Miss Morris’s earthly paradise

“Back in the 1920s my sister left the Cyanographers and followed the teacher to her secluded retreat in the south.”

When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,

The mother of months in meadow or plain

Fills the shadows and windy places

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,

Maiden most perfect, lady of light,

With a noise of winds and many rivers,

With a clamour of waters, and with might;

Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,

Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;

For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,

Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,

Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?

O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her

Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remember’d is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,

Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,

Follows with dancing and fills with delight

The Mænad and the Bassarid;

And soft as lips that laugh and hide

The laughing leaves of the trees divide,

And screen from seeing and leave in sight

The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The ivy falls with the Bacchanal’s hair

Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;

The wild vine slipping down leaves bare

Her bright breast shortening into sighs;

The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,

But the berried ivy catches and cleaves

To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare

The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.

“My sister liked to imagine that the place existed out of time, that the earthly paradise was still there and the teacher was still waiting for her.”

The verses come from the Chorus from Atlanta in Calydon by Algernon Swinburne which I first encountered in an anthology when I was a teenager. Swinburne was mentioned briefly in the Victorian Dreamtime post (link opposite) along with the Rossetti family. They are all characters in Tim Power’s recent novel Hide me among the graves which I can highly recommend if you like very strange books.

Thanks to Alex Buchholz of Westminster Central Reference Library for loaning me the book from which I scanned the images, Margaret Morris Dancing which features the photographs of Fred Daniels.

News

As I’ve been a bit economical with the text this week here is a little extra.

Lady Clementina Hawarden who I featured in the blog last year (The first fashion photographer – see link opposite or go straight there : http://rbkclocalstudies.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/the-first-fashion-photographer-clementina-lady-hawarden/ ) is in the news. An album of her photographs and sketches is coming up for auction at Bonhams in March and is expected to sell for up to £150,000. (http://www.bonhams.com/press_release/12780/) It’s no surprise that there should be huge interest in new pictures by one of the most significant figures in the history of photography. You can find some samples at Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2274357/Lady-Hawardens-19th-century-prints-sale.html) where there are some nice large images and on the Telegraph site (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9854840/Lady-Clementina-Hawarden-one-of-Britains-first-female-photographers.html)  where there is also a gallery of 10 images.

I had been planning to do another post about her myself but now I think I’ll save that idea for another day. In the meantime here is a self portrait of Lady Hawarden herself which I found at www.artblart.com . It has the same quiet and unearthly atmosphere as the pictures she took of her daughters.

I won’t be bidding myself on 19^th March but if you have a few hundred thousand burning a hole in your pocket you could do worse. It would be good if the album ended up in public hands where we could all get to see the pictures

A long walk down Walmer Road 1969-1971 part two

I left you last week at Dulford Street facing south.

Those two women are staring at you so we’d better move on. This section of Walmer Road is where there had been most changes since the 1930s. Here is Barlow House under construction (see how the crane is running on rails?):

The Beehive pub is visible in this picture but look opposite Barlow House at the row of terraced houses and the low industrial building.  The street between them is Bomore Road, which was actually moved southwards when Kensington Sports Centre was built. (Forgive me if I find that fascinating – it took me several minutes staring at two nearly identical 1960s OS maps to realise what had been done.) I once met someone who was in one of our photos of Bomore Road. It’s a good story but I can’t show you the picture.

This view is from 1937:

This shows the Walmer Road entrance to the Notting Hill brewery. When that was demolished a new housing block was built, Nottingwood House. You can see pictures of the demolition in the Ruins and reconstruction in North Kensington post (link opposite).

Further south more industrial buildings were replaced.

The Rugby Club was a long standing sporting and social club for young people first established in an old bus yard as a boys’ club in 1889 by a former pupil of Rugby School. This building dates from the early 1960s. (Who was Jim Shay- a name significant enough to be repeated by the writer but now forgotten?).

Some original buildings survived. Below you can see number 239 one of two surviving artisan’s cottages showing some signs of early gentrification.

Shutters, a recent paint job and a Renault 4 parked outside. These two houses have survived and now look even more prosperous.

On the west side of the road there was a Council depot:

See the pile of rubbish bags on the left. Was there a strike on at the time?

