Boy and Girl with Dolphin

Tags

dolphin

In an earlier post, I explained that the ‘dolphin’ lampposts did not really represent true dolphins, or even porpoises, but sturgeons, although most people – including me – persist in calling them dolphin lampposts. But this blog post is all about true dolphins. The two evocative sculptures of dolphins with acrobatic children were designed in 1973 and 1975 by David Wynne (1926-2014). Wynne made numerous sculptures of animals and he knew what he was doing. He had read zoology at Trinity College, Cambridge, and for the dolphin sculptures he spent hours under water studying the movements of dolphins. That is not to say that his work was favourably received by all; some considered him an upstart who ‘never even went to art school’. Personally, I could not care less whether anyone follows the accepted educational route, or manages to get to the end result by a circuitous or unlikely route; it is the result that counts and Wynne certainly manages to impress me with his work. A lot has been written about him and his work, so I will just post the photos I took of his two dolphin sculptures: the boy at Cheyne Walk and the girl near the Tower. The weather was not all that brilliant, although the raindrops on the boy’s body suggest even more the watery dolphin environment than sunshine would do. You can find better quality pictures online, but these will have to do for this post. If you want to read more about Wynne or his work, some links can be found at the bottom of this post.

Boy:

Girl:

Links:
Wikipedia
Obituary Guardian
Obituary Telegraph
View from the Mirror
Small silver version of Boy with Dolphin
Book: Jonathan Stone, The Sculpture of David Wynne 1974-1992 (1993)
Book: David Elliott, Boy with a Dolphin: The Life and Work of David Wynne (2010)

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The Knight of the Cnihtengild

Take the east exit of Liverpool Street station, cross Bishopsgate Street, walk south along Bishopsgate Street for perhaps fifty yards, and turn left into Devonshire Row. This leads to Devonshire Square, also known as Cutlers Gardens, which is the private property of the Standard Life Insurance Company, but during the day, you may walk there and admire the enormous sculpture of a knight in shiny armour. He is a representation of one of the thirteen knights (the Cnihtengild) who were granted the land lying to the east of the line Aldgate – Bishopsgate in the 10th century by King Edgar. The land was also know as Portsoken, but it was to have various names in the following centuries. In 1108, the knights gave the land to the Austin friars of Holy Trinity Priory at Aldgate; the monks used part of the land as their convent garden, but in 1532, the land reverted to the Crown and was parcelled out to courtiers and merchants. By 1700, Cutlers Garden was covered in houses and workshops.⁽¹⁾

One of the houses built in the area on the east side of Bishopsgate Street was Fisher’s Folly. Jasper Fisher, a Clerk in Chancery, built the house in the late 16th century. Stow said that it had large pleasure gardens and a bowling alley at the back. Fisher had, however, rather overreached himself with his grand house and owed quite a few people money, hence Fisher’s Folly and that name stuck. Even after several other owners, the house was still referred to as Fisher’s Folly with mocking rhymes from the locals at Fisher’s expense.⁽²⁾ The Dukes of Devonshire took over the house in the later 17th century and it became Devonshire House. The Ordnance Survey map below shows Devonshire Square, with Devonshire Street (now Row) leading to Bishopsgate Street; “Site of Fisher’s Folly” is written in faint lettering on the houses to the north of Devonshire Street.

Ordnance Survey map of the area 1893-95

In 1768, the East India Company built their first warehouse in the area south of New Street and they kept adding to their property, so that by the 1830s, they owned over 2,000 hectares and had replaced most of the houses on the site by warehouses. The warehouses can be seen on the Ordnance Survey map on the right-hand side. When the monopoly the East India Company had on the trade with China ended, the warehouses became surplus to requirements and the St. Katherine Docks Company bought them, later relinguishing them to the Port of London Authority who used them till 1976. The Standard Life Insurance Company bought the site in 1978 and rebuilt and redeveloped the area.

