In a white room, and other modern colour schemes: 1934

In one of the oldest houses in Chelsea, Syrie Maugham (wife of the best selling author Somerset Maugham) created a modern room.

This was the white room, a space entirely furnished in shades of white. It was the first of its kind. In the age of modernism, along with the revolutions in art, architecture, literature, music and dance, interior designers – the professionals and the amateurs had their own slant on modernism.

They didn’t stick with white though.

Here in this study room by Rodney Thomas are more pale walls and curved fittings, with some colorful touches,the most dramatic feature being the oversize clock.

Behind the walls of conservative apartment blocks and town houses in London the modernist revolution was carrying on in these new rooms. Here is another study, combined with a bedroom,designed by Angus Grant:

The decoration wasn’t all so restrained:

This entrance hall by Allan Walton has some trompe l’oeil features as does the dining room by John Armstrong below:

These rooms were designed for a “modern” form of life. I don’t know if the term lifestyle was in general use then but if not it should have been.

There was still room for the traditional activities of upper middle class life though, as in this music room.

It was designed by the owners themselves Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Below is a slightly grander music room designed by Oliver Hill:

The colour scheme is more sombre but the room still retains that uncluttered look the 30s designers were aiming for.

Last week I mentioned the hope of the Edwardians for the future. The early thirties were also optimistic in their way. Despite the Great War, the Depression and the ominous political developments in Europe these rooms also seem to me to reflect a hope for a future of technological and social advances.

The wall covering in this room by Ronald Fleming is constructed of squares of gold coloured straw paper arranged to make a pattern like wood veneers.

At her showroom in Sloane Street Betty Joel was presenting some flamboyant new designs in furniture and carpets.

One of her other living rooms, almost restrained by comparison:

Is that table pentagonal? Some more futuristic features below:

But note the horn of a gramophone player among the geometric lines of the furniture in this Ronald Dickens living room.

Throughout these rooms there have been artworks on the walls showing how the designers were allied with the artists of the day. This one was designed by Derek Patmore.

The other obvious feature of these rooms to my eye is that they look comfortable, much more comfortable than what had gone before. And if you were tired there were some colourful bedrooms to retire to like this bed / sitting room by Herman Schrijver for Miss Gladys Burton :

And for a good night’s rest you could do no better than this bedroom with its “convenient” furniture:

Looks good to me.

This week’s pictures come mostly from a book by Derek Patmore called Colour Schemes for the Modern Home, a 1934 survey of current trends in interior design.  They capture a fleeting moment of a quiet revolution in taste as ideas of modernity were changing into forms we still see today.

Finally let’s turn down the colour and look again at Syrie Maugham’s white room in the King’s Road:

The woman in white who stands in the white room is Nancy Beaton, in a photograph taken by her brother Cecil. A bright young thing if ever there was one. As part of her divorce settlement Syrie Maugham got to keep the house with the white room (along with a few other items such as a Rolls Royce)

Postscript

A bit of a change of pace for us after a month of transport related posts. As you have no doubt realised I’m not an expert on the history of interior design. But I’ve always found these pictures fascinating which is reason enough for showing them here. The picture of Nancy Beaton is from Stephen Calloway’s book Twentieth-century decoration : the domestic interior from 1900 to the present day.

This is the first in a short series of posts about interiors. Next week’s pictures will provide a dramatic contrast.

Rite of spring: Mr Ruskin’s May Queen

John Ruskin wouldn’t sit down for this picture. However poor the state of his health he felt it was unthinkable for him to sit in the presence of Rossetti so the great artist held him up. Ruskin was a man of high ideals and aesthetic principles. He had been one of the early supporters of the Pre-Raphaelites so Rossetti’s loose morals and the strange ménage at Tudor House wouldn’t have bothered him. But nevertheless it would have been hard to find two more unlikely companions in the whole of Victorian England. Rossetti represents the sensual side of the Victorian imagination let loose about as much as it could be. Ruskin of course represents the repressed imagination and it was that respectable side of his nature which drew him into collaboration with John Faunthorpe the Principal of the teacher training establishment in the King’s Road, Whitelands College.

[John Faunthorpe 1902]

Faunthorpe was a fan of Ruskin’s. He admired the great man extravagantly, idolised him even. So in1880 inspired by Ruskin  he floated the idea of starting a May Queen Festival at the College. Ruskin had form in this area, he had tried to start something similar at a school in Cheshire but parents had objected (Ruskin’s divorce / annulment from his marriage with Effie Gray and her subsequent marriage to Millais had been a great scandal). Between them the two men worked something out which combined Ruskin’s love of picturesque old English ritual and Faunthorpe’s desire for high Anglican ceremony. The notion of a may queen may also have appealed to  Ruskin because it involved pretty young women for whom he had a sentimental regard after the failure of his marriage and the derailment of his romance with Rose La Touche. The Victorians in general were given to sentimentalizing youth (perhaps because they frequently saw it snatched away by sudden disease and death, the very fate of Rose la Touche who died at the age of 27).

Ruskin donated a set of his books each year to be handed out by the new Queen, and paid for the design of the first in a series of crosses which were given to each Queen. The May Queen was chosen by the votes of the students (she should be “the lovablest and the likeablest” was Ruskin’s mawkish guidance to the voters). The first was Queen Ellen I.