Also on the west side a building called the Cottage which I wouldn’t have included as it’s still there today but is that a Ford Galaxie parked outside incongruously juxtaposed with a Morris Traveller?

The final stretch of Walmer Road had a long narrow school building, St John’s disused in 1971.

Two men are doing something with a long pole or plank but I couldn’t say what exactly.

They didn’t choose to go through the open gate where several other planks are stacked.

On the west side of the road was the main feature of this end of Walmer Road, Avondale Park.

This view northwards shows the disused kiln the only thing from this section of the east side of the road which survives to this day.

At this time Avondale Park was a classic municipal park as laid out in their hundreds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Lodge seen below has the faintly rural look of park buildings with a hint of Arts and Crafts about it.

In 1971 when John Rogers took these pictures it had been more or less forgotten that beneath the park was a small network of tunnels built in 1939 as air raid shelters. They were revealed a couple of years ago during landscaping work and I got a chance to go into them before they were sealed again. I wrote about them in one of my first blog posts, Secrets of Avondale Park (see drop down menu Complete list of posts) but here is one of my low resolution photos:

Back in February 1971 this woman, struggling with her inquisitive dog had no idea what lay below:

Avondale Park marks the southern end of Walmer Road. In 1971 there was a junction with Princedale Road, Kenley Street, Hippodrome Place and Pottery Lane.  All street names which sound picturesque and rural rather than sinister as the narrator of Absolute Beginners described the street names at the Latimer Road end. He could see the difference:

On the south side of this area, down by the W11, things are a little different, but in a way that somehow makes them worse, and that is. Owing to a freak of fortune, and some smart work by the estate agents too, I shouldn’t be surprised, there are one or two sections that are positively posh: not fashionable, mind you, but quite graded, with their big back gardens and that absolute silence, which in London is the top sign of a respectable location. You walk about in these bits, adjusting your tie and looking down to see if your shoes are shining, when – wham! Suddenly you’re back in the slum area again – honest, it’s really startling, like where the river joins on to the shore, too quite different creations of dame nature, cheek by thing

Princedale Road in 1971 was already looking upwardly mobile:

The houses and shops look well kept, the cars cleaner.

Is that a Bristol on the right? Remember their only showroom is a short drive away in Kensington High Street. The demonstrator cars there had the cherished number plates 100 MPH and MPH 100.  But don’t let me get bogged down in motoring trivia. What are those two guys doing in the camper van? That’s probably another story.

Empty streets: Earls Court Road 1904 – part two

Just to get you orientated, this is part of the final picture from last week’s post.

There’s our friend and his horse and above him the office of Hugo’s Language School.

It’s the following day, April 22^nd, and Ernest Milner is back on the Earls Court Road looking at the buildings on the odd-numbered side of the street. Hugo’s Language System is course still with us. So is the London and County Bank in a later incarnation.

In 1909 it merged with the London and Westminster Bank to form the Westminster Bank which later became the National Westminster Bank. If you take a look at the same building today you will see that it has grown slightly with a matching section being built into that empty site.

You can see in this picture that the empty site was quite narrow, that there were contractors in already and that the next building is another bank. The London and South Western was absorbed into Barclays in 1918. Barclays still have a branch in this spot in a completely new building. Banks are one of the great survivors of the high street. That is also true of the institution next door.

The Courtfield Hotel, public house and restaurant. It’s now known as the Courtfield but still offers fine dining on the first floor.

We’re at Earls Court Gardens now. Today there is a two storey Post Office building between this street and Hogarth Road right over the railway line but Milner ignored that. Perhaps the railway company already had it covered. On the other side of Hogarth Road was Ephraim B Goody, fancy drapers and milliner.

Just as at Edwards cross the road there is a man up a ladder making adjustments, possibly to the awnings. Upstairs Goody’s offered showrooms for baby linen and corsets.

On the other side of Hogarth Road Milner didn’t take a picture of Hardiman’s, a dressmaker’s shop and not much of Whitley and Sons, dyers. But he did cover Smith and sons the confectioners who offer lemonade and ginger beer by the glass and Cough No More lozenges. The man with the brush is from the shop next door and he also contrives to get into the next picture.

Here he takes up a proud pose outside Hurley’s Decorative Florist while another man pauses as the picture is taken.

