,000 to his widow. These were the days when that was a lot of money. But Mary Agnes McCulloch had not always had that kind of wealth. She was born Mary Smith, the daughter of a miner in Broken Hill, Australia and had married a man named Frans Mayger. Mr and Mrs Mayger worked for George McCulloch as handyman and housekeeper in his house at Mount Gipps near Broken Hill. Frans died when he fell from a horse and Mary moved to Melbourne. But she met George again there and he brought her with him to London. They were married at the Strand Register Office in 1893.

George’s pictures were sold for about £130,000 (a disappointing figure apparently as he had spent about £200,000 amassing the collection). Mary married again to the Scottish artist James Coutts Michie, who had been an artistic adviser to Mr McCulloch. It is his name which starts to appear in Kelly’s Street Directory for 184 Queen’s Gate after 1907.

184 is the third imposing house from the right.

But we’re not finished with Mrs Mary Coutts Michie yet. During the First World War she turned her house into a hospital with 168 beds for servicemen. Several houses in the area were also converted and she ran the Michie Hospital, as it became known, herself.

Is this her in the picture below with the staff of the hospital?

It may be wishful thinking on my part but the woman in the matron’s uniform has the same determined look as Mrs McCulloch the art collector’s wife.

She was awarded the OBE for her work during the war. Her third husband died in 1919. Her son Alexander rowed for England in the 1908 Olympics and survived the Great War. In 1925 she was back in Broken Hill, donating a picture to the local art gallery.

Remember at the start of the post I told you about a creased photograph? I’ve had a try at mending the image with Photoshop:

This photograph, which I have held in my hand, is something which quite probably Mary McCulloch held in hers. She is perfectly comfortable in the sumptuous evening outfit she is wearing but she has the air of someone who could ride a horse, do housework or run a hospital if she wished and would be perfectly happy to do so.

She’s not in Who Was Who or the Dictionary of National Biography and I haven’t yet been able to find out the date of her death but for the moment my curiosity about Mary Agnes Smith Mayger McCulloch Coutts Michie is satisfied.

Postscript

Coincidence: Many of George McCulloch’s artworks were bought by Lord Leverhulme, whose garden was the venue for some of Margaret Morris’s dancers a couple of weeks ago.

Quirky fact I couldn’t work into the main text: according to Kelly’s along the road from Mrs McCulloch’s house at 169 Queen’s Gate was an apartment house where a man named Edward Ittison Pronk lived. It’s a bit silly of me to find this amusing but I had to pass it on.

My thanks to Isabel who speculated with me about the identity and background of the lady in the pictures and heard the facts come out in installments.

The picture of the Michie Hospital staff comes from Wikipedia.

John Christie of Rillington Place

We have an author event at Kensington Central Library on November 8^th. Crime historian Jonathan Oates will be talking about his new book (published October 18^th) John Christie of Rillington Place: Biography of a serial killer. This is a definitive account of the Christie murders based on new research. I asked Jonathan to  write something about the case for the blog and he sent me this piece about some of the locations associated with the murders:

Most people have heard of John Christie of 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill and perhaps have seen the film, made in 1970 and starring Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Timothy Evans. The actual street itself is long gone (renamed as Ruston Close in 1954 and demolished in the 1970s; number 10 in October 1970), but there are a number of buildings associated with the case which still stand, though are perhaps less well known and the following is a brief gazetteer.

[10 Rillngton Place: last house on the left]

Below is the Kensington Park Hotel, standing on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road and the pub which Timothy Evans was fond of drinking in. Unlike many pubs it does not sell food, does not have ‘music’ and does not have a carpet; contrast this to a rather more upmarket and touristy pub on Praed Street near Paddington which was a haunt of Kathleen Maloney, Christie’s fourth victim. Middle class visitors to the KPH may well find themselves out of place.

The public library opposite the pub was the one visited by Ethel Christie on the evening of 8 November, the same day that fellow resident of number ten, Beryl Evans, was strangled. Christie himself had a library card so presumably also visited there. In Pentonville Prison it was said that he mainly read thrillers and that despite his airs, wasn’t much of a scholar, according to a fellow inmate.