Unfortunately for the ceremony Ellen was in mourning at the time and wearing black so a white shawl was found for her to wear. Ruskin pestered Faunthorpe for a photograph and then rather ungraciously said the Queen looked like she was 38. (She was 20). Although he did visit the College regularly he never attended the May Day ceremony. Perhaps he preferred the festival as a romantic ideal. After Queen Ellen the Queen and her maidens had dresses made for the occasion.

Ruskin had his protégé Kate Greenaway design a dress for the Queen which was passed on for four years.

[Queen Jessie 1891]

But as the Festival continued it became customary for former queens to return and take part in the festival so the Queen needed a unique outfit.

[A small and faded view of Queen Elizabeth II, 1893]

[Queen Annie II, 1895]

May Day is a festival dating back to pre-Christian times. It’s related to the Celtic festival Beltane and the Germanic Walpurgis Nacht. Faunthorpe wanted to emphasise the Christian elements, and Ruskin had exalted ideas about feminine innocence and purity. But despite that this version of May Day still had its May Pole, and retained the flowers, garlands, branches and wooden staffs which still have their older pagan connotations. Here’s Queen Annie again in her throne room.

They look like they’re starting to get the hang of it. Some former queens are present (see if you can spot Elizabeth II). They’re beginning to look a little like a female Masonic lodge.

Ruskin died in 1900 but the Festival no longer needed his blessing and seemed to grow in importance and complexity. If you remember I first dealt with the May Queen in Games for May. In that post I linked the Festival with the Chelsea Pageant just because I found the pictures together but the more I find out about the two events the more I think they belong together as part of the same current in the first decade of the 20^th century. The Edwardians seemed to have a propensity almost amounting to mania for dressing up and engaging in theatrical rituals and performances, especially out of doors. In an age of technological innovation perhaps they were reliving the myths and legends of an older England. An England of their imagination.

Behind the stern walls of the College was a quadrangle with ivy-covered walls where the ceremonies could take place out of sight of the busy streets outside.

[Queen Agnes I 1899]

The May Day festival took a whole day and required much preparation. The entire student body of about 150 got white dresses paid for by the college. There were services in the college chapel, a procession, an abdication ceremony, an election (although it became expedient to have the election before May Day so the new queen could be fitted for her dress) a masque, or some “revels”, and the crowning of the new Queen who would give out gifts of copies of works by Ruskin to selected students.

In 1906 there happened to be three queens in the College at the same time, the new Queen Florence, her predecessor Evelyn and the 1904 Queen Mildred.

Mildred in particular looks like she’s just come off the set of one of those 1970s Hammer films like the Vampire Lovers. Or (as I’ve said before) the cover of an album by a 70s English folk rock group, especially in the masque picture below.

They pulled out the stops on this one. Florence proceeded to her coronation with her maidens in tow.

And Mildred took the lead in a masque in which the students played flowers and trees and paid homage to her.

In 1909, the year after the Chelsea Pageant there were more elaborate ceremonies. Here is Agnes II, with her chamberlains.

On the throne with the Dowager Queen Dorothy.

Behind them is a painting of the 1902 ceremony. Check out the leopard skin.

There was even a special appearance by this lot:

Not real nuns of course, just some of the Pageant performers from 1908 who just couldn’t resist coming back for an encore. It might have been their last chance to join the procession with the women in white.

And oddly, it seems to me that at that point they had peaked. The May Queen Festival continued of course, carries on to this day in fact, but in the second decade of the century the ceremonies gradually became less elaborate and the College slowly seemed to stop making quite such a big thing of May Day. Or it could be that young women were getting more serious about their profession and less serious about quixotic ritual. I heard someone on the radio recently saying that the Edwardians had a kind of innocence based on hope, the hope that the new century was going to bring progress and prosperity. By 1910 perhaps the zeitgeist was looking a little less hopeful than before and the revellers decided it was time to put the costumes back into the dressing up box.

Still, there were many more May Queens at Whitelands and when they gathered together for the ceremonies there was quite a bunch of them, now engaged in charitable works as well as Christianised neo-pagan rites. They even had a leader, the Mother Queen who was the oldest of this select group.

The first May Queen, Ellen I, now out of mourning, in her own robes, leading the procession again in 1912. She died in 1923, mourned by her fellow queens, but never forgotten.

Postscript

That was quite a long post. Just as with the Chelsea Pageant I discovered a lot more material than I had imagined we had. Enough for another post next May Day if you can wait that long. I showed the pictures to a colleague and she said “it looks so pagan” – so it isn’t just me who thinks that.

The picture of Ruskin and Rossetti comes from the book the Victorian art world in photographs by Jeremy Maas. There is supposed to be a copy of it in William Rossetti’s memoirs but our copy had that page missing. There was an interesting picture of Maria Rossetti though which I intend to use in a future post.

Whitelands College moved to Putney in 1930 and has since moved again. It is now part of the University of Roehampton. The May Day Festival continues and they have May Kings now as well as May Queens. This year’s festival is on May 18th.