Next door is another growing chain of shops, the Home and Colonial who had over 500 stores by 1904 retailing tea and general groceries. The company was eventually absorbed into the Safeway group.

I said last week we would return to J Rugg and Son, the builders who were working down the road at number 168, and here they are ready to take on any building job.

The last shop Milner photographed that day was Blake and Everett’s grocers according to Kelly’s Directory.

But Mr Everett was not much in evidence if you look at the classic extravagant shop front depicted here. Perhaps he was the sleeping partner, or there’s some other story we’ll never know. Check out the massive milk urn – or is that for some other liquid?

Before we go let’s take a quick stroll back to Goody’s, seen here in a side view of Hogarth Road taken on April 21st.

Mr Milner took the close up view below for some reason of his own.

Perhaps he liked the artist’s palette sign. I’m more interested in my own close up:

Two women stand in the doorway. One is too blurred to see properly. But I think Milner took care with the other lady, perhaps even asking her to stand still.

So her slight smile and enigmatic expression was captured for us to look at more than a hundred years later. I doubt if Milner knew that would happen but I expect he would have been pleased.

Finally on a technical note I should add that the numbering of Earls Court Road has changed a little since 1904 so those of you comparing these views with those of today will notice a few anomalies. many of the buildings are still there of course which will help.

Next week my Christmas present to you, some seasonal darkness.

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.

Wild, wild west: Buffalo Bill in Earls Court

The pleasure gardens at Cremorne were the kind of mass entertainment enjoyed by Londoners in the mid-Victorian period. There was still something of the 18^th century about them, something a little anarchic and risky, not to mention illicit. Cremorne lost its licence because of perceived or actual immorality. But the appetite for spectacle and large-scale attractions hadn’t vanished, it had simply moved onto newer forms of entertainment.

The Earls Court Exhibition owed its existence to chance. A triangle of empty land had been created by a confluence of railway lines. One developer tried to build a Catholic Public School there but was defeated by financial problems. There was another scheme for housing, but even in the 1880s developers could see that the land was not especially desirable for that purpose. Finally John Robinson Whitley came up with the idea of the Exhibition. He had intended to put on an American Exhibition showing goods and products along the lines of the Great Exhibition and its successors such as the British Colonial and Indian Exhibition which took place in South Kensington in 1886. He postponed his opening for a year because of that event and many of his partners dropped out.  This worked to his benefit. That year he went to Washington to try and interest President Grover Cleveland in the project, and while he was there he saw Buffalo Bill’s Roughriders and Redskin Show.  He booked them for Earls Court’s first season and changed the nature of the Exhibition completely.

The troupe performed in the original triangle of land accessible from Warwick Road. An open arena and stand were created for them.  A second area accessible from Lillie Road and by bridge from the grounds contained a single long exhibition building. This was connected to a third area where there was a pleasure gardens with a switchback railway, a toboggan slide and a large bandstand.

The shows introduced the idea of the Wild West into public consciousness, in this country at least.

The shows were immensely popular and were even visited by the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales and William Gladstone (then in opposition, so he must have had some time on his hands).

You can see from the programme that the show contained all the familiar tropes of the Wild West – Indians attacking the stagecoach, gun battles with cowboys, the Pony Express – but also had a more rounded view of  Native American culture such as buffalo hunting and village life on the plains. Not to mention Cossacks and Gauchos.

(These two images are from one of the later shows).

William Cody himself of course had become a fully fledged media figure.

Along with Annie Oakley who fell out with Cody after the first shows but returned later having established herself as a star in her own right.

The Wild West show came back to Earls Court several times and there were other versions after Cody’s last show such as the Golden West / Red Man Spectacle of 1909. The cowboys look a little more like showmen in this picture:

But we get the idea.

The other well known name from Buffalo Bill’s show was Long Wolf, an Oglala Lakota Sioux warrior who had originally joined the show as part of a group of prisoners of war turned over to Cody by the American War Office.

Long Wolf and his family stayed with the show and came back to England in 1892 but the Chief caught scarlet fever on this visit and died at the West London Hospital in Hammersmith. His doctor had the macabre name of Maitland Coffin. Long Wolf was buried with due ceremony in Brompton Cemetery.

