Video Wednesday - Stately Home Renovations

Dumfries House

Prince Charles - the Royal Restoration of Dumfries House - Documentary 46 minutes.


Tim Wonnacott and Rosemary Shrager visit some of the castles, palaces and stately homes frequented by Queen Victoria during her lifetime. They begin with Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. 30 minutes.


I Own Britain's Best Home - The Yorkshire Castle, a renovated folly.  10 minutes.


Grand Designs - The Dilapidated Georgian House- 55 minutes.


Tour round the interior of abandoned Berkyn Manor. 4 minutes.


Wentworth Woodhouse - the incredible, sinking stately home. 3 minutes.


Restoration Home - Stoke Hall. 49 minutes

And From Elsewhere On The Web . . . . .

We thought we'd pass along some interesting posts we've stumbled upon lately - something for everyone. Enjoy!




The Momento Moriatas - Killed By A Coffin, And Other Tales of Kensal Green Cemetery

 

The British Library Blog - How Research at the British Library led two authors to challenge 18th
century East End stereotypes and to write three books on the subject.

Views of London, No.5. Entrance from Mile End or Whitechaple Turnpike’.  Maps.K.Top.22.6.e - S

The Georgian Gentleman - London's first gas lights

The Guardian - Inside "Billionaires Row": London's rotting, derelict mansions worth 350m

Adventures in Historyland - Lady Butler's Waterloo

Careme's Kitchen in the Brighton Pavilion

(©Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove)

On Tuesday, September 9, 2014, The Wellington Tour will visit the Brighton Pavilion, and we hope you will come along.  For all the details, click here.

The Royal Pavilion at Brighton

 

This fanciful building reflects the enigmatic character of the man for whom it was created, George, Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent from 1811-1820 and King George IV from 1820 to his death in 1830.  Prinny, as he was often known, considered himself "The First Gentleman of Europe," and a connoisseur of all things tasteful and refined.  And that was the paradox: He did indeed have good taste but he carried things to the extremes of excess.

 

James Gillray: A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion, 1792

The British Museum

 

We will cover other aspects of the Pavilion and its fancies elsewhere.  Today we want to discuss the Great Kitchen, built especially for the Prince's chefs who kept him and his minions well fed and produced brilliant banquets for his royal guests. 

Guest in the Royal Kitchen

(©Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove)

More information on the Royal Kitchen is here.  The Prince Regent, was obsessed with all things French: architecture, décor, furniture, china, fashion, and "above all" French food.  Once Great Britain had driven out Napoleon, the Prince Regent had to have a French Chef to prepare his meals and banquets in London at Carlton House and at his Brighton home, the Royal Pavilion. He sent his household Clerk Controller to Paris to find a chef.  Even  the Prince was surprised when the celebrated Antonin Carême agreed to come, probably for the offer of a very high salary.   Carême had prepared elaborate meals for the notables of Napoleonic France, particularly the diplomat Talleyrand and the Emperor himself;   Carême  was the first "celebrity chef."

Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, the First Celebrity Chef

by Ian Kelly, a biography with recipes, 2003

Distinguished British writer and actor Ian Kelly is the author of Carême's biography.  You can read more about Ian and his books here.  A chapter is devoted to Carême's brief but notable career in England.  He arrived in July 1816, having left his wife and child in Paris. Carême certainly impressed the Prince's guests particularly with his elaborate, even ostentatious, confections, up to four feet tall.

Before Carême arrived, the Prince was already grossly overweight.  Supposedly the Prince said that the temptations of his new chef's cooking would be the death of him.  Carême replied, "Your highness, my concern is to tempt your appetite; yours is to curb it."  Touché!

Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-1833)

Kelly had access to the records in the Royal Archive which include bills and notes from Careme's time. When he arrived from France, Carême altered the usual method of disposing of the extra food  not eaten at the royal table. Previously the staff could sell leftovers, plus things like candles, and share the  profits.  Carême kept for himself the right to dispose of items from the kitchens. Thus he was quite unpopular with the staff.  Kelly tells some wonderful stories about the conflicts.  In late 1817, Carême returned to France.

(©Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove)

 

The kitchen as it appears today is only a part of the many rooms that were once used as bakeries, for supplies, preparation, sculleries, and so forth.  Kelly found records showing in 1817, in one month, the kitchens took supply of 428 bunches of radishes, 153 Savoy Cabbages, 7 dozen Cos lettuces, and spent over  £250 on 1,854 pounds of beef and similar amounts of mutton and veal.