London Transport: travelling in Kensington and Chelsea

In his recent book “What we talk about when we talk about the tube” (the District Line volume of Penguin Lines, a series of books which celebrate the 150 years of the London Underground) John Lanchester makes the point that London and the Underground grew together. The railway lines made it possible for workers to travel further to work and so communities like Morden for example sprang up because the railway was there. London grew around the railway map – the city made the map but the map also made the city. He makes the further point that the reason that the London Underground network was started thirty seven years before the Paris Metro (a huge number of years in a period of rapid technological development) was that sending steam trains through underground tunnels was daring to the point of recklessness. But they did it anyway, and made London the biggest city in the world (two and a half million people in 1850, seven million in 1910).

[A steam train at West Kensington 1876]

Look at this map, a section of Davies’s 1841 Map of London and its environs:

Davies’s map is interesting because it’s one of the first London maps to show railways. You can see the main line to Paddington and the West London Railway heading south towards the river with a proposed route alongside the Kensington Canal. You can also see the empty space between the comparatively built up Chelsea and the line of development along the Kensington Turnpike, the road from Hammersmith to Hyde Park Corner or Kensington High Street as we now know it.

Click on the map for a bigger version and look for the villages of Little Chelsea and Earls Court, the Hippodrome race course north of Notting Hill, Notting Barn Farm and Portobello Farm, the “proposed Norland Town” beside the Railway and the “proposed extension” following a similar route to the eventual District Line.

In the second half of the 19^th century those spaces were filled by housing, and the railways which linked Kensington and Chelsea to the rest of London.

This Kensington parish map of 1894 with the wards shaded shows how most of the space devoted to market gardens and open country was occupied by the end of the century and how the railways made their mark. (Apologies to Chelsea for being squeezed out a bit at the bottom but maps which show both parishes equally are hard to find before they became London Boroughs and eventually joined.) You can also see how development north of Notting Hill Gate moved northwards first to meet the Metropolitan Line at Ladbroke Grove and then to meet the main line.

As I said in the Gloucester Road post the stations were often built before the housing and the major roads. The District, Circle and Metropolitan lines crossed the two parishes knitting them together. The sub-surface lines weren’t actually underground for most of their routes (the longest underground section on the District / Circle line is the tunnel between Kensington High Street north to Notting Hill Gate) so they had a visible impact on the map especially in certain areas such as the Cromwell Curve where three lines (and the trains of three companies originally) met.

This is a rear view of Cromwell Road after building development showing the District Line rails in 1902. It’s by Ernest Milner, and has one of his characteristic faces at the window.

After the sub-surface lines came the deep tunnels (the actual Tube as Lanchester also points out) of the Central Line and the Piccadilly Line.

This one is the short lived Brompton Road Station opened 1906 and closed in 1934, being by then too near to both Knightsbridge  and South Kensington Stations.

This picture shows the Piccadilly Line station at South Kensington, which like the one at Gloucester Road sat right next to the Metropolitan and District Line Station.

The picture also has a good view of a comparatively small horse-drawn bus. The buses which had carried people around London before the railways could not compete in terms of numbers even when motor buses were introduced in the 1890s and early 1900s. But they would soon catch up, and I can’t leave the subject of transport without some pictures of the buses that have served Kensington and Chelsea.

A horse-drawn bus proceeds along Notting Hill Gate.

Below an early motor bus on its way to Westbourne Grove.

The bus routes we know today were established quite early.

A number 27 departs from Hammersmith bus station. The buses got bigger and more frequent.

This picture shows an AEC Regent on Kensington Gore in 1953 when the border of the Royal Borough was decorated for the Coronation. Below, the most iconic London bus of them all, the Routemaster, heading into Kensington in the 1960s (The Royal Garden Hotel is visible in the distance.)

Finally, on Kensington High Street the bus I use most frequently.

At any given bus stop the bus you’re waiting for is always the least frequent. Or is that just me? At least there’s the Tube.

Postscript

That was the last of my transport related posts which were part of our contribution to this year’s Cityread campaign. It’s been a bit of a challenge to do four whole posts on the subject so I hope the strain hasn’t shown and I’ve showed you some interesting images.

John Lanchester’s book is one  a  series of 12 . (Link)  They’re a bit of a mixed bag and I haven’t seen them all but I’d also recommend Paul Morley’s Earthbound (the Bakerloo Line).

Other writers have made the same points as Lanchester, such as Andrew Martin in his history of the Underground “Overground Underground”. but Lanchester’s little book was the first I read. It’s a subject with a large bibliography.

Next week a special post for May Day heading taking us right back into the depths of the Edwardian imagination.

Searching for the Ford Capri

We’re going on another tour through the photo survey this week but not down a single street. The photo survey pictures were taken by John Rogers between 1969 and 1975, mostly in 1970 and 1971. That’s a few years before my brief time working in the motor trade. I worked cleaning new cars for a garage that had a British Leyland franchise. Some of you who remember the 1970s may remember how awful British Leyland cars were then – the Allegro, the Marina and above all the Princess a car so awful it has been almost obliterated by history. Occasionally my sales manager Bob would acquire a Ford for one of his special customers and we would both welcome these examples of decent automotive technology with some relief. There were Escorts and the new mark 4 Cortina but our favourites were the Granada and the Capri, both genuine classics hallowed by their appearances on TV in the Sweeney and the Professionals. I stand very little chance of finding a Granada in the photo survey pictures (they first came out in 1972) but I might just find a Capri.

