Down by the River: Chelsea Reach in the 1860s

 

This is Chelsea Reach where today you will see a collection of picturesque houseboats. The boats are a long established Chelsea institution which have braved bad weather and road widening schemes alike but long before they were there the Reach was a place for working boats. Most of the houses in the background are still there but you will no longer see sailing barges resting on the foreshore or the sign on the wall at the centre of the picture.  Don’t strain your eyes trying to read it. Here is a closer view:

The name of course is Greaves. This is the family business of Walter and Henry Greaves, amateur artists as well as boatmen. The street behind the wall looks calm and prosperous, the passersby are unhurried. This is a quiet residential stretch of the riverside. The tightly packed shops and taverns of Lombard Street/ Duke Street are just out of shot. To the left the road leads to Cremorne Gardens. But no-one is in a hurry to get there this morning. A man sits on the wall. Could that be one of the Greaves brothers themselves keeping a eye on James Hedderly, who has carried all his photographic equipment onto the muddy river bed? We think they were acquainted maybe even friends as fellow tradesmen of Chelsea’s riverside. (Hedderly was a sign writer at this point in his life).

Hedderly took many photographs of this area. Here are some of the barges moored to the west of the Greaves boatyard:

In the background you can see the old Battersea Bridge looking ethereal, although this is probably due to the quality of the photograph rather than weather conditions on the day.

Here a little further down is a pair of coal barges at Lindsey Wharf:

And a close-up of the men working on the barge, pausing to face the photographer and look out at us:

The next picture looks back at the Greaves boatyard from the east :

Just behind the boats to let sign is another for Lindsey Wharf. The boats built and rented out by the Greaves family were mostly rowing boats. The brothers rowed customers out on the river themselves. Some of those trips were purely business, taking passengers to their destinations like river taxis as boatmen on the Thames have done for centuries.  But Chelsea was already a place for artists and some of the passengers were making sketches of what they saw from the river. One of those customers was James McNeill Whistler who would have a profound effect on the lives of the Greaves family.

This is a view at low tide probably taken from the bridge, shows what must have been the whole of the Greaves business, the narrow rowing boats sitting on pontoons waiting for customers.

When I started writing this post I intended to take you all the way along Chelsea’s riverside, but we seem to have lingered in one small stretch of water. Perhaps it’s the spell of the river or perhaps post-Christmas languor. Either way we’ll be back here again before too long both with Mr Hedderly and the Greaves family.

I hope you all had a happy Christmas.

 

Vickie and Nance’s excellent adventure

This story ends in Kensington in 1960 when an old woman named Victoria died at her small house in Holland Street. She had lived there quietly for many years. But a long time before that a young woman called Vickie and her sister Eleanor each inherited £30,000. They had a tragic background. Their mother had died giving birth to Vickie in 1875. Their father remarried and had seven other children with his new wife Clara. In this photograph you can see the contrast between the dark haired Vickie and Ellie and their blonde half-siblings.

Ellie is at the centre of the photograph looking confident and relaxed but as it turned out she was the more conventional one. Both sisters travelled in Switzerland and southern Europe but Vickie wanted to go further afield. She and her best friend Nance went to Egypt. Here they are sitting in a Cairo park with their new friend Monsieur Countour. It’s 1898.

In the nineteenth century the British had become obsessed with ancient Egypt. Egyptian influences are apparent in art, architecture and literature. In Victorian London there were theatres and exhibition halls in Egyptian styles. The influence can be seen particularly in burial places. Look at the Catacombs in Highgate Cemetery or closer to home the Kilmorey mausoleum in Brompton Cemetery. The Victorians seem to have felt a strange bond with ancient Egypt. Both cultures enjoyed elaborate and extensive funeral rites. By 1898 tourism was no longer uncommon. Vickie and Nance joined the other travellers who were visiting Egypt for the first time.

Just as with tour parties today a crowd of visitors mills about not sure what to do next. The locals do their best to get the tourists organised.

That’s Nance with an unknown man beside the Nile. Below are some exhibits in the Musee de Gizeh.

If you’ve been on a tour and seen the local museum you’ll naturally want to go riding as well.

That’s Vickie on a donkey at Saqqara. And here’s Nance trying a camel:

It’s very difficult to tell from what are basically low resolution holiday snaps but I get the distinct impression Nance wasn’t too comfortable perched on top of a camel in a very formal outfit. Vickie looks more assured in the same position.

Perhaps she’s getting some encouragement from Mr Drummond Hay.  From a modern perspective we’d also like to know what the camel owner was thinking. In the photo below the two men look enigmatically at the photographer, perhaps Vickie herself.