The design on his headstone was based on a drawing he made on his deathbed for what he hoped would be a temporary resting place. He was right. Although he lay amongst strangers for a long time his remains were disinterred in 1996 and moved to a burial place in his ancestral lands.

The heyday of the first Exhibition was as brief as Cremorne’s. By 1914 the Wild West shows had departed, the Great Wheel was demolished and the grounds were being used as a camp for Belgian refugees. The new Exhibition was 20 years in the future. But we can still remember the days the Wild West came to West London.

This picture is of the Deadwood Stage. Now where did I put that Calamity Jane DVD?

Back to Old Church Street with Mr Hedderly

This is my 53^rd post on this blog, so it’s almost exactly a year since my first post. When I started I wasn’t sure exactly how I would find something to write about every week but I was sure about where I would start. The one subject I knew I wanted to share with you was the photography of James Hedderly.

Just after the middle of the 19^th century an ordinary man started to haul fifty pounds of complicated equipment around his neighbourhood so he could take photographs. His friends and neighbours humoured him by standing still or just watched him in silent amazement. Or perhaps they realised that they were also participating in something new. They watched him and now we can watch them.

So once again we are in Old Church Street facing the Black Lion Tavern.

My friend the lady with the basket isn’t here on this occasion but Mr Hedderly has assembled the same mixed bag of people deliberately and accidentally posing for him.

The boy slouched against the wall, the guy with curly hair, a bowler hat and what looks like a leather jacket, the boy sitting in the window, the barman in the apron, the stout middle aged man who can’t do his jacket up, a young girl behind him, a couple of smartly dressed younger men with time on their hands,  a couple of indistinct figures behind them probably children, a girl who has managed to get into the picture twice by moving just enough and a man just edging into the right side of the picture – quite a cast for a simple daytime picture. They all get our attention. Look long enough and they might all tell their stories.

Leave the idle fellows at the tavern and come back down Old Church Street to the river to meet some of the working men.

Alldin’s Coal Wharf at low tide. Arch House marked the end of Cheyne Walk at this time. It was a substantial and solid looking building compared to the cramped old houses and shops in Lombard Street and Duke Street which lay behind it. The confident looking man perched on the precarious arrangement of planks looks like management to me, keeping an eye on the staff.

The four men standing on the river bed all carry items related to the coal business – spades, a coke sifter, a coal sack (the man holding the sack looks like a classic coal man, his face grimy with coal dust. The three on the street might be drivers. There’s a man in the window behind them joining the picture.

Behind Arch House was Allen’s Lime Wharf.

Allen’s was one of the ramshackle collection of buildings on the river bank. You can just see part of Lombard Street on the left and the poor state of the houses in it. Look in close up at the state of the roof of Allen’s.

The undulating uneven roof tiles and patches of what looks like moss, the tiny attic window which looks like it is about to fall inwards. The whole house look like it is held together by the dirt of decades. This picture is one of Hedderly’s crispest images and it captures those moments of stillness in what must have been a hectic day. No faces at the window though. I would love to see one of those in a Hedderly picture.

Just a few yards away are some more upmarket houses and retail establishments.

I can’t quite make out what sort of shop Mr White runs, but Wheeler’s Medical Establishment next door must be some kind of pharmacy. A group of middle class people are posing for Mr Hedderly, or again standing just as mystified as the tavern’s customers. One of the ladies has left a ghostly presence but if you look to the left you will see some even vaguer traces of a couple of men, possibly workers from Alldin’s.

And Mr Hedderly gives us another mystery woman standing in the doorway of the house next to White’s, a young woman in indoor clothes drawn outside perhaps by curiosity.

If we head eastwards along Cheyne Walk towards Oakley Street we can see Golding’s Pier Hotel.

Next to the Hotel is a coffee house. Look closer.

Do you see the billboards outside?

Can you make out any of the words? I see Leah, the name of a play perhaps, and the even more enigmatic words Fat Boy.

The last picture for today is quite different from the others.

I don’t know whether it’s sunlight shining down over the top of the house, or just the limitations of the camera but the light seems to isolate the garden and the solitary figure sitting in it. Who is he?