So where do you look for a car?

A garage is one place to start. This is one of those garages a few of you may remember where they stack the cars neatly but you don’t have instant access. Most of these cars looked pretty old even in 1970. In terms of design it was a transitional period (but aren’t they all?) between the staid fifties cars like that Rover you can see, the watered down versions of American designs and the hatched-backed days to come.

That’s a Ford Corsair on the left, with its odd pointed nose. Before we leave can I just invite any car enthusiasts to identify any of the cars in these pictures? There was a time when I could have done that but it was thirty odd years ago. I’m not really a car person. I don’t even drive. I just found myself around car people and got interested. Let’s get outside. See where we were?

Here’s another Ford:

But it’s only a lowly Anglia already fairly low on the meter of desirability even by 1970. What’s the one behind it? Addison Avenue must have been a quiet street. Just off it was Addison Place, a strange little converted mews kind of a street overlooked by Campden Hill Towers.

And that car in the foreground would I think be a Ford Consul, the fifties styled precursor of the Granada.

Not all of the British Leyland marques were hideous. That’s a Triumph Spitfire , a traditional British sports car. Other mews streets were full of cars.

Amid the old style cars in this back street of garages an expensive looking sports car, probably Italian. The odd thing I sometimes think is that expensive sports cars still look like that decades later as if that low wide look is the optimum shape.

The mews streets used to be filled with small garages servicing cars. Note the sign: Barclaycard Welcome – something of a novelty then.

A 60s novelty the Mini Moke parked in Linden Gardens. In the same street the opposite of a Mini Moke:

It’s also a Ford, a 60s American model, but I can’t make out the word on the side. I’m sure someone can help me out with that. Below a home grown model:

The Mark 3 Cortina parked in Christchurch Street. A bit of a classic itself. Nearby another puzzle for you:

I should know what this is, it looks so familiar. Someone tell me (No, not the mini.)

The first sighting of our quarry is back at the other end of the Borough in Clarendon Road.

The slightly cluttered styling of the Mark 1 Capri. And having found that one I came across another down in Earls Court.

Is that guy in the window coming back to close the boot?

In the very same street a Mark 2, at last an example of the car that sat in my cleaning bay in Poland Street.

There it is by the fence. For me the Mark 2 Capri represents the mid seventies like no other car, better than the high performance cars of the era. Seeing it in this picture reminds me of a time when the traffic was lighter, the cars were serviced in back streets and the Ford Capri was exciting and glamorous, if you can imagine such a time.

Postscript

As I said above if you can identify any of the other vehicles in these pictures or you have to correct any inadvertent errors of mine, please leave a comment.

Trelawny at the Royal Court 1898

Currently playing at the Donmar Warehouse in London’s West End is a modern version of Arthur Wing Pinero’s play of 1898, Trelawny of the Wells, directed by the well know film director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, Hanna). Here are two of the actors:

The characters of Rose Trelawny and Imogen Parrott , played by Amy Morgan and Susannah Fielding. Back in 1898 the play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Rose Trelawny was played by this up and coming actress:

Irene Vanburgh,  who had known Lewis Carroll when she was 16, became one of the most famous stage actresses of her day and was later made a Dame,  here in a picture captioned “Oh, this dreadful half hour after dinner, every, every evening.”

The 1898 Imogen Parrott looked like this:

The interesting thing about Trelawny for me is that it has always been a historical play. We’re used to costume dramas on television and film so the two modern actors don’t look odd to us – it’s just the past, when quaint costumes were worn. But the costumes the 1898 cast were wearing were also old fashioned to the “modern” audience. The play is set in the 1860s and one of the themes is how the old melodramatic styles of theatre were giving way to realism. But a large part of the comedy in 1898 was the 1860s themselves – “the scarecrow period of British taste” as Malcolm C Salaman calls it in the official souvenir programme of Trelawny. He looks back at the 1860s in much the same way as modern commentators look back at the 1970s (the decade that taste forgot etc). The principal target of the comedy is the costumes of the women, specifically the crinoline dress to which he devotes the first six pages of his text. Here is a typical sample:

“..and see winsome Rose Trelawny, pretty Imogen Parrott and comely Aviona Bunn …in their flounces and frilled frocks of enormous circumference, to their pork-pie hats with feathers, or coal-scuttle bonnets, their back hair hanging in baglike nets of chenille, their elastic-sided boots, and their garish parasols assisting an incongruous complication of colours, are not our aesthetic sensibilities tempered with tender complacency, as we realise a sense of old-fashioned quaintness we remember that our mothers used to be garmented even so, while in such apparel were our maiden aunts wooed and won?”

Salaman goes on at some length even listing different varieties of crinoline and quoting from old catalogues. I realised that for him and his readers, crinolines were not only amusing but also unfamiliar. After all they weren’t able to watch adaptations of Dickens or Trollope every evening on TV as we can, and none of them had ever seen The King and I or the Innocents (the film of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw) for me two of the most striking examples of crinoline wearing in cinema (oddly both of them starring Deborah Kerr). So maybe we can forgive Mr Salaman’s obsession.