They could be annoyed at the whole process or simply maintaining a professional demeanour.

Vickie and Nance also travelled to other parts of North Africa and India returning to Egypt for an extended visit in 1903/04. Here is another chaotic looking outing with a caption in Vickie’s handwriting:

In this image you see some visitors, getting closer to a fallen statue than anyone could today:

They may be archaeologists. Vickie seems to have known the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall.

These pictures come out of a photo album deposited at the Library by a descendant of Vickie’s sister. As with all family albums details are often lost. Although Vickie and Nance were close friends we don’t know Nance’s surname.  The pictures show a couple of friends exploring the world in a way which would have been difficult or impossible for their own parents. But we are only catching a few glimpses of their adventures.

In 1904 Vickie was back in Kensington for her sister’s marriage.

She looks much more confident and assured than she did in the first group photo.

Vickie got married herself in the 1920s and moved to her little house in Holland Street. Here she is in her garden:

But I prefer to think of her on her travels. Here she is back in 1898 posing with a cactus as you would if you’d never seen one so big:

And finally another one with Nance on their way to India on board the ship Caledonia in 1902:

This week we’ve taken a holiday from purely Kensington and Chelsea matters ourselves. But all kinds of material end up in Local Studies collections, which is why they are endlessly fascinating.

Portobello Road in the 50s

I was born in the 1950s so although I can’t remember much if anything about that era, because I was alive then it doesn’t seem to me like it should be described as the historical past. More like an annexe to the present. But looking at these pictures from 1958 demonstrates how far away from us the 50s are. No internet, no mobile phones, almost no television by comparison with today. Only a few subtle differences in this photograph could place it twenty years earlier.

North Kensington has not yet become a particularly bohemian or counter cultural area. These images are from the other side of a cultural divide. It’s a view of almost forgotten working class west London.

That’s Mr Brooks and his vegetable stall. A hard working photographer from the Ministry of Health took these photographs to illustrate a now forgotten display about food retailing. They would have been thrown away if the man who donated them to the Local Studies collection had not had been thinking of their value to later generations.

A little further down from Mr Brooks’ stall is a branch of the once ubiquitous Woolworth’s stores.

In this photo you can see the Electric Cinema looking a little grim but obviously open, one of the longest surviving institutions of Portobello Road. In 1958, according to that year’s Kelly’s it was trading as the Imperial Playhouse.

But fruit and vegetable stalls in gloomy streets are not the whole Portobello story even in the late 50s. The market even then was an outlet for antiques, bric a brac and other second hand goods as shown in another set  of photographs from the same period.

I think you can see a couple of penguin paperbacks on top of the pile of books.

I couldn’t resist including this one. Some kind of basket made out of a dead armadillo. Try getting one of those on e-Bay.

This set of photographs seem brighter and more optimistic to my 21^st century eye. Perhaps it’s just that they were taken on a sunny day or perhaps it’s the fact that the people in the pictures are not buying food but browsing for more interesting items.

The 1950s are still a long way off though. Look at this final image:

A trio of excited young women examine the contents of a stall selling jewellery. The detail that caught my eye was that all three are wearing gloves. So we’re still on the other side of that cultural divide.

The next time we go to the Portobello Road it will be to the 1970s a far more familiar era.

Thanks to the unknown Ministry photographer and to Corry Bevington who took the other photographs which are from the HistoryTalk collection.

Idle days in southern Kensington: William Cowen country

Through the trees you can see a domed building. We’re not truly in the country but this isn’t the city. It’s the suburbia of the 1840s. Not many miles from this spot there are wide roads, grand houses, public buildings, slums and rookeries, courts and prisons, open sewers and dirty rivers. But here there are leafy lanes and walled nursery gardens with occasional cottages and inns.

(Click on the image to see the details)

Here are some houses in the little village of Earls Court. A woman hangs out washing to dry in the clean air.

Here is Walnut Tree Walk or Redcliffe Gardens as we’d call it today which takes you south from Earls Court Road to Fulham Road.

In the distance you can glimpse some large buildings. The big places always seem to be in the distance, as in this picture of Cromwell Road, or Row:

Not the Cromwell Road we know of course. That wouldn’t come into being until the 1850s. If the angle is right the distant tower is Holy Trinity, Brompton before the Oratory got in the way. The view below has another church, St Luke’s in the background behind the newly built Brompton Hospital. (Or The Diseased Chest Hospital as it is called on the parish map of 1846.)

But the focus of the picture is the pair of young men and their reluctant looking horse. Things look more relaxed in Gore Lane:

Outside Ivy Cottage are two women, a child, a dog and a couple of odd looking birds. Chickens? Or guinea fowl maybe. Guinea fowl are strange looking creatures, I think. I once came upon a crowd of them at a farm (or is that a flock?). They moved away from me slowly in unison, their iridescent tail faeathers trailing behind. The sight has stayed with me through the years since that encounter.

