The Plimsoll Line

Tags

transport

This peculiar symbol that looks like some sort of secret code, is in fact the symbol painted on the hull of a ship to ensure the ship is not overloaded. The line through the middle of the circle is known as the International Load Line, Plimsoll line or water line, and that line is not to disappear under water when the ship is loaded up. When Samuell Plimsoll (1824-1898) came up with the scheme, the circle and the horizontal line where all that was required, but over time the additional symbol on the right was added to allow for different water conditions and hence different water densities.

Plimsoll was not the first to come up with the idea; there were already loading regulations in Crete 2,500 BC and in the Venetian Republic, and the city of Genoa and the Hanseatic League required ships to show a load line. In the case of Venice this was a cross marked on the side of the ship, and for Genoa three horizontal lines. In the 1860s, losses of ships through overloading increased dramatically and Samuel Plimsoll set out to find a solution. In 1867, he tried to get a bill passed through Parliament dealing with the load line question, but in vain as there were too many shipowning MPs who feared for their profits. Subsequently, Plimsoll published Our Seamen. An Appeal in which he set out his concerns and solution. Following the publication, a Royal Commission on unseaworthy ships was set up. In 1876, the United Kingdom Merchant Shipping Act made the load line mark compulsory.

On 14 February 1928, almost 30 years after Plimsoll’s death, a notice appeared in The Times, announcing plans to erect a statue to honour Plimsoll.

Permission is being sought from the Office of Works to set up, at the Westminster end of the Embankment, a statue of Samuel Plimsoll, known as “the Sailors’ Friend”, and the originator of the load line for British shipping. The statue which weighs three tons, is of bronze on a granite base, and is the work of Mr. P.V. Blundstone, of Kensington. The Seamen’s Union decided, instead of endeavouring to raise money for the memorial by public subscription, to defray the cost themselves. Mr. J. Havelock Wilson, the president of the National Union of Seamen, said that the idea of a memorial to Plimsoll had been in the minds of those associated with the seamen’s movement for some time. Seafarers from all parts of the world would attend the ceremony.

It took a year and a half to sort out the permission and logistics, but the Daily Mail of 21 August, 1929, could announce in their ‘To-day’s events’ column that “Sir Walter Runciman unveils memorial to Samuel Plimsoll, Victoria Embankment Gardens”. A very short announcement, but one with a lasting result as we can still walk past the gardens (on the outside, at the Embankment side) to see the statue.

Although plimsoll or plimsole shoes, that is shoes with canvas uppers and a rubber sole, had been known since the 1830s, they only had a name change from ‘sand shoe’ to ‘plimsole’ in the 1870s, because the horizontal line on the rubber resembled the plimsoll line on ships. And as with ships, if the water came above the line, you got wet.

More information on the Plimsoll Line and on Samuel Plimsoll himself on the Wikipedia-pages here and here.

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The statue of Béla Bartók

In 1922, the Hungarian composer Béla Viktor János Bartók (1881-1945) came to London for the first time. He stayed at the home of Sir Duncan and Lady Wilson at 7 Sydney Place in South Kensington, as he was to do on all his later visits. The house now bears a blue plaque to commemorate Bartók’s visits (see here).

Folk music had always influenced Bartók’s music and he travelled extensively to study the music of other countries. In 1913, for instance, he went to North Africa to study Arabic folk music and in 1936, he went to Turkey, but his own backyard, so to speak, was not forgotten and he toured Hungary, Romania and Slovakia to collect folk songs. His collections are now kept at the Ethnographical Museum of Budapest and in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.⁽¹⁾ But music was not his only interest. He collected shells, plants, insects and Hungarian furniture.⁽²⁾

Watercolour of Bartók by Ervin Voit c. 1900

Bartók was strongly opposed to the ideas of the Nazis and abhorred Hungary’s siding with Germany. From the early 1930s, he refused to perform in Germany and after the outbreak of World War II, his anti-fascist views caused him more and more problems. In October 1940, he and his wife decided to flee to America, first sending his manuscripts on and following later themselves. Bartók died in New York in September 1945 of leukemia at the age of 64. His body was interred in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York, and it was only in the late 1980s that the political situation had changed enough for a request to transfer his body to Budapest for re-burial became possible. Hungary gave him a state funeral on July 7, 1988. He was then finally laid to rest alongside his wife Ditta who had died in 1982.