The nearby Oxford Gardens is also of importance in the case. Firstly, because at number 41 there lived, for a few months of 1943, Ruth Fuerst, a young Austrian woman who became Christie’s first victim. Less well known is that Christie and his wife lived at number 23 in 1936, whilst Christie was employed as foreman at the Commodore Cinema in Hammersmith. This is the only house in London where Christie lived and which still stands. As with many houses in Notting Hill at this time, it was shared with other families.

Cambridge Gardens, number 108a was the home of the Thorley family from at least 1945-1947. Beryl Thorley, later Beryl Evans, lived there with her parents and brother, Basil. When her mother died, the family broke up, with her father going to Brighton, she marrying Timothy Evans in 1947 and her brother living elsewhere. Basil was convinced that his sister was murdered by her husband, who said to him, ‘I’m sorry, Baz’.

Number 319 Portobello Road was the address of second hand furniture dealer Robert Hookway who bought the furniture of both Timothy Evans and John Christie before the two left the district.  Dr Matthew Odess, Christie’s GP, resided at 30 Colville Square.

Many of the other buildings involved in the case are long gone. The Royalty Cinema, which employed Basil Thorley and which was patronised by the Evanses, has been demolished; it was on 105 Lancaster Road. Others include the house that the Evanses lived in, in St. Mark’s Road, number eleven and another house briefly resided in by the Christies in 1936; 172 Clarendon Road.

[The Royalty Cinema Lancaster Road as a bingo hall in 1972]

Returning to the subject of Rillington Place/Ruston Close, the most detailed source is www.10-rillington-place.co.uk

Postscript- DW

The Library photographer John Rogers visited Ruston Close on December 8^th in the last few days before the demolition was complete.

Number 10 had already gone. The rest of the street was about to follow it into oblivion.

Eventually there was new housing on the site. I took these pictures one evening on my way to an appointment in Lancaster Road, hence the poor light – I’ve attempted to adjust the brightness and contrast.

The new street, Bartle Road is not on the old footprint of Rillington Place as the map below shows – the Rillngton Place location was added by researcher Andy Eigendorf. The picture above shows a gap between houses looking through to the location of number 10 but the garden space itself is not on the site of the Christie house.

Careful planning has obliterated all trace of the tragic house. But the murders have not been forgotten.

Jonathan Oates will be joined by John Curnow of the 10 Rillington Place website and retired Metropolitan Police Superintendent Terry Johnson. This should be a fascinating event.

Details of the event on the What’s On page of the Council website:

http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/leisureandlibraries/libraries/libraryevents.aspx

Map detail copyright Ordnance Survey

Dr Phene in his garden

So there he is. Dr Phene in his garden. A neatly dressed elderly man with a flamboyant beard. Dr Phene was a minor celebrity in his own time. He is still famous in a small way. A local eccentric who collected artworks from all over the world. A poor man’s Sir John Soane if you want to be cruel.

He built a famous house which he never lived in. Shall we look at the house?

The house is as famous as the man. Stories abound about Dr Phene and his house. His wife or his fiancé died and the wedding breakfast, already laid out was preserved untouched in the house just like Miss Havisham’s. I’m glad to say this is not true. A woman to whom he was engaged died of a rheumatic fever but that was many years before he built the house. He later married his cousin Margaretta. Some say the marriage soon failed others that it lasted for some time before Margaretta left and went to live in Paris. He did name a street after her though – Margaretta Terrace.

Another story told about Dr Phene is that Queen Victoria came to see the new houses he was building off Oakley Street and was pleased enough with them to say he could name the new street after her, but he declined as he had already promised the name to his wife. If this is true it sounds quite a daring thing to do. He may have made up for the slight later by writing a long narrative poem: “Victoria Queen of Albion – an idyll of the world’s advance in her life and reign” published in 1897. (I have a copy of the book here with me but I’m going to spare you any quotations from this work. It doesn’t make much sense to me even with the explanatory footnotes and illustrations.)

It’s also true that Dr Phene never actually lived in the house but he and his friends seem to have spent time in it, long enough to have created among other features a mortuary for cats within its walls. Or would that be another apocryphal story? The house is described as being in the style of a French chateau or an Italian palazzo depending on the source and either way as a celebration of Dr Phene’s rich and varied ancestry. He is said to have avoided completing the building because of a dispute over the rates with the Chelsea Vestry, which is a dull enough explanation to be plausible, but perhaps he simply never got around to finishing it. He had another house nearby in Oakley Street which wasn’t exactly conventional in appearance either.