The big clue is the handwritten caption – back of Rossetti’s house. Rather than try to puzzle out whether it’s Rossetti himself or his brother William the question I wish could be answered is how did Mr Hedderly and his camera find their way there?

Go on then. One last close up.

Portobello Road in the 90s

Having done posts on Portobello Road in the 1950s and the 1970s I was keen to continue the story so I was pleased when we recently acquired a large number of photographs of streets in the borough which our Planning department no longer needed. The photographs were all taken in connection with planning applications, so they had no artistic or historical intent. And of course there was no intention to cover a whole street or district or capture an atmosphere. Their existence depends purely on someone’s desire to make changes in a building.

I looked through the three folders devoted to Portobello Road and picked out images I liked, not expecting to see any kind of story, thinking I would simply see shop fronts and stalls, some of them now gone, some of them still here. But what does emerge is a feeling for the decade, a decade which doesn’t seem to my recollection at least to have a distinctive identity.

Number 265 in 1990 and 299 in 1991, properties in need of improvement after the effects of the 1980s.

See the handwritten notice about DHSS estimates on this locked up property. But remember these are the properties someone wanted to improve not examples of how the street as a whole looked. At the same time the commercial life of the market continued and some businesses were looking prosperous.

Here, around number 345 on a quiet morning in 1991:

And here at 117 where you can see the entrance to Vernon Yard, a mews which was at one time the home of an early version of Virgin Records:

The collection has a few composite pictures made up of several individual photographs put together to form a larger image.

This one shows a whole row of shops at 139-151 continued below in a second version:

It’s an interesting technique which has probably now been replaced by digital methods of merging images. Here’s another example from 1995 of number 205:

Sometimes the applications included interiors and rear views, some of which can be interesting. This image of number 95 shows the street view:

But it also comes with a view of the roof, which gives us an unusual rear view of the tower of St Peter’s Church in Kensington Park Road:

A series of pictures show the market in full swing with the shops behind them in 1994:

See the comic shop Fantastic Store at 166 also visible in the picture below.

Two years later another business is at the same address (although the German food stall remains):

In 1997 an internet cafe opens at 195 with a mission to explain:

Despite the changes you could argue that the basic character of the street remained unaltered. Some of its long established institutions remain:

The Warwick Castle has been at 225 since the 19^th century.

Further up the road another long established (since 1974) institution carries on trading.

I sometimes think the 1990s were recent times, until I realise they were in another century and there’s more than a decade between then and now. Those years are retreating into history. Some things of course don’t change too much.

Back at the beginning of the street:

You can still find an obscure sports car parked near the Sun in Splendour just as we saw in the Portobello Road in the 70s post. (My transport correspondent says it’s not a Lamborghini, a Ferrari or a Maserati – suggestions welcome)

And on Saturdays you’ll still see a crowd of people making their way down the narrow street from the top of the hill to the bottom.

Thanks to all the anonymous photographers and above all to Michael Robertson of the Planning Department.

Postscript

We now have two suggestions for the car parked near the Sun in Splendour – is it a Camaro Z28 (owned by Malcolm Wood) or a De Tomaso Pantera? Here is a bigger version of the picture:

At the moment I’m leaning towards the De Tomaso – see the picture below:

 

Back to the party: the Duchess of Devonshire’s Costume Ball 1897

After nearly a year of blogging I’ve been looking back at the most popular posts of the last twelve months and at number four was the original post about the Duchess of Devonshire’s Diamond Jubilee costume ball in 1897.  The photographers of the Lafayette Company photographed 200 guests that night as souvenirs for guests and to turn into collectible cards. There are still some remarkable pictures left to see.

Lady Alexandra Acheson strikes a pose in a hunting costume of the Louis XV period, when the French aristocracy also enjoyed dressing up.

Count Omar Hadik as his own ancestor Field Marshall Count Hadik, easily the least embarrassing male costume.

The Countess of Gosford as an 18^th century version of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Check out her owl, which later appeared in the original Clash of the Titans film.

Many of the guests leaned towards the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Lady Meysey Thompson as Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia the aunt of Charles II and wife of the Elector Frederick V, who has become a significant figure in esoteric history.

Another of her Stuart relatives:

Lady Katharine Scott as Mary Queen of Scots, with the look of a martyred saint in a religious painting.