There were already statues for Bartók in Budapest, Brussels, and Paris before the one in London was unveiled on 2 October 2004 on a traffic island in South Kensington. It shows Bartók nattily dressed in coat and hat. The statue was designed by Imre Varga (1923-), one of Hungary’s most important living artists, who came to London to see the statue unveiled. The whole schedule for the festive day can be seen on the website of the Peter Warlock Society (see here). Peter Warlock had been instrumental in bringing Bartók to London in 1922 and his own music was greatly influenced by the way folk music was incorporated into Bartók’s. Unfortunately, the statue had to make way in April 2009 for road redevelopments and it was not until 24 September 2011 that it was repositioned and unveiled for a second time; quite close to where it was before. See for the old situation here (look for number 46) and for the second unveiling here. It is to be hoped that the statue does not have to be moved again and Bartók’s likeness in bronze with the little bird on the base of stainless steel leaves will remain where it is for anyone to see coming out of the Underground station.

(1) Man, January 1947, p. 14; Sylvia B. Parker, “Béla Bartók’s Arab Music Research and Composition” in Studia Musicologica, 49/3-4 (2008), pp. 407-458.
(2) Hugh D. Loxdale and Adalbert Balog, “Béla Bartók Musician, Musicologist, Composer … and Entomologist!” in Antenna, 33/4 (2009).

Robert Clayton

Tags

medicine, philanthrophy

Portrait Clayton from Old and New London, vol. 1

Robert Clayton (1629-1707) came originally from Northamptonshire, but became an apprentice scrivener to his uncle in London. A scrivener can be described as a cross between a moneylender and a scribe, often acting as a broker or notary. After Clayton’s apprenticeship, he set up on his own and, together with a fellow apprentice, John Morris, took over his uncle’s bank. They renamed it Clayton & Morris Co. His uncle left him a fortune and when Morris died without issue, he also left a considerable sum to Clayton, so he became very wealthy. Clayton had a finger in many pies, first as Alderman of the Cheap Ward, as sheriff, as Lord Mayor, as MP, as colonel in the militia, as governor of the Bank of England and much more.

statue of Robert Clayton at St. Thomas’s Hospital

On 26 September, 1672, John Evelyn wrote in his Diary that he went to dinner at Sir Robert Clayton’s with Lord Howard and they had “a great feast” there. Clayton was at that time Sheriff of London and had just built himself a new house at 8 Old Jewry. Evelyn remarks that the house was “built indeed for a great magistrate, at excessive cost. The cedar dining-room is painted with the history of the Giants’ War, incomparably done by Mr. Streeter, but the figures are too near the eye”. A few years later Clayton bought an estate at Marden, Godstone, Surrey, from a kinsman of Evelyn. They travelled together to Clayton’s new home on 12 October 1677 where Evelyn saw that Clayton had transformed “a despicable farm-house […] into a seat with extraordinary expense”. Evelyn’s description gives us a good idea of Clayton’s house and grounds:

The gardens are large, and well-walled […] The barnes, & the stacks of corn, the stalls for cattle, pigeon-house, &c. of most laudable example. Innumerable are the plantations of trees, especially walnuts. The orangery and gardens are very curious. In the house are large and noble rooms. He and his lady (who is very curious in distillery) entertained me three or four days very freely. […] This place is exceedingly sharp in the winter, by reason of the serpentining of the hills: and it wants running water; but the solitude much pleased me. All the ground is so full of wild thyme, marjoram, and other sweet plants, that it cannot be over-stocked with bees; I think he had near forty hives of the industrious insect.

Clayton’s house at Old Jewry ©British Museum

Clayton’s house at Marden Park (Source: Grosvenor Prints)

Clayton did use his wealth for numerous good causes and he was a major benefactor of Christ’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, but it is for the latter that he is probably best remembered. Thomas’s Hospital was first located in Southwark, but in the 1680s, it was considered to be in such a state of dilapidation that patching up was not an option and a complete re-building was envisaged. Funds were, however, a problem. A subscription scheme was set up in 1693. Clayton contributed £600 towards the rebuilding and was later to endow the hospital in his will with a further £2300. But Clayton was not the only major benefactor: Thomas Guy and Thomas Frederick paid for wards to be put up, Sir John Wolfe gave fifty pounds and portraits of the King and Queen, Thomas Gudden gave reading desks and bibles for the patients, Captain John Howard paid for the interior of the chapel, and many lesser-known people gave sums between 10 and 100 pounds. And money kept flowing in even after the new hospital had been built. Benjamin Golding gives a complete list of benefactors in his book on the history of the hospital.⁽¹⁾

Site of St. Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark on Horwood’s map of 1799

In 1701 (Matthews says 1702), a statue of Clayton was erected in the square built at his expense. According to Golding, it had Clayton’s arms on the south side of the pedestal and a – rather wordy – inscription on the north side. The statue had been ordered from Grinling Gibbons, although it was possibly made by his workshop rather than by the artist himself.⁽²⁾ By order of the Governors of the hospital, the inscription was altered slightly in 1714 when the statue was “beautified and improved” “as a compliment to his virtues and to perpetuate his memory”. In 1862, a compulsorily purchase order had forced the hospital to make way for the Charing Cross Railway viaduct. It temporarily moved to Newington until, in 1871, the new building further west along the Thames at Lambeth was opened. Fortunately for us, the hospital had the sense to take Clayton’s statue with them when they moved from Southwark to Lambeth. The right hand and scroll are replacements to rectify the damage done by a medical student climbing the statue when drunk.⁽³⁾ The statue itself was moved several times, but since 2000, it stands in a small garden in a quiet corner of the hospital grounds, close to the river.