I love the composition of this photograph. Dr Phene, Dr Phene’s dog, Dr Phene’s maid posing for another illustration of his eccentricity.

For the record then, Dr John Samuel  Phene: a traveller, a collector, a scholar, a poet, a recluse (who nevertheless seems to have had many friends), a property developer. An innovator in architecture and planning, he was the first person to think of planting trees in streets but also perhaps a lover of decay. The famous house was on the corner of Oakley Street and Upper Cheyne Row. It was built in the grounds of the literally crumbling eighteenth century mansion Cheyne House. The garden was overgrown and unkempt except where Dr Phene had carved out a section for the display of his collection of sculptures.

I think these two photos, probably taken after Dr Phene’s death, demonstrate the sheer strangeness of the house and garden better than any number of stories. And the depth of Phene’s obsession with collecting exotic objects. That is still real long after the rumours have been forgotten.

The garden and its contents are looking a little the worse for wear. Perhaps this was at the time of the sale of the house. The building itself continued to stand empty until its demolition in the 1920s.

I haven’t exhausted the mine of contradictory stories about Dr Phene. The photographs tell their own story. I always come back to the first picture: Dr Phene in his garden. Aloof, diffident but quietly satisfied with his efforts and the persona he has created.

But I can’t help adding one more picture, one more mystery. Here is Dr Phene in a more sociable setting on a charabanc tour in 1860.

I think he’s the man on the far left with the casual pose and the already impressive moustache. But he could be deceiving me.

Mr Hedderly in Old Church Street

Mr Hedderly in Old Church Street

I can’t be precise about when this photograph was taken. The photographer James Hedderly was active in Chelsea before the building of the Embankment and afterwards. The maid on the steps on the right of the picture is wearing a crinoline which probably puts the date before 1865, but that’s just a clue. The other people in the photograph are not wearing anything which would help with the date. Fashions such as the crinoline had barely reached the working classes at that time. Perhaps the woman isn’t a servant. She’s certainly keeping an eye on the child who is barely visible in the foreground. Photographs required long exposures in those days. You had to keep still. The child, who could be a boy or a girl, has paused just long enough to leave an impression. The other people could be said to be posing for the photograph or at least have been curious enough to linger while Mr Hedderly struggled with all his equipment. They might have known him well enough to indulge him, or at least known who he was, a sign writer by trade who had taken up the new hobby of photography. What is sure is that he wasn’t taking a random snapshot. What he was doing would have been the most interesting thing that happened in Old Church Street that day.

The two men in aprons and the boy have come out to have a look. The bunch of men leaning against the fence are curious about the photographer but may simply have been hanging around outside the pub. If you look closely you can see what appear to be a disembodied set of legs with a blur of motion above them. Somehow that person left before the upper part of his body could be recorded on the glass plate.

The figure who most intrigues me is the woman standing with her half-hidden friend on the left holding a basket. It’s possible with early photographs like these with their long exposure times to bring out details with a high resolution scan. Hedderly’s photographs are full of interesting details if you can examine them at a higher resolution. But some details are just not there. I can see the woman standing looking towards Mr Hedderly. I get the impression that she’s a young woman. You can almost make out her face under the shadow of her hat. Or perhaps I just think I can. Perhaps I just want to see her face. That’s part of the mystery of photographs especially old photographs. That bright day sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century is gone, the people in the photo are dead and buried. But the moment in the photograph is still there. The maid, the child and the man by the lamppost are still there. That young woman is still standing there looking at Mr Hedderly wondering what on earth he is doing. You can almost look her in the eye but you never will. That’s the problem with photographs. Sometimes they just don’t show what you want to see.

 

She and the others might never have had their photos taken before that day. But if they lived for another ten, twenty, thirty years it would probably have happened many more times. So at some time a photograph of that woman’s face could have existed. I’ll never see it. That’s the other problem with photographs. Many more of them are discarded than preserved. So I’m grateful to Mr Hedderly for all the forgotten days he has kept alive.

This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be writing based on images in the Local Studies collection at Kensington Library. I’m not embarking on a systematic trawl through the collection just picking out pictures that have struck me as interesting. I hope you like them. Feel free to leave comments.