Unfortunately we can’t see the colours he mentions but here are some more of the costumes:

Imogen Parrott again, I think.

A bit of comedy going on there with some other members of the cast.

The man’s whiskers attempting to compete with the crinoline in this picture, and below a distinct touch of melodrama:

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage having never seen or read any version of the play so I don’t know who the white haired actor is playing but he certainly looks like he’s in a melodrama.

Here he is in two scenes with Irene Vanburgh:

Good pointing there, and a touch of Svengali in this one:

There were sub-plots involving comic servants:

And a number of scenes involving several cast members sitting around:

This is a scene from the play within the play – “Life: a comedy, by Thomas Wrench”. I think this would be another ( or a rehearsal):

As you can imagine it all ends well, with a toast:

The lovers are happily united:

Did Arthur Wing Pinero imagine that in 2013 he would have two plays on in London? (The Magistrate, featuring John Lithgow recently finished a run at the National Theatre). Did he think that audiences would still be enjoying Trelawny of the Wells over a hundred years after its first performance? He would have been pleased I’m sure but perhaps not entirely surprised. The caption for this picture reads: “Isn’t the world we live in, merely a world – such a queer little one!”

Postscript

I’ve written a companion post to this one – A brief history of the crinoline, which is on the RBKC Library blog here

If  like me you like to consult imdb while watching TV you may appreciate the fact that  John Lithgow appeared in a production of Trelawny as a young man in which the role of Imogen Parrott was played by Meryl Streep. Here is a picture to prove it:

No crinoline visible there.

Pictures from the current production of Trelawny are from the Donmar Warehouse website where there is an excellent gallery of images.

Try Googling Trelawny for more, including a colourful version staged in Pitlochry and the version with Lithgow and Streep.

JB at the jazz club

John Bignell was sometimes a little unhelpful to posterity when it came to identifying pictures. You might get a penciled note on the back of a print or a short phrase on a batch of negatives. Sometimes you have to ask someone if you can find someone to ask or just make an educated guess. I started this post with a handful of photos of people dancing to a jazz band and they looked like they were having a good time.

The room doesn’t look like a club, more like a gallery or some curtained off room in a municipal building but by comparing details of the ceiling and wallpaper with a picture that was labelled I came to the conclusion that all the photos were taken in the same place – an upstairs room at the Six Bells pub in the King’s Road.

The trees visible through the window are still there. The Six Bells still exists too as part of the Henry J Beans chain of bars but there’s no jazz upstairs these days. These pictures were taken about 1959. Jazz was still popular then, more popular than rock’n’roll in some circles. Across the road there were plenty of students at Chelsea College and Chelsea School of Art all eager to drink and dance. As I’ve said before (see the Art School Dance on the complete list of posts opposite) the 50s was the decade when people started to have serious fun again after years of wartime danger and post-war austerity. The students and others in these pictures had grown up in “interesting” times and they were ready to party. An even bigger party was waiting for them in the next decade but they didn’t know that yet.

They were still conventionally dressed but starting to loosen up. Look at the women in the centre of the picture with her head thrown back. Or this group:

The band is the Mike Martin Band. They’re in a formal pose in the picture by the window but in the others they’re looking far more abandoned and have been joined by their vocalist Pat Adams who can be seen better in the picture below with his back to the audience.

The band played a form of jazz called mainstream which lay somewhere between the New Orleans style trad jazz and the newer styles.

The club at the Six Bells was run for several years by musician and cartoonist Wally Fawkes. As well as being a musical associate of George Chisholm and George Melly, Fawkes is also known as the creator of the cartoon strip Flook.

Flook, a talking animal whose exact nature I was never able to fathom had a series of satirical adventures scripted by Melly, Barry Took, Humphrey Lyttelton and others which was featured in the Daily Mail when it was still a broadsheet.

There are some later photos from 1966 or 1967 featuring Henry “Red” Allen, a famous American trumpet player.

As was often the practice he is playing with a “local” group, the Alex Welsh Band.

You can see from the background that some effort had been made to alter the decor of the room. Did Fawkes create the illustrations himself?

Sadly, Red Allen died soon after his British tour in 1967. The club itself didn’t last much longer despite the nights devoted to blues and other more popular forms of music. But it had a good run. You can find some memories of the club at: http://www.sandybrownjazz.co.uk/forumsixbells.html

And we can also remember through John Bignell’s photographs the nights of music and dancing in an upstairs room at a Chelsea pub.

Is that the woman we saw dancing on the left of the first picture, with Pat Adams taking a breather in the background underneath a strange looking painting? Once again Bignell demonstrates his talent for picking a good moment.

Postscript

I scanned most of the pictures myself, some from negatives. A couple of the others I had to convert from TIFFs which adds to the slightly grainy or overexposed look to some of the images. Also Bignell was working in a dimly lit smoke filled room. But I like them anyway.

I found the picture of Flook online but I can’t remember where. Sorry to the owner.