(1) Benjamin Golding, An Historical Account of St. Thomas’s Hospital, Southwark (1819).
(2) Peter Matthews, London’s Statues and Monuments (2012), p. 187.
(3) Matthews, p. 188.

Cordwainer

Tags

cordwainer

A statue of a cordwainer can be found in Watling Street at the Queen Victoria Street end, beside the wall of St. Mary Aldermary Church. A cordwainer is basically a shoemaker. The word derived from the Spanish town of Córdoba in Andalusia where high quality leather was produced. It was originally made from the skin of Musoli goats which was tawed with alum after a secret method only known to the Moors. The Crusaders brought the fine leather back to England and it became the material of choice for the best quality footwear.

In February 2002, this statue was unveiled by Alderman Sir Brian Jenkins, president of the Cordwainer Club. Not, by the way, in Watling Street, but in the courtyard of St Mary Le Bow Church where it stood for a couple of years before being moved to its present location. The statue was a joint initiative by the City of London Corporation and the Ward of Cordwainer Club to mark the 100th anniversary of the Ward Club.

original position of the statue at Bow’s (Source: Alma Boyes)

The cordwainer statue was made by Alma Boyes who signed her name on the statue’s right hip (see photo below).She is a sculptor who was awarded a British Council scholarship in 1979 and worked with William Tymym on life-size bronzes of animals for zoos. She teaches ceramics at the University of Brighton since 1982. Her website can be found here. The cordwainer was cast by the Morris Singer foundry; you can just see their mark under Alma Boyes’s name. On their website they proclaim that “Morris Singer’s origins date back to 1848 and is recognised worldwide as the oldest fine art foundry in the world, where traditional values meet contemporary craftsmanship with quality and excellence throughout.”

The panel on the front of the statue explaining what the statue is about is still there, but the one on the side is missing. You can still see it on the picture of the statue in the courtyard of Bow Church and London Remembers has transcribed both the plaques. The missing panel contained the names of the contributors to the statue.

Cordwainer Ward is one of the smaller City wards and was traditionally the area were the shoemakers and leather workers lived and worked. James Elmes in his Topographical Dictionary of London and its Environs (1831) describes it as extending “from Walbrook eastward along Watling-street, to Red-Lion-court westward, and its principal streets are Bow Lane, Queen-street, Budge-row, Little St. Thomas Apostle, Pancras Lane, Size Lane, Basing Lane and a part of Watling-street”. For a clear modern map of the Ward see the post by Hidden London. The Ward was divided into eight precincts and served by three churches: St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Mary Aldermary and St. Antholin’s. The latter church was demolished in 1875 to make way for Queen Victoria Street; the parish was joined to that of St. Mary Aldermary.

Bread Street and Cordwainers Wards from J. Noorthouck, A New History of London, including Westminster and Southwark (1773)

coat of arms cordwainers

The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers dates back at least to 1272 – there is a written document from that year – but perhaps it is even older. They obtained their Royal Charter in 1439 from Henry IV which gave them the right to own property and a hall. Although guilds started as organisations to control the trade and protect the rights of their members, many lost much of that focus over the centuries, especially after the Industrial Revolution, and the emphasis is now very much on charitable work and education. The Cordwainers provide scholarships, bursaries and prizes, and they promote the shoe industry in general.

stained glass cordwainers (Source: website St. Mary Aldermary)

Over the centuries, the Company has had five – not six as the blue plaque suggests – Halls in Great Distaff Lane. The lane was absorbed into Cannon Street when that street was extended and widened in 1853-4 and all that is now left of the site of the halls is a plaque in St. Paul’s Churchyard to mark the spot. The earliest Cordwainers’ Hall is recorded in 1440, so right after they obtained their Charter. It was rebuilt in 1577, destroyed in the Great Fire, rebuilt again in 1670, in 1788 and in 1910. After this last building was destroyed in the Blitz, it was decided not to rebuild yet again, but to move in with the Clothworkers in Dunster Court, Mincing Lane.