The artist, Denys Mitchell (1939-2015), had previously made some railings for the Edinburgh office of the Standard Life Insurance Company and he was asked to do something with the space in Cutlers Gardens. The Cnihtengild knight in shiny armour is his interpretation of the site’s history. The knight is made entirely from beaten bronze and not from a mould as most other sculptures are. The horse’s caparison – blanket to you and me – is covered in stylized birds with a blue crystal in their tail. When I took the photographs, the horse was looking towards the central piazza, but apparently it stands on a turntable that revolves one degree per day, so the horse and knight turn full circle in a year. The New View journal interviewed Denys Mitchell and the Cnihtengild knight stands proudly on the magazine’s cover (Autumn 2003 issue).⁽³⁾ The sculpture was unveiled on 21 November 1990.

Photo used for the Cover of New View, vol. 29 (Source: New View website)

Website on Mitchell built and maintained by his family here.

(1) More on the area in P. Hunting, Cutlers Gardens (1984). Commissioned by the Standard Life Insurance Company.
(2) B. Maxwell, chapter X, “Nice Valour, or the Passionate Madman” in Studies in Beaumont Fletcher and Massinger (1966) and H.B. Wheatley, London Past and Present (2011), pp. 47-48 (online here).
(3) Grateful acknowledgements go to Tom Raines for helping me locate a copy of the New View issue and the Rudolf Steiner House Library for letting a friend of mine copy the relevant pages.

Clare Market: from flesh and fish to art

Tags

art, market

According to Peter Cunningham in his Hand-Book of London (1850, p. 122), it was William Holles, created baron Houghton of Houghton, Nottingham, in 1616 and Earl of Clare in 1624, who had lived in the St. Clement’s Danes parish since 1617 and who created Clare Market on his London estate. Cunningham was, however, mistaken as the first Earl of Clare was called John Holles (1564-1637). Sir William Holles (1471?–1542) was his grandfather and long dead by the time the market came into existence. Strype in his Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster of 1720 says that Clare Market is “very considerable and well served with provisions, both flesh and fish; for besides the butchers in the Shambles, it is much resorted unto by the country butchers and higglers, the market days, are Wednesdays and Saturdays.”⁽¹⁾

Clare Market by T.H. Shepherd (1815)

Illustrated London News, September 1891. Source: View from the Mirror

By the nineteenth century, the reputation of the market had gone down considerably.

It is a market without a market-house; a collection of lanes, where every shop is tenanted by a butcher or greengrocer, and where the roadways are choked with costermongers’ carts. To see Clare Market at its best, it is needful to go there on Saturday evening: then the narrow lanes are crowded, then the butchers’ shops are ablaze with gas-lights flaring in the air, and the shouting of the salesman and costermonger is at its loudest. Nowhere in London is a poorer population to be found than that which is contained in the quadrangle formed by the Strand, Catherine-street, Long-acre, and Lincoln’s-inn and the new law courts. The greater portion of those who are pushing through the crowd to make their purchases for to-morrow’s dinner are women, and of them many have children in their arm. Ill-dressed, worn, untidy, and wretched, many of them look, but they joke with their acquaintances, and are keen hands at bargaining. Follow one, and look at the meat stall before which she steps. The shop is filled with strange pieces of coarse, dark-coloured, and unwholesome-looking meat. There is scarce a piece there whose form you recognise as familiar; no legs of mutton, no sirloins of beef, no chops or steaks, or ribs or shoulders. It is meat, and you take it on faith that it is meat of the ox or sheep; but beyond that you can say nothing. The slice of bacon on the next stall is more tempting, and many prefer a rasher of this for their Sunday’s dinner to the coarse meat which neither their skill in cooking nor their appliances enable them to render tender and eatable, or satisfactory to the good man who is at present drinking himself to a point of stupidity at the public-house at the corner, and spending an amount which would make all the difference in cost between the odds and ends of coarse meat and a wholesome joint. It is a relief to turn from the butchers’ shops to the costermongers’ barrows. Here herrings or mackerel, as the season may be— bought, perhaps, -a few hours before at Billingsgate —are selling at marvellously low prices, while the vegetables, equally cheap, look fresh and excellent in quality.⁽²⁾

Last of the bulk shops by H. Barton Baker from his The Stories of the Streets of London (1899)

The area with its narrow Elizabethan streets and toppling houses, overflowing with produce and people, declined gradually into what was called, the Clare Market Slum. Barton Baker called it “a murky district”, “that once notorious haunt of vice and misery”.⁽³⁾ But not long after he wrote his book, a lot of the streets were razed away in one sweeping development scheme when Aldwych and Kingsway were created. For excellent posts on the reconstruction of 1901-1905, see Peter Berthoud’s blog with lots of old photos and a map of the development, here and here.