None of these costumes are entirely accurate although the look of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries was probably well known to historians and costumiers at the end of the nineteenth but they had to look attractive too, just like costume designs in films and television.

It was probably easier to work with more obscure characters from history, literature and mythology which gave more scope for artistic license as in this costume:

Lady Alice Montagu as Laure de Sade, an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade, and possibly the Laure who inspired the poet Petrarch in the 14^th century. We saw a gentleman portraying Petrarch himself in the previous post.

Another poetic muse who was brought to life at the Ball by two different guests:

The Countess of Mar as Beatrice Portinari the woman who inspired Dante, who has I think the edge over Lady Southampton’s more contemporary version:

Instead of playing a muse Viscountess Milton opted for a creator, Marie Antoinette’s court painter Madame Le Brun.

Other guests chose mythological identities, where the costume designers had free reign:

Lady Gerard, describing herself as the Moon Goddess Astarte. Astarte is a goddess who was worshipped over many years in many different countries in the ancient world under several names. She isn’t exactly a moon goddess but we can let that go.

Lady Lurgan, surprisingly nonthreatening as Alecto, one of the Furies (“the implacable or unceasing anger”).  Megaera (Jealousy) and Tisiphone (Vengeance) appear to have had another party to go to that night. Alecto has also made a film appearance, in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

Mrs Ronalds as Euterpe the Muse of music – her costume has many clues to her identity.

On the musical front Wagner was still very popular in the 1890s so it is not surprising that there was a Brunhilde (Mrs Leslie):

And a couple of narrow waisted Valkyries (Two sisters, the Mademoiselles de Courcel):

Turning from northern European mythology to British legend and literature, here is a King Arthur out of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King played by Lord Rodney:

And finally a royal character out of Shakespeare:

The ethereal beauty of Mrs J Graham Menzies in the role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies who can now get back to the party with the rest of the guests. Shall we leave them to it?

No wait, one more. The patroness of bloggers and other storytellers everywhere played with some conviction by a lady with no title, Miss Goelet.

Scheherazade.

More pictures from the costume ball here and here.

John Bignell and the celebrities: fame in the sixties

Some of you may not have heard of John Bignell. I googled his name when I was preparing to write this and you don’t find much – lots of results about his book Chelsea Photographer and the inevitable reference to the picture he took of Claudie Delbarre a few days before she was murdered. (See the King’s Road Blues post if you want see the picture) But there’s very much more to John Bignell. He did street photography, news, fashion, art even a bit of glamour. He documented bohemian life in Chelsea from the 50s to the 80s. And like many London photographers in the 60s he snapped his share of the celebrities of the day.

Celebrity itself was a little different then of course.

A young David Hockney, sitting with the widow of Igor Stravinsky.

A couple of other shots in art galleries:

Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger in 1961 according to Bignell’s notes, then married (his fourth marriage, her third, and final one) The man on the left is David Tomlinson but I don’t think it’s the actor from Mary Poppins. (or is it?)

The man with the prominent nose is L S Lowry sharing an amusing story with an unknown gentleman and the already ubiquitous Richard Attenborough.

Another high class occasion:

Derek Nimmo (ask some old person if you don’t know) officiating at some formal occasion puzzling over an illegible note with Lady Limerick. This could be a literary occasion. There’s an impressive collection of old books in the background.

Bignell must have been on good terms with his subjects. He often took pictures in their own homes.

Chelsea resident, film and TV actor Harry Fowler, with his wife Kay. Mr Fowler who died earlier this year made an appearance in the short lived BBC2 Chelsea-based soap opera World’s End, which I’ve already referred to in a previous post.

This is one of my favourites among Bignell’s celebrity photos:

Charles Gray, another local, looking like a man who knows how to have a good time. He had a long career in acting, playing one version of the James Bond villain Blofeld (in Diamonds are Forever), at least three versions of Mycroft Holmes, on film and TV, and most memorably for me Mocata, the villain in the Hammer adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out.

Another classy interior:

A fairly young Ned Sherrin striking a pose while sitting down, possibly in the flat in Chelsea where he lived for many years.

Bignell found many of his subjects on the streets of Chelsea.