The one but last Cordwainers Hall from T. H. Shepherd & James Elmes. London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century (1831)

Cobblers and cordwainers, although both dealing in shoes were two distinct occupations. To put it simply, cordwainers made new shoes, cobblers repaired shoes. This is a gross oversimplification, but I am sure, you get the point. In 1395, the cobblers brought a suit against the cordwainers because they felt threatened by them and the age of the leather used was from then on to be the distinction. Cobblers were forbidden to make new shoes with new leather and cordwainers were forbidden to repair shoes.⁽¹⁾ The cobblers got round the injunction by salvaging old leather and making ‘new’ shoes out of that. In the sixteenth century, the two Companies merged and henceforth, both cobblers and cordwainers were members of the Cordwainers’ Company. Over the centuries, the distinction blurred even more, not least because shoe shops no longer all make or repair shoes, but the two terms still persist and if you wants your shoes repaired, you still go to a cobbler.

Delft blue tile (Source: Nederlands Tegelmuseum via Geheugen van Nederland)

Schoolplaat (Source: De Kantlijn)

The shoemaker (1907) from Wikipedia Commons

(1) M. Pelner Cosman and L.G. Jones, Handbook to Life in the Medieval World (2008), p. 195. Also see: W.M. Stern, “Control vs.freedom in leather production from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century” in The Guildhall Miscellany, II (1968), p. 438-42.

Window cleaner

Because of the holiday season, this time just a short post on a statue that makes you smile. On Chapel street, just outside Edgware Road Underground station, stands a bronze statue of a window cleaner.

window cleaner by Allan Sly

The sculpture itself is not particularly funny seen from the viewpoint in the photo above, but stand on the opposite pavement and look back towards Capital House, a huge office block, and the humour becomes apparent. The poor man has every reason to take off his cap and scratch his head at seeing so much glass while being equipped with just a small ladder.

looking up to Capital House

Apparently, the artist’s remit set by Capital House was to produce a statue “expressing a wry sense of humour” and he certainly succeeded.

Allan Sly (1951-) studied sculpture at the city and guilds of London Art School for 1971 to 1974, followed by postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Art, London from 1974 to 1977. He is now a senior lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art. His ‘Window Cleaner’ of 1990 is one of his earliest public works, but more of his work can be seen around London, e.g. ‘The Messenger’ at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, much in the news these days for a different reason. Read a fuller list of Sly’s activities here.

Willing House

Tags

advertising, Aumonier, Willing, Young

This statue of Mercury stands on top of Willing House in Gray’s Inn Road. It is now a Travelodge hotel, but it was once the home of the Willing family. They made their name in advertising, their activities ranging from book stalls and posters to billboard advertising. The Beamish Museum has one of their metal advertising boards (see here). The statue of Mercury, or Hermes, the messenger of the gods and responsible for the communication between the worlds of gods and men, is rather appropriate. Bill-posting was a lucrative business and one of the largest contractors in London was Willing and Co, founded in 1840. They arranged for the wall space, found the advertisers, and arranged the printing and pasting up of the posters. A contractor had the right to a certain wall or hoarding space, often paying good money for it, and employed regular bill-stickers. Those most proficient and capable of climbing ladders with poster and glue without getting the paper torn in the wind could claim higher wages and were called ladder-men.

Street Advertising (Source: Digital Library at LSE)

Wall space was essential in this competitive world of advertising and one journalist wrote:

The value of advertising space, where it is secured and not subject to obliteration inflicted by some rival “fly-paster,” is absolutely fabulous. More than £300 a month was paid a short time ago for some hoardings in Queen Victoria Street; and, altogether, I was assured by a gentleman who has been in the trade for a long time, and enjoys every opportunity of making a fair estimate, that upwards of £60,000 was paid annually for the possession of hoarding and wall space in London to let out to advertisers. Indeed, so much money is made in this way, that there are certain houses standing in conspicuous places by the railway lines, which are not pulled down, though in ruins, because it pays the owners better to let the outside walls for advertising than to let the interior for dwelling purposes.⁽¹⁾

Alfred Cecil Calmour gives us an insight in the cost of advertising for a play. He listed the costs he had made for one of his plays that he tried in a morning performance at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1883. The cost of advertising came to £7 3s. 7d. and posting by Willing & Co. had cost £1 while the total production, including actors, had come to “seventy odd pounds”.⁽²⁾

Automotor Journal 1903

The bookstalls of Willing and Co. turn up in the addresses where magazines and journals are for sale, such as this one in The Automotor Journal of 1903. But the firm also had works published in their own name, the most well-known being Willing’s British and Irish Press Guide which, according to the write-up in The Electrician of 19 April, 1895, was “the handiest book of the kind published. The method adopted in dividing the book into sections lends itself to ready reference”. The guide was first published in 1874 and is still published today, no longer by Willing, but by Cision.