The street name Clare Market still exists, although no longer a market, but a thoroughfare through the London School of Economics buildings. The school, although basically teaching politics and economics, is known for its promotion of the arts. If you walk through the area, do not forget to look up and around you to enjoy the various artworks on display. I will show you two, but there are more!

Baby Tembo

The small elephant, baby Tembo, on the steps of the Student Service Centre is a bronze sculpture by Derrick Stephan Hudson, and one of the more than ten statues donated by the Canadian businessman Louis Odette, who studied at LSE in 1944.⁽⁴⁾ Tembo’s mother and siblings can be found in Windsor, Ontario. If you run the sculpture slide show on the Windsor site, you may also recognise Yolanda Vandergaast’s Penguin that in London can be found across from Tembo at the entrance of Waterstone’s – where else? But there is more art than these two animals to be found around LSE.

On the corner of Clare Market and Portugal Street, above the big W logo of Waterstone’s bookshop is a mural by Harry Warren Wilson. According to the information panel “the motif represents ‘London’s river’ and illustrates subjects taught at the School”. Wilson exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1924 to 1952 and, besides making murals, also painted and worked with glass.

All in all, Clare Market is perhaps a little bit off the regular trail, but certainly worth a visit. 
 
 
 

(1) Book 4, chapter 7, p. 119. Higglers were apparently middlemen who traded in poultry and dairy products. They bought the produce from farmers by barter, hence haggle/higgle. See here.
(2) Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dictionary of London, 1879. Online here.
(3) H. Barton Baker, The Stories of the Streets of London (1899), pp. 154-155.
(4) For an overview see here.

The South Bank Lion

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Coade stone, Lambeth

On the south side of Westminster bridge stands a large stone lion, or so it seems, but it is not made of stone at all, but of Coade’s artificial stone. The process for the material was invented in the 1720s by Richard Holt who took out a patent in 1722. The exact composition of the material is not known, but the ingredients were finely ground, poured into a mould and then fired in a furnace, producing a very durable stone-like product. In 1730, Holt wrote a booklet, A short treatise of artificial stone, as ’tis now made, and converted into all manner of curious embellishments and proper ornaments of architecture in which he alleges that the stone made according to his “secret composition” “is more strong and durable than the best natural stone” and “will last forever”. It can be made into all sorts of objects: tomb-stones, statues, pipes, sun-dials, vases, etc. The goods are to be seen at Holt’s Artificial-Stone-Ware-House, over-against York-Buildings-Stairs in the Strand, near Cuper’s Bridge, Lambeth. And although the goods are produced in a white colour, if the customer so wishes, they could be painted into all possible colours.

Coade’s factory by G. Shepherd 1810-1815

So much for Holt, because the story of the artificial stone is taken up after the lapse of Holt’s patent by Mrs. Eleanor Coade from Lyme Regis. She set herself up as a linen draper in 1766, but by 1770 she and her daughter, also called Eleanor, had taken over the artificial stone factory of one Daniel Pincot at the King’s Arms Stairs, Narrow Wall, Lambeth, opposite Whitehall Stairs. They improved Holt’s recipe by adding ground quartz or glass and although Holt’s claim that the material would last forever may not be quite accurate, it is true that everything the climate can throw at it in the guise of rain, hail, thunder, sunshine or frost has very little impact on it and quite a lot of items from Coade’s factory still exist in pretty good order. I will just give one example: the caryatids at St. Pancras Church, Euston Road.⁽¹⁾ They were designed by J.C.F. Rossi and consist of sections fitted over a steel column which carries the weight of the roof above. Unfortunately, when they came to put the caryatids in place, they found them too tall and a section had to be cut from their waists.⁽²⁾

Detail from Horwood’s 1799 map. Click to enlarge. The Coade factory can be seen at the top and the gallery at the bottom of the map