Postscript to the postscript

As well as writing this blog I also do a few pieces for the K&C Libraries blog. Here’s my latest one: http://rbkclibraries.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/empty-spaces-part-2-the-writing-on-the-floor/

They let me do my own photography.

The dancer from the dance: Margaret Morris

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B Yeats 1928

W B Yeats, 63 when he wrote those lines in the poem Among School Children was probably not thinking of the work of Margaret Morris, already a successful dancer, choreographer and teacher. But they seem to fit.

By the 1920s Margaret Morris had a club and a small theatre in Flood Street both named after her. At the Club, founded in 1915, she and her partner the painter John Duncan Fergusson mixed with artists and writers such as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Katherine Mansfield, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Ezra Pound, all of whom at some time lived nearby in Chelsea or Kensington. At her theatre she presented music, drama and dance performed by both adults and children.

Morris had been dancing from a very young age and by the precocious age of 12 had begun to reject the strictures of classical ballet. In 1909 she met Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan, who taught her the six Greek positions, adapted from images on ancient Greek vases. She elaborated on these to produce her own dance system aiming at naturalism and freedom.

Morris and Fergusson ran annual summer schools in Devon and the south of France where the emphasis was on learning and performing in natural surroundings – “almost ideal conditions”. There were lectures on painting and dance from Morris, Fergusson and others, ballroom dancing in the evening, and during the daytime plenty of this:

Three dancers  get into position on a beach with the waves coming in behind them.

Below the student dancers are posing in front of a cliff in a rocky stream.

Here a large group disport themselves around an ornamental pond in a classical garden in Hampstead. It looks a little like an act of worship.

I know very little about the history of dance. But these images grab your attention. When I first came across them I tried to find more. There is something esoteric perhaps even magical about them although they belong to the period of modernism rather than fin de siècle occultism. The ritualistic element brings out the imaginative connection with ancient Greece. (Morris was also influenced by Rudolf Steiner the founder of anthroposophy which has been described as a Christianised form of Theosophy, an occult philosophy still popular in the 1920s).

Morris herself was a charismatic figure obviously supremely confident when striking a pose for the camera as here in this alarming posture:

Or in “The dance of the bow”, looking like an Amazon warrior:

Or just worshiping nature:

Morris also developed her dance system as a form of therapy.

In 1927 she presented a matinee at the Chelsea Palace in aid of the Heritage Craft Schools for Cripples.

In the programme for the event the Medical Director of the school Surgeon Commander Murray Levick writes “Miss Morris’s educational gymnastics have been found admirably suited to various stages of crippledom and it is on that account that she has been invited to Chailey with such great advantage to the crippled children there”. His use of the word cripple sounds wrong to modern ears but the intentions of the school were progressive in its own time. One of the dances in the programme, the Enchanted Garden was performed by children from the school.

Margaret Morris had a lengthy career in dance and physical education in London and Scotland and lived until 1980 (She trained the dancers for a production of the musical Hair in Glasgow when she was 83). The Margaret Morris Movement organisation now continues in centres in many countries.

But what stays with me are these striking images of dancers in unfamiliar poses, the dance equivalent of all the new developments in literature and art in the 1920s.

Below, two barefoot  dancers adopt a symmetrical pose.

Above a dancer in a costume designed by Lois Hutton for a piece employing music by Ravel.

The dancers look deeply serious but at the same time oddly comic. Morris was not unaware of the element of humour in her work so if they make you smile remember she may keeping a straight face in the picture below but inwardly she was smiling right back at you.

All of the images in this post come from items in our scrapbooks but you can find more on the internet if they have whetted your appetite for the unique imagination of Margaret Morris.

18th century escapades: the votaries of dissipation at Ranelagh

In April 1776 the gentleman who called himself Momus, the Laughing Philosopher went on a ramble and wrote an account of it in the Westminster Magazine. After a walk in the park he found the day so salubrious that he proceeded down the Chelsea Road. Carriages went to and fro so he concluded that “the Rotunda was open for the reception of the polite world.” He was not incommoded by dust “in consequence of the road being watered”. Nor was he prevented “from joining the votaries of dissipation by not being dressed au dernier gout”.

He fell in behind two ladies who were complaining at having to arrive at so early an hour.

He was fascinated by the head of one of the ladies “which appeared to be fluffed out to an enormous size but what chagrined me the most was to see it decorated with a prodigious quantity of cherries which looked most invitingly plump and juicy”. For himself he had no desire to taste the fruit. It seemed to him they were set in a “dunghill composed of hair, wool, grease and powder”. But another woman nearby “being in a longing condition [i.e.pregnant] cast such wilful glances at them that I actually believed she would have snapped at them had she been tall enough to reach them”

When the first woman took her seat in the Rotunda the pregnant lady sat as close as she could. Reaching out to touch the fruit she could not contain herself and “tore the whole superstructure to pieces”. As it turned out the fruit was not fit to “be pressed by her lips” and she was obliged to pretend to faint to cover her embarrassment. Momus reports that another lady with a vegetable based hairdo suffered a similar mishap.A hairdresser was summoned to effect repairs. (was this a common occurrence?)

Momus drew a moral from the occasion: “the first beauty in the kingdom will gain more real admiration by the enlargement of her mind than the expansion of her head.”

I don’t suppose he really believed that.