But not everything was as great a success as their Press Guide. William Tinsley relates how James Willing senior wanted to start a new monthly periodical “England in the nineteenth Century” which was however stopped after most of the work had been done for the first issue, because not enough advertisers were interested in the project, and, as Tinsley states, “the monetary success of any daily paper, or weekly, or monthly, or quarterly magazine, depends to a great extent upon the number of advertisements it contains”.⁽³⁾

Willing House

The red brick building on Gray’s Inn Road stands on a site that was first developed as a residential area in the second half of the 18th century by John and Richard Smart. The Metropolitan Railway (±1861) cut through some of the houses; the north corner of the Willing site is now situated over the railway tracks. By the 1890s, the Willing family occupied number 366 which stretched from the Gray’s Inn Road, along St. Chad’s Place to Wicklow Street where they had their stables. They gradually acquired and developed the rest of the site to what is now the Travelodge hotel at 356-364 Gray’s Inn Road. From 1910 onwards, their architects were Alfred Hart (1866-1953) and Leslie Waterhouse (1864-1932) who designed the house in the ‘Free Baroque’ style which is called ‘a free mix of Tudor and Baroque elements’, although the Listed building site just calls it ‘French Baroque’. Over the years, smaller and larger alterations have been made to the building complex. In the 1970s – the building had by then been acquired by the Haslemere Group – substantial moderations were made to the place to create more office space, but the frontage has remained more or less what it was.⁽⁴⁾ Although the site had been included in a plan for the development of the King’s Cross area, the 1974 Grade II listing changed all that. I’ll just quote the beginning of the description here:

Irregular facade of 3 storeys and attics, 5 storeys right hand bay. Left hand 3 bays forming a slightly projecting pavilion with round-arched central main entrance. Pilasters flanking entrance surmounted by large winged lions supporting a great 7-light bowed window with enriched apron, segmental headed lights and pilasters supporting a cornice and domed roof in an arched recess. To either side, transom and mullion casements with aprons; 1st floor with segmental-arched enrichment with small keystones. 2nd floor with paired stone Ionic columns to outer bays, flanking 2-light windows and supporting a modillion entablature with round-arched balustrade (piers with swags and features terminating in balls) over. Central dormer with transom and mullion casement flanked by scrolled consoles. Roof surmounted by a statue of Mercury.⁽⁵⁾

The statue of Mercury is by Arthur Stanley Young (1876-1968). It was made from cast and sheet bronze sculpted around a hand-carved elm structure. It was recently restored to its former glory by Rupert Harris Conservation. When they analysed the paint, it transpired that Mercury had originally been painted in a pale grey and that the caduceus had been gilded. He has been repainted and regilded and now proudly stands once again surveying the area from above.

work on Mercury (Source: Rupert Harris Conservation)

The frieze above the porch that seems to be resting on two winged lions, was carved by William Aumonier (1891-1943), the father of Eric Aumonier who designed the reliefs in the lobby of the Daily Express building.

frieze by William Aumonier

(1) Adolphe Smith, “Street Advertising” in John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Street Life in London [1877], pp. 22-23.
(2) Alfred Cecil Calmour, Practical Playwriting and the Cost of Production [1891], pp. 55-56.
(3) “An Interesting Speculation Nipped in the Bud” in William Tinsley, Random Collections of an Old Publisher (1900), vol. 1, pp. 96-103.
(4) The information on the history of the building has come largely from a Report on Willing House by Paul Drury FSA ARICS IHBC (now Drury McPherson Partnership), 2000.
(5) The full listing can be read here.

Fishmongers’ Hall

Tags

Alfred Turner, fish, Thames

This post is closely related to the previous one on Billingsgate fish market, because the Fishmongers’ Company has been responsible for the quality of produce on that market for centuries. The Company is one of the London guilds and has existed for at least 700 years. It used to be called the Stock Fishmongers’ Company, but it got its present name when it merged with the Salt Fishmongers’ Company in 1537.

In 1666, Fishmongers’ Hall was destroyed in the Great Fire, but because of its location so close to the river, the papers and valuables could easily be transported to safety. Although the Fire was an absolute disaster, it did give the Company the opportunity to rebuild the hall on a grander scale.

Fishmongers’ Hall from W. Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2

In 1828, another external event, albeit this time not as catastrophic as the Fire, gave the Company the opportunity to build a new Hall once again. The post-Fire building was by then in need of urgent repairs and when part of the site was needed for New London Bridge, the Company enlisted an architect to design them a new Hall. The building, designed by Henry Roberts with the assistance of Gilbert Scott and built by Thomas Cubitt, was completed in 1835 and has an arcaded gallery at the water’s edge. The wharf is now part of the walkway (Thames Path) and freely accessible.