The Coade business flourished and artificial stone became quite the fashion, not just in England, but also in America and continental Europe. The Coades took in a partner, nephew John Sealy, and published a catalogue in 1784, listing more than 700 items. After the death of Mrs Coade sr. in 1796, Eleanor jr expanded the business with an exhibition gallery on what became known as Coade’s Row at the corner of Pedlar’s Acre and Bridge Road. They produced a separate catalogue for the gallery in 1799, Coade’s gallery, or, exhibition in artificial stone. In 1802, they even managed to get their factory mentioned in the European Magazine (vol. 41). The engraving for the frontispiece to the magazine shows the entrance to the gallery as designed by John Bacon, one of the artists employed by the Coades. Other artists’ names that have come down to us are John Bacon, John Flaxman, Benjamin West, John Charles Felix Rossi, and James Wyatt.

Frontispiece European Magazine, 1802 ©British Museum

After Sealy’s death in 1813, Eleanor took William Croggon, a cousin, into the business as manager and proposed successor. Croggan indeed continued the business after Eleanor’s death in 1821, and was in turn succeeded by his son Thomas John Croggon, but the latter gave up the factory in 1837. One of the last items made by the Coade Works must have been the lion for the Lion Brewery. The plaque on the plinth says that it graced the brewery compound since 1837, although it does not say it was made in 1837, but where else do you store a large lion than on top of your brewery?

Lion Brewery with the lion – still white – on top ©British Museum

When the area was redeveloped after WWII for the Royal Festival Hall, the lion was temporarily placed at the entrance of Waterloo Station, by that time painted bright red.⁽³⁾ The London correspondent for the Manchester Guardian relates on 9 Feb. 1949 that

Down by the river’s edge, where a fine promenade is to stretch by 1951, the Lion Brewery still stands, though not at all steadily; small bits of it rain on your head if you stand on the ground floor. The celebrated red lion on the top of it, seven tons in weight and 111 years of age, was to be lowered through the wrecked building this morning and borne off in a lorry to the place near the County Hall where it is to be stored against the reappearance, at the Festival of Britain. This task proved tricky, to say the least (for the building looks as though it might crumble at any moment), and the lion in its cradle did not complete its journey to the ground today.

When the lion was moved to its present location in 1966 and returned to its original colour, the items found in a small cavity discovered in 1949, a Coade trade card and some George IV coins, were supplemented with The Times for 17 March 1966.

(1) See Alison Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone (1990) for a comprehensive listing of extant Coade stone pieces. See also the post on Jane Austen’s London: ‘De-coding Coade stone’.
(2) Information made available in St. Pancras church.
(3) For a photo of the lion’s removal see here

Cutlers’ Hall

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Benjamin Creswick, Cutlers' Company, guild, Thomas Tayler Smith

The coat of arms of the Cutlers’ Livery Company is – perhaps surprisingly – the elephant and castle. The exact reason for of the choice of an elephant has disappeared in the mist of time, but is presumed to relate to the ivory used to make knife and sword handles. Of old, the cutlers were responsible for producing metal items with a sharp edge, the emphasis shifting over time from implements used in warfare to those for domestic use. The arms were granted to the Company in 1476, although the elephant and castle did not come in until 1622. The original blazon reads: ‘Gules, three pairs of swords in saltire argent, hilts and pommels or Crest: An elephant’s head couped gules, armed or’.

Cutlers have been practising their trade in London since Roman times (the word ‘cutler’ comes from the Latin ‘cutellarius’). In medieval times, the cutlers worked in the Cheapside area and in the 14th century, a guild was established to protect the interests of the members and to ensure quality control. In the 15th century, they requested a Charter from Henry V, which they received in 1416. The Cutlers’ Company as we now know it, is therefore one of the oldest in the City of London. In those days, a fair amount of specialisation meant that other artisans who also worked on the finished product, such as gilders and grinders, were not incorporated in the Cutler’s Company, but by the 16th century, these ancillary skills were also brought under the aegis of the Cutlers’, making them the sole controllers of the entire trade.

By the 19th century, sword making had declined dramatically and cutlery and razors were made elsewhere in England, so that the Cutlers of London moved towards the production of surgical instruments. They also expanded their charitable educational activities.