Meanwhile at Mr Attwood’s house it’s all quiet.

Mr Attwood owned one of the many local nurseries and lived here with his wife, seven children and two servants. He is still remembered in gardening circles.

My favourite picture from the collection is this one:

Another young woman with a dog and the suggestion of a ruin, but the best touch is that Narnian lamppost. This is the avenue to Cresswell Lodge. At this time Cresswell Lodge was a private boarding school for young ladies, which sounds like an ideal place to go walking through a wardrobe.

This one has the same fantasy quality:

It’s Rose Lane, which leads to Kensington by a scenic route. The two women talking in the shade of the high wall appear to be in no hurry to go anywhere. Through the open gate is a still more private garden. The  sun casts long shadows.

No-one is sure where Rose Lane was exactly but may have been just west of Gloucester Road perhaps near the present Rosary Gardens.

William Cowen the Yorkshire-born landscape artist and author of Six Weeks in Corsica came to live at Gibraltar Cottage, Thistle Grove in 1843. Not the same Thistle Grove as today’s. The wide still somewhat picturesque alley we know today, which also has a Narnian style lamppost took its name from Drayton Gardens which didn’t need it anymore. Cowen lived there until his death in 1860. The indigo wash water colour paintings featured here are part of a set of 31 which seem to have come from the same sketchbook. They all have the same dreamlike quality, the same calm feeling of unhurried summer days in an idyllic rural landscape.

Back to the beginning, here again is Cowen’s most recognizable subject. The domed building is revealed as the chapel of Brompton Cemetery, another kind of walled garden at the end of Brompton Lane, by the side of the short lived Kensington Canal.

This is also the end of Cowen country. You can imagine visiting these landscapes but you’d need more than a time machine to get into the country of his imagination.

Games for May: the Pageant and the Queen 1908

If the past really is another country and they really did do things differently there, photographs can sometimes show just how different it could be. In this collection of images you seem to have all the ingredients for a supernatural drama. A creepy giant figure, people in costume, with a teenage girl, ready for sacrifice right out of one of those stories about a folk tradition gone bad as in the Wicker Man….

A procession of enigmatic robed men…….

Some sinister nuns….

Druids….

Women in classical costume ready for a fertility rite…..

A ceremony beside an ivy-covered wall. Isn’t that a maypole?

All the while an audience watches from the shadows, waiting for the conclusion of the ritual. As always in a supernatural story  in the style of M R James  there is a framing narrative in which the editor asserts that it’s all true. A library is just the place for uncovering secrets and just like in a story I discovered these pictures a few years ago at the bottom of a dusty box which had been sitting untouched for years in a basement room. Would I lie to you?

Some of the other pictures I found make things clearer.

You can figure out who the man in the right is supposed to be. And the woman in the centre is more concerned with having her photo taken than looking at the King.

The nuns look much less sinister in a group photo. And as for the women in white….

They are of course the court of Queen Agnes the May Queen of Whitelands College, a teacher training college which was founded in Chelsea in the 1840s. The art historian John Ruskin was instrumental in starting the tradition of an annual coronation for the May Queen. Queen Agnes was crowned in 1909. The ivy covered wall was in the courtyard of the College on the King’s Road.

And the rural setting of all the costumed performances was the grounds of the Royal Hospital. The event was the Chelsea Historical Pageant of 1908.Note the presence in this photo of some people in “modern” dress who break the spell. The historical fancy dress costumes actually take the people out of their own time into a special zone – an “any” time where it’s difficult to say exactly what the year is.

As if to prove this point, here’s a picture which could easily have been taken at almost any time in the last century.

So whatever strange activities they got up to in the past, perhaps it wasn’t so different then.

The photographs, discovered in one envelope were by Kate Pragnell about whom I know nothing except that it’s good she was there. She may have taken some of the official photographs of the events but these are the candid shots from behind the scenes.

By rights you should have had a Kensington post this week but there have been so many modern topics recently that I thought it would be a good idea to go further back in time and now that we’re in autumn take a look at some long gone summers. The kids in the last picture had the twentieth century in front of them. How far did they get?

Postscript

Other posts about the Chelsea Historical Pageant:

Kate at the Pageant 1908

Kate at the Pageant 2: Tudor dreams

Kate at the Pageant 3: an adventure at Ranelagh

Whitelands College posts:

Rite of Spring: Mr Ruskin’s May Queen

The May Queens of Whitelands:return to the hidden kingdom