The front of Fishmongers’ Hall on Upper Thames Street. Steel engraving from The History of London, ed. W.G. Fearnside, engraved by J. Woods, 1838

The lamps on Fishmongers’ Hall

Detail of the lamp

In the staircase niche on the Thames side of the Hall stand statues of a fisherman and a fishergirl. The marble girl was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901 and she was placed, with her male companion at Fishmongers’ Hall in 1902. The sculptor, Alfred Turner (1874-1940), had been given the commission in 1899 when the hall was being redecorated and he was paid 1200 guineas in total for the two statues. Alfred was the son of sculptor Charles Edward Halsey Turner and had entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1895. His most well-known works are the friezes at the Old Bailey and the horse with two men on top of the South Africa War Memorial at Delville Wood, France.⁽¹⁾

Statues by Alfred Turner

The Hall is not open to the public, but guided tours are possible, see here.

(1) Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (2003), p. 482; and Wikipedia.

The Weeping Monument of Edward Cooke

Tags

Cromwell, Ireland, medicine, St. Bartholomew-the-Great

Many tourists have walked past the grand porch of St. Bartholomew-the-Great on the corner of West Smithfield and Little Britain, perhaps on their way to the Victorian pile of Smithfield market, but very few tourists take the trouble to go through the arch, along the path and into the church. What now appears to be a separate porch used to be the west front of the actual church. The church itself was part of the monastery of the Augustinian Canons and much larger than it is today, but in 1539, the nave was destroyed as the result of Henry VIII’s Dissolution. The rest of the church was allowed to remain as a parish church and what is now the path from the porch to the church door used to be – roughly – the south aisle of the nave.

Once inside, the hustle and bustle of the street is no longer to be heard and one can pretend to be back in 1652 when the stone monument for Edward Cooke was erected. It is attributed to Thomas Burman (1617/18–1674)⁽¹⁾ and known as the ‘weeping statue’, because the moisture in the atmosphere used to be soaked up by the soft marble and miraculously released again as ‘tears’ from time to time. Alas, the Victorians installed a radiator under the monument which put a stop to the moisture releasing properties of the stone, so no more miracle.
Under the effigy is a tablet with the text:

Hic inhvmatvm svccvbat, qvantvm terrestre: viri
Vere venerandi, Edwardi Cooke Philosophi
Apprime docti nec non Medici spectatissimi
Qvi tertio Idvs Avgvsti Anno Dom. 1652.
Annoq[ue] ætatis 39, certa resvrgendi spe
(vtinecesse) natvræ concessit.

Or in English: Here lies interred all that is mortal of a truly reverend man, Edward Cooke, an exceedingly learned Philosopher as well as a very notable man of medicine, who, on the third of the ides [the 11th] of August A.D. 1652, and in the 39th year of his age, yielded perforce to nature in the sure hope of a resurrection.⁽²⁾
A second text on the plaque refers to the weeping nature of the stone:

Vnsluce yo^r briny floods, what can yee keepe
Yo^r eyes from teares, & see the marble weepe
Burst out for shame: or if yee find noe vent
For teares, yet stay, and see the stones relent.

Edward Cooke

Despite the fact that Edward died relatively young at 39 years of age, he had amassed a reasonable amount of property. He had lands in Lincolnshire which were given to him by his father-in-law Timothy Wade at the time of his marriage.⁽³⁾ The combined coats of arms of the Cooke and Wade families can be seen under the tablet referring to the statue’s moisture properties. Edward owned a property in Lime Street, presumably that was were he lived, and he had property in Friday Street which was rented out.
He also had shares in ‘bills of Ireland’, a scheme put forward by the Cromwellian Parliament to anglicize Ireland in order to control the stubborn Irish who did not want to accept English rule. Every person who contributed to the scheme was to receive land, estates or manors according to their contribution, or ‘adventure’ as it was also called. The subscription began in 1642, but it took till 1653 for the lands to be given out, so Edward Cooke never reaped the rewards himself. He had inherited his shares from his father, also Edward, an apothecary who died in 1644, and from his brother John, who died later that same year.⁽⁴⁾ Edward Cooke senior also invested in the Massachusetts Company and even sent his other son Robert, whom he had trained to be an apothecary, across the Atlantic. Edward senior had invested 100 pounds for which Robert was given the right to 800 acres of land in the new colony.⁽⁵⁾

Edward was baptised on 14 November 1613 at St. Dionis Backchurch, and became, as the monument in St. Barts already states, a medical man, consistently described as ‘Doctor of Physick’ in the parish registers. J. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922) lists him as entering Sidney College, Cambridge at the age of 17 on 22 Oct. 1630. He received his M.A. in 1638 and his M.D. in 1644. In between his M.A. and his M.D., he went abroad – not unusual for well-to-do Englishmen – to broaden his experience and to study at other European universities. We find Edward at Leyden registering himself on the 1st of June, 1639 and at Padua in October 1641.⁽⁶⁾

Edward died the 11th of August 1652 and was buried at St. Barts on the 14th; he left a wife and two children. He had married Mary Wade on 9 December 1645 at St. Helen Bishopsgate and four sons were born during the marriage, but two died young.⁽⁷⁾ Edward left most of his wealth to his wife and on her death to his sons, first to Edward and if he should die before his wife, to Robert.