The earliest recorded (1285) meeting place of the Cutlers is the ‘House of the Cutlers’ near the site of the present Mercers’ Hall. In the early 15th century, they had a Hall in what is now Cloak Lane ‘next to the tenement formerly belonging to the famous Richard Whityngton, sometime Mayor’. In the early 1660s, it was decided to rebuild the Hall, but a few months after it was finished, it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. They rebuilt the Hall straight away and used that until 1882 when the Metropolitan and District Railway Company acquired the site by compulsory purchase.

The entrance to Cutlers’ Hall in Cloak Lane by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (±1850)

The fifth and present Hall was built in Warwick Lane on the site where the Royal College of Physicians had been until 1825. In between the Physicians and the Cutlers, the site had housed a foundry.

The present Hall came into use on 7 March, 1888. On 10 May, 1941, an explosive bomb destroyed a neighbouring building and took away the north wall of the Hall. The damage could be repaired and after the War, the Hall once again stood as it had been in 1888.⁽¹⁾

Bomb damage (Source: website Cutlers’ Company)

The Warwick Lane Hall was designed by Thomas Tayler Smith (1834-1909), the Company’s Surveyor. Smith was the son of Thomas Smith, an architect from Hertfordshire, and styled himself ‘architect’ in the census reports up to 1891. In 1887, he got into financial difficulties, not released from his trustees until April 1889. On this release, he is stated as “carrying on business at 4, Circus-place, Finsbury, London, at 101, London-Wall, and residing at Bush Hill-park, Enfield, Middlesex”.⁽²⁾ His occupation is given as ‘surveyor and electrical engineer’. In the 1901 census, he states his occupation solely as ‘electrical engineer’. He died 22 October 1909 at 7 Kildare Terrace, Bayswater. His estate was worth as little as £37.⁽³⁾

The terracotta frieze on the Hall façade, showing cutlers at work, is by the sculptor Benjamin Creswick (1853-1946). Creswick had been a pupil of John Ruskin and was a cutler himself from Sheffield. After he had had to leave the trade because of ill-health, he became interested in sculpture. Not many of his works still exist, but you can find an overview here. An article in The British Architect of 6 April 1888 by T. Raffles Davison described the frieze as follows:

“The design comprises four sections-Forging-Grinding Hafting and Fitting (and finishing of scissors). In the first section commencing with the ‘forgers’ the first figure appears plunging the hot scissors into the hardening trough. The next fig. 2 is forging scissors and fig.3 is at the bellows heating the iron and figs 4 and 5 are the maker or ‘smith’ and the ‘striker’ forging table knives. Fig. 6 is bringing a bundle of steel into the smithy.”⁽⁴⁾

(1) Information on the Cutlers’ Company from their website.
(2) London Gazette, 15 March 1887 and 30 April 1889.
(3) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1909.
(4) Information on Creswick from benjamincreswick.org.uk and Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (2003), pp. 429-432.

Dolphin lampposts

Tags

dolphin, lamppost, Vulliamy

Oystergate Walk gets its name from the Oystergate, not a real gate, but one of the wharfs where goods were offloaded from ships for the London markets. Other ‘gates’ were Billingsgate, Botolphsgate, Ebgate, Puddledockgate and Wolfgate. They derived their names either from the goods that were landed there, or from the owners or neighbouring places. Oystergate is easily recognizable as the place where oysters were brought into London. Oystergate Walk is located on the Thames side of Fishmongers´ Hall and is graced with several ´dolphin lampposts’. These lampposts were originally to be found on the Albert and Victoria Embankments (the ´Dolphin Zone´), but they have spread themselves across to South Bank and to Oystergate Walk. They are said to represent sturgeons rather than dolphins, but ‘dolphin lamppost’ is the accepted name, so I’ll stick to that.

dolphin lamppost Oyster walk

The Victoria Embankment was built in the 1860s and 1870s and provided a perfect opportunity for a walkway along the Thames. The Metropolitan Board of Works displayed several designs under consideration and the Illustrated London News and The Builder of 19 March 1870 published pictures of the designs. A favourite was an elaborately ornamented design by Timothy Butler, cast by the Coalbrookdale Company, with climbing boys and overflowing cornucopias. You can still see a Coalbrookdale lamp on the Chelsea Embankment, at the east end of Albert Bridge Gardens (see here).