I’m assuming the giant hairdos in this  picture are exaggerated for comic effect. This might be closer to actuality:

Momus’s night at Ranelagh was evidently pretty typical. Far from that was an event which took place some eighteen years later advertised below:

The Chevalier D’Eon is history’s most famous transvestite. Or is it as easy as that? The more you look at his life the more disagreement there seems to be. The simplest view is that after a career as a soldier, diplomat and spy he seemed to have fallen out with the French government and agreed to live as a woman for some reason which is not entirely clear. After the French Revolution he lost his government pension and made a living selling off his possessions and engaging in demonstration duels such as the one illustrated below:

This picture is of a classic D’Eon duel at Carlton House in front of the Prince of Wales, the future Prince Regent.

Far more sensational accounts of his life exist however. Giacomo Casanova wrote in his memoirs: “It was at that ambassador’s table that I made the acquaintance of the Chevalier d’Eon, the secretary of the embassy, who afterwards became famous.  This Chevalier d’Eon was a handsome woman who had been an advocate and a captain of dragoons before entering the diplomatic service; she served Louis XV as a valiant soldier and a diplomatist of consummate skill.  In spite of her manly ways I soon recognized her as a woman; her voice was not that of a castrato, and her shape was too rounded to be a man’s.  I say nothing of the absence of hair on her face, as that might be an accident.”

Later in his memoirs the great lover takes the opposite view and recounts the story of a 20,000 guinea bet on the gender of the Chevalier. The bet was never won or lost as the Chevalier refused an examination.

The Chevalier lived in London in the role of a middle aged lady even though his pension had dried up. Perhaps he’d settled into the role.

There are more sensational stories though such as the disputed account of a spying trip to Russia in female clothes as “Lia de Beaumont” in which guise he infiltrated the maids of honour to the Czarina. As a young man D’Eon was a member of the King’s Secret, a clandestine group of agents working for Louis XV.

This picture of the Chevalier from a biography published in 1895 shows a much younger version of his female alter ego which would make the Russian story slightly more plausible (though still unlikely). Was this picture part of the fantasy or evidence that some of the wilder stories were true?

Most accounts agree that a postmortem examination of D’Eon confirmed that he was a man. The psychologist Havelock Ellis referred to cross-dressing as Eonism possibly on the basis that forms of sexual deviance should always be named after a European aristocrat.

D’Eon has also been described as an early celebrity – a manipulator of his own public image. He wasn’t altogether successful but fantasies and images have floated around during his lifetime and long afterwards.

“The discovery of the Female Freemason” 1771.

A cosplay version of the Japanese anime character Lia de Beaumont, the Chevalier’s sister.

One thing is clear however. The Chevalier seems to have been a favourite at Ranelagh:

In the engraving below he is again described as the Chevaliere D’Eon.

So the votaries of dissipation had a sentimental side.

Images from this post are from a scrapbook in the Local Studies collection about Ranelagh compiled in the 19^th century, except for the picture of the young Chevalier which is from Ernest Alfred Vizetelly’s The true story of the Chevalier D’Eon (1895), the Female Freemason which is from Edna Nixon’s Royal Spy: the strange case of the Chevalier D’Eon (1966), and the photo of “Lia de Beaumont” which is from NadiaSK’s DeviantArt gallery (http://nadiask.deviantart.com/ ).

The Chelsea painter – on the waterfront

Earlier this year, I spent some time in our archive rooms assisting a photographer who was taking pictures of the oil paintings in our Local Studies collection. He was working for the Public Catalogue Foundation (www.thepcf.org.uk ) a registered charity which has been working to create an online catalogue of all the oil paintings in public ownership in the UK. To this end their agents have been visiting institutions all over the country, making lists and taking photographs. They have visited museums, art galleries, educational establishments, hospitals and of course libraries. They’ve been working in collaboration with the BBC’s Your Paintings project and you can see the results on the PCF website and at www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings .

But for me and you and the blog the main result of all this work is that I now have some good digital images of artworks I haven’t been able to photograph or scan myself. I’m going to do a couple of posts featuring some of the paintings. This week the paintings are all from the Chelsea collection. Just as with the Chelsea artists I’ve featured in previous posts, for the painters here the quintessential Chelsea subject is the river.

This is a picture of the riverside at Chelsea looking from the Battersea shore painted by James Webb in the 1880s.  You can see the principal landmark Chelsea Old Church, the old Battersea Bridge and just visible in the distance the towers of Albert Bridge. The painting hangs high up on a staircase chained into position and has probably been there since 1905.  Some good lighting has brought out details which I had never seen before like these:

You can just about read the name of the barge in the foreground. The number and size of the barges show you that this is a working river.

More than a century earlier Thomas Priest painted this picture:

The sky is lighter, the boats are smaller, the Battersea shore is more rural. It’s the same church. There was originally a cupola on the tower which was removed in the 1820s when the “new” church St Luke’s was built. The tower is also visible in the picture below, by an unknown painter.

Here you can see an even quieter day on the river. There really was a windmill on the south shore in the eighteenth century. I can’t say for sure what the building to the right of it is though. It looks like a warm lazy day. Before the embankment and the development on both banks the river was wider and may have flowed slower, or so it looks from our time.