(1) http://www.churchmonumentssociety.org and A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851 (http://217.204.55.158/henrymoore/index.php)
(2) ‘Monuments, memorials and heraldry’, The records of St. Bartholomew’s priory [and] St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield: volume 2 (1921), pp. 449-487.
(3) PROB 11/224/348.
(4) John Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1870) and John Pentland Mahaffey, Irish State Papers 1641 to 1659, vol. 4 (1903).
(5) Letters of 1638 and 1649 from Edward Cooke to John Wintrop in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863, p. 381-384.
(6) Album studiosorum Academiae Lugduno Batavae MDLXXV-MDCCCLXXV, compiled by W.N. Du Rieu, 1875 and www.rcpe.ac.uk/library/read/people/english-students/
(7) Baptism and burial register of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate: baptised 23 Oct. 1646 Edward (buried 21 Nov. 1646); baptised 16 Nov. 1647 Edward; baptised 19 Feb. 1650 Timothy (buried 12 Aug. 1650); also mentioned in the will is a son Robert, but I have not found a record of his baptism.

Philanthropist George Peabody

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Peabody, philanthrophy, Royal Exchange

On 23 July 1869, the Prince of Wales unveiled a statue of George Peabody (1795-1869), the American merchant banker and philanthropist. It stands at the north-east corner of the Royal Exchange in what was once St. Benet Fink’s Churchyard. It was designed by William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), a fellow American who spent most of his time in Rome. Story was chosen after a design competition and was paid £2,300 for the work. Sir Benjamin Phillips, the chairman of the Peabody Memorial Committee stated that the statue was a symbol of the gratitude of the English people to Peabody for all he had done for the poor of London.

Statue of Peabody

Designer and sculptor Story

Unveiling of Peabody’s statue
Source: Illustrated London News, 31 July 1869

Peabody had been born in New England in a time of rapid growth. He started collecting his fortune in Baltimore and did much to promote the railway lines to the West. In the Civil War, he acted as an unofficial diplomat to pave the way for Lincoln’s side, because he was a fervent abolitionist. After the War, he donated a large sum of money to set up an education system in the Southern States for both black and white people. Rather than collecting books, art or other things to be stored for private delight, he preferred “practical philanthropy as an investment for the sake of happiness”.⁽¹⁾

Portrait of Peabody in the London Illustrated News, 20 November 1869

In 1837 Peabody moved to London where he continued in business and also to share his wealth with those he thought needed it most. In a letter to his Trustees, published by The Times on Wednesday 26 March 1862, he announced the establishment of the Peabody Donation Fund to “relieve the poor and needy of this great city, and to promote their comfort and happiness”. The fund started with £150,000, but was increased by Peabody later in life and also by a bequest in his will, so that by 1873 when the bequest was made available to the trustees, the capital had grown to £500,000. The main activity of the fund was – and still is – to provide decent housing. The first Peabody Estate opened in 1864 in Spitalfields.⁽²⁾
Unfortunately, due to illness, Peabody could not be present at the unveiling of his statue. He had gone to America, according to the Illustrated Police News

“very unexpectedly, and without letting his departure to be known beyond a narrow circle of his friends. But the fact of his embarkation and of his extremely feeble health, found its way into the English journals, and soon came to the knowledge of her Majesty, who, with, that goodness of heart that has always characterised her […] gave immediate expression to her feelings in the following autograph note […] Windsor Caste, June 20, 1869: The Queen is very sorry that Mr. Peabody’s sudden departure has made it impossible for her to see him before he left England, and she is concerned to hear that he has gone in ill health. She now writes him a line to express her hope that he may return to this country quite recovered, and that she may have the opportunity of which she has now been deprived, of seeing him and offering him her personal thanks for all he has done for the people.”⁽³⁾

Source: openplaques.com

Peabody did come back to England, but he did not recover his health and died on the 4th of November that same year at Sir Curtis Lampson’s residence at 80 Eaton Square where a blue plaque can be seen on the wall.

It had been his wish to be buried in the tomb he had built for his mother in Danvers, but that did not happen before a service was held in Westminster Abbey attended by representatives of the American government, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. The funeral procession from Eaton Square also included the carriages of the Queen and the Prince of Wales decked out in mourning. Peabody’s remains were transferred to H.M.S. Monarch on the 26th to be transported to the U.S. Most newspapers carried a story about Peabody after his death, but the Illustrated Police News and the Illustrated London News also included an illustration of the service in Westminster Abbey.