Illustrated London News Butler/Coalbrookdale design

Illustrated London News Bazalgette design

Joseph Bazalgette designed a more restraint lamp with lion’s paws (modelled by S. Burnett) and you can see those on the Chelsea Embankment. See the last picture in this blog post for the construction of Chelsea Embankment with the Bazalgette lampposts. But for the Victoria and Albert Embankments the design of George John Vulliamy (1817-1886) was chosen. His lamps were said to be designed after the examples Vulliamy had seen on the Fontana del Nettuno in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. They were modelled by C.H. Mabey. See here for the reasoning behind the choice for Vulliamy’s design.

Illustrated London News Vulliamy design

The dolphins on the Fontana del Nettuno, Piazza del Populo, Rome

Vulliamy was educated at Westminster School and started his career at Joseph Bramah & Sons, engineers. In July 1836, he came to work for Charles Barry, but in 1841 he left to travel through France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. He returned to England in 1843 and set up his own business as an architect. He was a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Royal Archaeological Institute, and he exhibited at the Royal Academy. He was elected superintending architect to the Metropolitan Board of Works in March 1861 and in that capacity designed several fire-brigade stations, the pedestal and sphinxes for Cleopatra’s needle on the Embankment and the Embankment lampposts. He resigned in 1886 for health reasons and died in November of that same year.

The building of the Embankments offered a perfect opportunity to install electric light. Charles Dickens in his Dictionary of London of 1879 reports that

The electric light first practically introduced into London by Mr. Hollingshead at the Gaiety Theatre, has been made, during the last few months, the subject at a great number of experiments both public and private. Of the former the most important has been that on the Thames Embankment where the great width of, and the entire absence of all extraneous light from shop windows or public houses on either hand, enabled the rival systems of gas and electricity to try their strength against each other on equal terms. On the conclusion of the period allotted to the first experiment the Board of Works decided upon continuing it on a somewhat larger scale, and an additional length, of the Embankment parapet has accordingly been supplied with electric burners.

The dolphin lampposts have spread from their original location and can now be found in various places, one of them being Oystergate Walk where I took my pictures, another location is Queen’s Walk, which follows the south bank of the River Thames from Lambeth Bridge to Tower Bridge. Queen’s Walk is part of the 1977 Jubilee Walkway and became part of the Thames Path national trail in 1996.

The lampposts have even inspired Moorcroft’s for their London Vase (designer Paul Hilditch).

Moorcroft’s London Vase

Arthur Phillip, the first governor of Sydney, Australia

Tags

Australia, Sydney

In Watling Street stands a gabled monument in memory of the founding of Sydney, Australia by Captain, later Admiral, Arthur Phillip.

Monument Arthur PhillipMonument Arthur Phillip

Arthur Philip was born on the 11th of October, 1738 in the Bread Street Ward and baptised in All Hallows Bread Street Church exactly one month later.⁽¹⁾ His parents were Jacob Phillip, who may have been a language teacher from Frankfurt, but was just as likely a sailor, and Elizabeth Breach, widow of John Herbert, a seaman in the Royal Navy. Arthur had sea-going aspirations as he went to the Royal Naval Hospital School in Greenwich in 1751. He was bound as an apprentice to William Readhead, a whale hunter who went after his catch in the waters around Spitsbergen in the summer and who traded in the Mediterranean in the winter. In 1755, Phillip joined the Navy and proceeded to climb up the naval hierarchy ladder. In 1787, the London Gazette reported that “the King has been please to appoint Arthur Phillip, Esq; to be Captain-General and Governor in Chief of the Territory of New South Wales”. That sounds rather grand, but the reality was that Phillip had to take eleven ships, the First Fleet, with over 700 convicts besides the regular sailors and some officers, to Botany Bay which had been discovered by James Cook a number of year before, in order to start a new colony. And so he did, but not in Botany Bay, which, although lush in vegetation, did not provide enough shelter and fresh water.