This is the Chelsea bank at high tide. I think the bridge in the background is Chelsea Bridge, the old one which looked a little like Hammersmith Bridge. Just to the left of centre is the curious bent structure (a chimney?) of the Old Swan, an ancient Chelsea tavern much loved by artists.  Here it is again in a painting by Edward A Alkyns showing a barge being unloaded with raw materials for the brew house and some men swimming in the river.

The next picture of the Old Swan is by one of Chelsea’s most famous artists, Walter Greaves.

It shows a livery barge passing the Old Swan with a crowd gathered to see it go by. This may be a depiction of famous river race for barges, Doggett’s Coat and Badge. The Old Swan would have been the finishing point for the race at this time. The Greaves family had a boatyard further down the river which we’ve seen in the posts about James Hedderly and W W Burgess.

Going west past the Old Swan was the Magpie and Stump. Here the river ran close to Cheyne Walk and at high tide was only a few feet from the street.

This atmospheric  picture is by George Lambert.

Further west you came to Lindsay Wharf where the Greaves family worked and where Walter painted this picture called “Unloading the barge”. This is one of his best paintings.

It’s one of those pictures where Greaves leaves behind all the touches of the amateur painter and creates a work as good as any of the artists who have painted Chelsea. St Mary’s Church, Battersea where William Blake was married is is visible across the river.

Finally this week, my single favourite painting in the collection, another view of the river and Cheyne Walk. This one is by Henry Pether.

Pether was one of a family of painters of that name. His father Sebastian and his grandfather Abraham were all fond of night time scenes. This one, “Cheyne Walk by moonlight” captures the still evening atmosphere of old Chelsea. Two lonely figures pass the dark houses and shops and the river laps against the moored barges.  This is a hard picture to photograph. The colour of the original is hard to capture but this version comes the closest yet. With the full moon over our heads it’s a good moment to leave the Chelsea painters.

 

Thanks to the Public Catalogue Foundation and particularly to Dr Rosie Macarthur.

That’s entertainment: Bignell at the Palace

The King’s Road 1953. An AEC Regent bus blocks our view of Chelsea Town Hall but it is easy to see where we are on this bright autumn afternoon. The Chelsea Palace stood on the corner of Sydney Street where the Heal’s shop is today. Look closely and you can see that there’s a show called Twinkle on today. If there’s a matinee we can go in and see.

Looks like good old fashioned entertainment. Singing, dancing, costumes, comedy, romance.

These were still the elements of a show whether it was a big production in the West End or a more downmarket affair at the Palace. The Palace had been a music hall in its time and a proper theatre which had put on plays and revues. But by the 1950s its neighbour at the other end of the King’s Road the Royal Court was the place for serious drama in Chelsea. The Palace was a variety theatre. The long decline of the music halls and variety theatres had already begun. But they were by no means dead. John Bignell was there recording what he saw with his customary eye for a good picture.

This is a different show I think a year later. It’s one of my favourites of his theatre pictures because he catches the individual personalities of the four dancers in the chorus line. The two on the right look new to the business, concentrating hard on what they’re doing. The woman next to them is older, probably a seasoned professional, not too happy to be stuck in the chorus line but trying to rise above it. What makes the picture special is the one nearest the camera. She sees her picture being taken and looks slightly embarrassed at being caught doing something as silly as this. She’s also the prettiest of course, so perhaps her wary look is also telling Bignell that she is destined for better things. Or perhaps none of this is true. Bignell has given us room to speculate.

Bignell took many more pictures at the Palace.

An enthusiastic young man singing as though rock’n’roll would never happen.

Some gypsy dancers.

The photo below looks like publicity shot for a pantomime. The dame with another group of young women in quaint costumes:

I can’t imagine what pantomime it was though. As far as I’m concerned this past is definitely a foreign country so if anyone can tell us more I’d be grateful. Bignell didn’t always record the subjects of his pictures in great detail so we’re often left to guess exactly what’s happening.

The next two are more obvious:

A Parisian style can-can – see the words Place Pigalle at the back.

And although I can’t tell you the name of the show you can imagine the sort of song being performed here:

I suppose the last three images could be described as slightly risqué. They were taken after 1955 around the time when Paul Raymond started putting burlesque shows on at the Palace.

See how there are fully dressed dancers at the front of the stage while topless performers stand at the rear. At this point the shows must still have been following the conventions of the Windmill Theatre where nudity was permitted so long as the performers stayed completely still. Later the scantily clad dancers moved further forward.

The male performers whether in pyjamas or a suit remain fully covered.

The burlesque shows were one of the ways in which the Chelsea Palace survived in a world where entertainment was dominated by cinema and television but despite the efforts of Paul Raymond and others it eventually closed as a live venue. For a short while it was used by Granada Television as its London studio. The building was demolished in 1966.

If you’ve enjoyed this trip to the Chelsea Palace we might return for some more late night entertainment so let me show you one last intriguing picture. Every so often, when looking through the collection I see a picture that makes me say “What?” This is one of those.

The only clue I can give you here is that it looks like the lady has dropped her laser rifle. Not a sentence I thought I’d ever have to write on this blog.