Illustrated Police News, 20 November 1869, front page

Illustrated London News, 20 November 1869

Peabody’s name is still found in combination with numerous social and philanthropic activities both in London and in America, some of which are known under various names, although they are in fact one and the same, but they are all part of the Peabody organisation, now known simply as Peabody: Peabody Dwellings, Peabody Estate, Peabody Buildings, Peabody Trust, Peabody Institute, Peabody Academy, Peabody Museum, Peabody Library and the Peabody Conservatoire.

I like to thank Christine Wagg of Peabody for her helpful comments.
(1) Illustrated London News, 20 November 1869, Obituary.
(2) The website of the Peabody organisation can be found here.
(3) The Illustrated Police News, issue 285, Saturday, 31 July 1869.

King Lud

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Elizabeth I, King Lud, Ludgate, St. Dunstan-in-the-West

This lovely sandal belongs to one of the sons of King Lud whose statue used to stand on Ludgate, the western entrance to the City. Ludgate was built in 1586 after previous versions of the gate had not stood the test of time. It was rebuilt once again after the Great Fire of 1666, but finally demolished in 1760. According to Thomas Pennant, the remains were sold for 148 pounds, the purchaser to remove the rubbish.⁽¹⁾ The statue of Lud and his sons Androgeus and Theomantius (also called Tenvantius) had stood on top of the gate on the eastern side, while Queen Elizabeth I guarded the west side. When the gate was demolished, the statues were brought to St. Dunstan–in-the-West in Fleet Street where they live in the tiny court yard. When I went round in September, Elizabeth had been boarded up to protect her from the maintenance work that was being done, but the Gentle Author recently posted an old photograph on his blog Spitalfields Life which shows her statue.

Elizabeth I at St. Dunstan-in-the-West
Source: spitalfieldslife.com

As Lud was protected by the porch, he was not boarded up and still there to be seen, and although the son has a sandal on his foot, several other feet of the family are missing, nor do they have many arms between them; the centuries have not been kind.

King Lud and his sons in the porch of St. Dunstan-in-the-West

The name of the gate still survives in Ludgate Hill, but the link with King Lud, a Celtic king who ruled the country in pre-Roman times, is almost certainly apocryphal, originating with Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and repeated at the end of the sixteenth century by John Stow.⁽²⁾ Richard Verstegan had his own reason for rejecting King Lud as the namegiver of the gate as, according to him, “it could never of Lud be called Ludgate, because gate is no British word, & had it taken name of Lud it must have bin Ludporth, and not Ludgate”.⁽³⁾ Whatever the linguistic truth of that statement, the name is now thought to have derived from Old English ‘hlidgeat’, ‘swing gate’.

Ludgate from Stow’s Survey (1733 edition)

Ludgate Prison was established in the gatehouse in 1378 for petty offenders such as debtors; serious offenders went to Newgate prison. These debtors even gave rise to the now obsolete term Ludgathians.⁽⁴⁾ In 1712, a curious booklet was issued, called The Present State of the Prison of Ludgate. In typical seventeenth and early eighteenth-century style, the title-page is rather verbose, stating that the purpose of the text is “Fully discovering all its customs, privileges, and advantages, whereby it exceeds all other prisons, and particularly shewing what treatment the prisoners meet with from their first entrance to their discharge”. And if that was not enough, the author continues with “useful remarks and pertinent observations on the former state thereof. Interspers’d with divers pleasant relations of the humours of the prisoners … Together with an account of divers impositions and innovations lately introduc’d”. And all that to show that “imprisonment is not so exceeding dreadful as some imagine”. This rather disagrees with the qualification Pennant gave later that century, “a wretched prison for debtors”.⁽⁵⁾ The author of the booklet remains anonymous, using the pseudonymous ‘Philopolites’ to sign his dedication, but it is most certainly a defence against allegations made that not all was well in the prison and prisoners are exploited. Prisoners – and remember they were put there for debt – had to pay for all sorts of things, for sheets, for lamps and candles and for food, but, according to Philopolites, all is done according to fair rules and regulations and properly accounted for in the books. The lady [or in this case probably the man] doth protest too much, methinks.
You can read the whole pamphlet here.

(1) Thomas Pennant, Some Account of London (1790; 5th ed. 1813), p. 318.
(2) Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (±1136); John Stow, A Survey of London (1598).
(3) Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in antiquities (1634), p. 136.
(4) Ben Jonson, The comicall satyre of euery man out of his humor, (1600) unpaginated, signature C4v “Alwaies beware you commerce not with bankrupts, or poore needie Ludgathians”.
(5) Thomas Pennant, Some Account of London (1790; 5th ed. 1813), p. 319.