Placques on Arthur Phillip’s monument

He established the colony in Port Jackson, an inlet slightly further north from the Bay. Phillip spend five years as governor of Sydney which he named after the British Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, who had been instrumental in granting Phillip the charter authorising him to administer the colony. The settlement went through some rough times as disease was rife and the relief ships were late in bringing much needed supplies, but despite these setbacks, Sydney grew from these small beginnings into a large and prosperous city. Phillip was considered a reasonably fair man who tried to establish good relations with the indigenous people. It is difficult to judge this fairness from our viewpoint of another era where simply taking land from those who live there for you own, or your country’s gain is decidedly frowned upon. Phillip left for England in December 1792 when the colony started to take shape and handed the administration over to Francis Grose, a far less likeable man. Phillip did some more work for the Navy until he fully retired in 1805 to live out his remaining years in Bath. He was buried on 7 September 1814 in St. Nicholas Church, Bathampton.⁽²⁾

Arthur Phillip by Francis Wheatley. Oil on canvas, 1786. NPG 1462
©National Portrait Gallery

Even since James Cook’s discoveries, there had been an interest in information about Australia, and one bookseller in particular, John Stockdale, realised he was on to a good thing. Even before the First Fleet set sail, he published The History of New Holland which was an enlarged edition of An Historical Narrative of the Discovery of New Holland and New South Wales (1786) and as soon as reports started to come in about the new settlement, Stockdale published The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (1789) which was partly based on official government papers.

The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (1789)

Although Stockdale never had any direct help from Phillip, he managed to get the assistance of many men who were in a position to know the latest news about the colony, such as Sir Joseph Banks and Viscount Sydney. The work came out in weekly instalments at a shilling a piece and went through several editions. It is liberally supplied with illustrations of animals that were found in Australia and quite a few maps. The British Library owns a copy bound in kangaroo skin.⁽³⁾

The monument to the foundation of Sydney and to Arthur Phillips has had a history all of its own. It all started in December 1932 when a bronze wall monument was unveiled by Prince George, the later King George VI, in St. Mildred Bread Street Church (see photo here). Phillip was born in the Ward of Bread Street, but had been baptised in All Hallows Bread Street, the neighbouring church. That church had, however, been demolished in 1878 and the monument ended up in St. Mildred’s. But not for long. In April 1941, enemy bombs destroyed the church which was not rebuilt after the war. Various bits of the monument were salvaged and incorporated in a new memorial on the east wall of Gateway House in Cannon Street. That monument was unveiled in May 1968 by the Australian High Commissioner, but, although this version lasted a bit longer than the first one, it again had to make way, this time not because of enemy action, but because of builders’ hammers which demolished Gateway House in 1999. The monument reappeared in its present guise in the garden next to 25 Cannon Street and will hopefully stay there for a very long time.⁽⁴⁾ It is, however, not the original buste that stands at the western end of Watling Street. It is a copy of the one in St. Mary le Bow Church, but at what point the copy was made is unclear to me; was it made before or after the move to Gateway House? The statue in Bow church was unveiled in 1992 and Gateway House was demolished in 1999 which suggests that the memorial on Gateway House was already a copy.

Memorial in St. Mary le Bow

Cambridge University Library holds a collection of material relating to the unveiling of the original monument and to the admiral himself, such as a memorial programme, the guest list and table plan for the luncheon given by Lord Wakefield, the financier of the memorial project, and several addresses given at various services to commemorate Phillip. The papers belonged to Douglas Hope Johnston, the driving force behind the monument and whose great-grandfather had served under Phillip.⁽⁵⁾

Front and back of medallion designed by Henry Webber and made by Josiah Wedgwood of clay from Sydney Cove
©The Trustees of the British Museum

P.S. 1 Oct. 2014: A new memorial has been unveiled in Westminster Abbey for Arthur Phillip, see the post on the Exploring London blog.