Ryan O’Neal examining a shop keeper’s pendant in a slightly disconcerting manner.

Sammy Davis Jr making his way down the King’s Road, possibly on his way here:

You can see him on the balcony. Has the crowd gathered for him, or is this a normal Chelsea Saturday afternoon back in the 60s?

You’ve seen a lot of male celebrities so far so here are a couple of famous women:

Jayne Mansfield with her daughter Jayne Marie at Victor Silvester’s dance studio on the King’s Road. Jayne Marie is unmistakeable I think. I got carried away with the caption Jayne Mansfield and daughter, thinking the daughter was Mariska Hargitay, star of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but it turned out to be Ms Mansfield’s first daughter. I can see the family resemblance though.

Just a little way down the King’s Road was the Chelsea Palace. Here Bignell took this excellent picture of another famous blonde actress.

Diana Dors in the dressing room with a man named Michael Keaton who looks very pleased to be on the receiving end of Ms Dors’s attention.

This post has been an introduction to John Bignell. I’ll be coming back to him again over the coming months to try and show you the full range of his work. But for now here’s the man himself behind the bar of the Six Bells.

And here’s a puzzle for you. Who on earth are these guys?

Are they an actual group, or just some likely looking hipsters Bignell gathered together for the picture, which is simply called Love is all you need?

So if anyone has any ideas please let me know. We’ve already eliminated Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch by the way.

Kate at the Pageant 2: Tudor dreams

We’re back at the Chelsea Pageant this week moving out of the medieval era into more familiar historical times. The Pageant devoted four of its ten episodes to Tudor subjects. This is not surprising. Chelsea begins with the big riverside houses of the Tudor aristocracy. It was in Chelsea that Henry VIII had a manor house and a hunting lodge conveniently accessible by boat. And of course his sometime friend Thomas More lived in Chelsea. The Tudor monarchs haunt Chelsea in fact and legend and they continued to loom large in the Edwardian imagination.

Mr Herbert Jarman, an amateur Henry VIII, looking a little like Charles Laughton in the later film. Mr Cavendish Morton portrays Thomas More but we have a less definite idea of how More should look. In the background two of his daughters look on anxiously. Here’s one of them, Margaret Roper with her mother, sharing another moment with a distinctly non-Tudor fence in the background.

Episode 4 has two parts: a friendly visit to More’s house by Henry for the purpose of offering the post of Chancellor to him, and later, More’s last day in the same house as he obeys the summons to his trial and execution. Episode 5 covers an attempt to seduce the young Princess Elizabeth, episode 6 the funeral procession of Anne of Cleves which began at the Manor House.

Catherine Howard intercedes with the young King Edward on behalf of Thomas Seymour. The woman with her hair down on the left is the young Princess Elizabeth.

The ladies and gentlemen of Chelsea seemed happy to take on the roles of their Tudor forbears.  Kate Pragnell was also patrolling the entrance of the Royal Hospital like an early paparazzo.

An older version of Elizabeth arrives with an anachronistic escort.

Interested parties and spectators with no tickets await the arrival of another important personage.

Episode 7 was about Elizabeth’s return to Chelsea to relive childhood memories and watch a children’s masque of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, a sprawling allegorical poem in which Elizabeth features under several different guises.

Here are two other versions of Elizabeth an adult and the child Gloriana along with the poet Spenser stepping inside his creation. Elizabeth also appears as Lucifera, Queen of Pride:

The Faerie Queen is full of unsuitable wonders.

Including a version of George and the Dragon.

This must be a rehearsal, assuming the man in the straw boater in the group on the left doesn’t represent a time traveler.

Are those horses or mice (or something worse) pulling the coach? Is that Mr Punch driving it?

He’s not in the cast list but is this Dr John Dee facing the queen?

There is still something magical about these scenes. Amateur actors act out fact and fantasy living out dreams of another English dreamtime.  Here’s another group with an infiltrator from modern life. She is us, spying on the past.

Two more primal scenes from the Masque:

Our friend, the giant Orgoglio.

And best of all, a woman St George, the maiden Una and a friendly lion. That’s what I call entertainment.

Other posts about the Chelsea Historical Pageant:

Kate at the Pageant 1908

Kate at the Pageant 3: an adventure at Ranelagh