(1) London Metropolitan Archives, All Hallows Bread Street, Composite register: baptisms 1723 – 1812, P69/ALH2/A/003/MS05033.
(2) Information on Phillip and on the early years of Sydney from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip 1738-1814. His Voyaging (1987); and Geoffrey Moorhouse, Sydney. The Story of a City (1999).
(3) Eric Stockdale, ’Tis Treason, My Good Man! Four Revolutionary Presidents and a Piccadilly Bookshop (2005), pp. 260-2.
(4) Information about the history of the monument from P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (2003), pp. 432-434.
(5) Cambridge University Library, RCS/RCMS 285/3.

Hay’s Galleria

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David Kemp, Hay's Wharf, insurance, Thames

Hay’s Galleria is named after Alexander Hay who started the Hay empire in 1651 with a lease on a brew-house on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge.⁽¹⁾ Five years later he branched out into pipe-boring. Water was an essential ingredient of beer, so Alexander had a vested interest in a good supply. The New River Company had been supplying fresh water into London via an aqueduct since 1613 and wooden pipes were used to transport that water. John Evelyn in his Sylva explained how these pipes were made from tree trunks with a hole bored through them lengthways.⁽²⁾ Hay had a small tidal creek next to his brew-house which later became Hay’s Dock, but which he probably initially used to store the trunks. The work place became known as Pipe-boarers’ Wharf.

Pipe-boring from John Evelyn, Sylva, 1670

In 1696, Alexander’s son Joseph, with some of his wharfinger neighbours, set up a fire insurance scheme to share the financial risk of a fire, an ever-present threat among the timber warehouses. They called it ‘Contributors for Insuring Houses, Chambers or Rooms from Loss by Fire, by Amicable Contribution’, and is Britain’s oldest mutual Fire Office with its own firemen and fire-engine. By 1720, it became known as the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office which later merged into Commercial Union, now Aviva.⁽³⁾
Somewhere in the early 18th century, in the time of Alexander Hay, grandson of the first Alexander, the wharf received its present name Hay’s Wharf. The Wharf continued to expand, but the Hay family gradually bowed out to Humpherys, Smiths and Magniacs, although the name of Hay’s Wharf was retained. In 1856, the enclosed dock was built by Sir William Cubitt. It became famous for the tea clippers that berthed there, bringing goods from all over the world. Hay’s pioneered cold storage which improved the quality of dairy produce, such as New Zealand butter, considerably. Butter formed a large part of Hay’s trade, but many other items came through the warehouses as well. Richard Church names “coffee-berries, orris-root, nine-and-twenty kinds of tea, geranium oil, and oil of pine”.⁽⁴⁾ The Wharf was rebuilt after the Southwark fire of 1861 and continued to expand and flourish until WWII.

Scene of the fire, Reynolds’s Miscellany 20 July 1861

After the war, trade declined, but the area has been given a new lease of life as an urban redevelopment area providing housing and office space. The Grade II dock itself was permanently closed at the river side and covered over with a floor and roof in the 1980s, resulting in a spectacular covered space, Hay’s Galleria, with a bronze sculpture in the centre. David Kemp’s ‘Navigators’ which was “inspired by the dockside neo-Victorian Architecture of Hays Galleria [… and] strongly prompted by Jules Verne’s stories” was unveiled in 1987.⁽⁵⁾ It is a 60ft bronze kinetic work that looks like the amalgamation of a Viking warrior ship, a dragon, a tea clipper, lots of steam boat funnels, various other marine bit and pieces and plenty of water. Kemp is an artist and sculptor who lives in Cornwall and makes “things out of things, big things, little things, old things and new things. I like to recycle things, and find new uses for things that have been thrown away. Some things say something about their surroundings, and other things become something else.”⁽⁶⁾

David Kemp, The Navigators

Hay’s Galleria

Hay’s Galleria information panel

(1) Most of the information on the early history of the wharf comes from Aytoun Ellis, Three Hundred Years on London River. The Hay’s Wharf Story 1651-1951 (1952).
(2) John Evelyn, Sylva, or, A discourse of forest-trees (1670), p. 175-176.
(3) The minutes of the first meeting do not show the name of Hay as one of the directors, see here.
(4) Richard Church, ‘Hay’s Wharf (A Passacaglia)’ as quoted in Three Hundred Years on London River, p. 6.
(5) http://www.davidkemp.uk.com/blog/steam-punk.html
(6) See David Kemp’s website for more information on his work.