For a 360-degree view of the kitchen, click here.


^{The Great Kitchen was built as part of the remodeling of the Marine Pavilion by architect John Nash.  Intended to be a model of innovation, the kitchen had running water, steam heating and special ventilation through the high windows. The oriental theme used in varied versions throughout the palace is also found in the kitchen. Tall pillars supporting the ceiling are adorned with copper palm fronds.}

Nash water-colour of the Great Kitchen, 1828

The kitchen has been extensively renovated and visitors can see an impressive collection of on display of Regency-era and early Victorian kitchen equipment.  As a matter of fact, some of the copper pots  once belonged to Apsley House, the London residence of the Duke of Wellington.

In his excellent book, Ian Kelly reproduces the menu of 18 January, 1817, for a dinner for Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia:   eight soups, eight releves de Poisson, fifteen Assiettes Volantes, eight grosses pieces, forty entrees, eight pieces montees, eight roasts thirty-two entremets, twelve assettes volantes." Kelly writes, "the banquet was to be seen and experiences as part of the theater of international relations -- Napoleon's chef creating a gastronomic spectacle for the conquering British monarch and his Russian allies."  Excess indeed. 

Kelly's conclusion is Carême's "...genius was to deploy methods that brought out the natural flavors of food to create a gourmand's paradise while at the same time producing a feast which would, visually live up to the most opulent settings."  He would have been the superstar of the cable Food Channels!

(©Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove)

 

 

 

Join us on The Wellington Tour, September 4-14, 2014 Click here for more tour site pictures

Before We Had Cell Phones

We're kicking off a new series with an excerpt from Rory Muir's most excellent new biography, Wellington: The Path to Victory 1769 - 1814 concerning news of the Battle of Salamanca - 22 July, 1812:

"First reports of the battle reached London at the beginning of August in a message from Sir Home Popham. John Wilson Croker (above), the Secretary to the Admiralty, recalled: `I myself passed a few painful hours when a blundering telegraphic dispatch announced the battle of Salamanca as won by the French and `Wellington killed.' This was a Sunday in August 1812. Parliament was up - no minister in town - nobody at the Admiralty but my single self; and there I was for four cruel hours, sitting on a corner of the Admiralty garden-wall watching the slow telegraph and as Homer says `eating my own heart.' They were the most painful hours I ever passed, and I had the tremendous secret all to myself - first because I had no one to tell it to, and secondly that it was not tellable to anyone, in the confused and imperfect state in white it was coming up.'

"The mistake was corrected that afternoon, but newspapers the following day could only report the bald fact that the battle had been fought and won, and the anxious public had to wait another fortnight until, on Sunday 16 August, Wellington's ADC Lord Clinton arrived in London in a chaise bedecked in laurel, carrying the captured French eagles and flags, and the official dispatch giving full details of the victory. An excited crowd assembled outside Lord Bathurst's house in Mansfield Street and the tidings soon spread. Lady Wellington ran to Lord Bathurst's from her house in Harely Street to hear the news, and on being told that her husband was safe she nearly fainted. The following night the capital was illuminated and jubilant crowds filled the streets. Lord Wellesley (Wellington's brother, Richard) ventured out to enjoy the scene and was recognized and cheered wherever he went, basking for a moment in the reflected glory of his younger brother."

Home Front Daily Life in the Civil War North

Victoria here...I have written earlier on this blog about programs at Chicago's Newberry Library, and while I am far away at the moment, I want to tell you about an exhibition on display there until late March, if you have the chance to get to Chicago by then.

 

Views of the Newberry Library in the Autumn of 2013

 

 

"Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North" marks the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War, 1981-1865.  The exhibition is interesting and well organized, and it may be of particular interest to readers of this blog because of the position of Great Britain.  Less than a century after separating from Britain, would the USA survive or break apart? 

Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, ca. 1855

Artist: Francis Cruikshank

British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) was said to be more sympathetic to the cause of the secessionist states, probably for several reasons, especially including the importance of southern cotton to the textile mills of Britain.  Yet, the grains that traveled east across the Atlantic from Northern ports were of equal concern.  Most of the controversy was played out in diplomacy concerning the shipping, blockades, embargoes, neutral rights, etc. on the high seas.  President Lincoln needed to keep Britain on his side, or at the least prevent the British from directly supporting the Southern States

Samuel Colman Jr., Ships Unloading, New York, 1868

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago

 

 

From the Library's Text Labels:  "Samuel Colman’s Ships Unloading depicts a busy New York port, where a ship known as the Glad Tidings is docked. The ship’s most important cargo was cotton, the mainstay of the South’s slave economy and New York City’s most important export. But since the early war years, the Glad Tidings had been instrumental in facilitating a free labor model of the cotton trade that aimed to replace slavery with wage work. The crops the Glad Tidings brought to New York had been grown and harvested in the South by wage-earning ex-slaves. Colman’s painting is therefore a reminder of epochal historical change. In the foreground, a black worker and two white counterparts tend to a cotton bale that has spilled open, while a single white worker wrestles with another bale. On the left edge of the painting a banner reads “London and New York,” reminding viewers that the South supplied the vast majority of raw cotton for the English textile industry through the port of New York. Visible only under considerable magnification are the words “New York Petroleum Co.” painted across the head of the barrel facing the viewer, foreshadowing the presence of the commodity that would fuel the engines of American commerce, and warfare, for generations to come."

 

Albert Bobbett, Edward Hooper, and Louis H. Stephens, “Principle vs. Interest" from Vanity Fair

New York: Louis H. Stephens, April 13, 1861

Newberry folio A 5 .93 v. 3

. 

Again from the Newberry's texts: 'In “Principle vs. Interest,” England’s John Bull casts a sidelong glance at the seated Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, who appears as a cotton broker. Bull turns his back on the black male figure, signaling that England’s abolitionist principles will not stop it from acting on its commercial interests. Characteristic of cartooning style at that time, the slave is literally encased and flailing helplessly in a cotton bale.'




Many other exhibits refer to activities in Chicago and elsewhere in the North during the Civil War. 

"Group of Chicago Zouave Cadets" from

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, NY, July 28, 1860

 

According to the exhibition, 'More than 70 US Army volunteer regiments fashioned themselves “Zouaves,” borrowing the term and the uniform from French Army regiments serving in North Africa during the mid-nineteenth century. Instantly recognizable in their colorful garb, Zouave regiments sported tasseled fezzes, short, open jackets trimmed with braid and baggy pants, often in brilliant red. Sheet music, periodicals, and parades featuring precision drills contributed to the popularity of the Zouave regiments.

This Zouve-style silk dress worn by Sarah Cadwallader Logan Knowland, 1865-66, particularly interested me for the carefully stitched pleating and fine fabric.  I find it interesting that military styles often influence women's fashions.

Dress, based on Zouave Style,

Chicago History Museum,

 

 

“Home Front” is open through March 24, 2014.  Among other exhibits are paintings by Winslow Homer and Frederic E. Church; first editions by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott; sheet music from Chicago-based music publishers; and  displays about changing roles of women and children. 

 Lilly Martin Spencer, The Home of the Red, White, and Blue ca. 1867-68

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago

Lilly Martin Spencer was born in Exeter, England, to French parents; the family emigrated to the U.S. when she was 8 years old in 1830.  Her husband, Benjamin Rush Spencer,  married in 1844 in Cincinnati, devoted his life to her artistic career.  Lily Spencer's popular paintings focused on daily life, particularly of women.  After the Civil War,  she was well known for depicting the results of the war and the changes it brought in the American family.  In the scene above, the mother in white -- said to be a self-portrait -- and her daughters in red and blue assist the poor.  The man at the left seems to be a wounded war victim.  the painting is seen as m allegory of how women are repairing the war-torn nation.

Another aftermath of the war is simply and effectively shown below.
 

 

    William Sidney Mount, Fruit Piece: Apples on Tin Cups, 1864

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago

According to the Library text, "William Sidney Mount’s Fruit Piece: Apples on Tin Cups depicts two weathered tin cups, known as “dippers,” each with an apple sitting atop. The tin cups were standard issue for Union soldiers, who often wore them dangling from their belts as they marched, or on their saddles as they rode into battle. These cups were objects of war, yet by placing them in this domestic setting, Mount’s painting suggests that the distance between battlefield and home front could easily collapse. The artist donated his painting to the 1864 Great Metropolitan Fair in Manhattan, where its sale helped the US Sanitary Commission raise money."

“Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North” was organized by the Newberry and the Terra Foundation for American Art. the Library's website is here. The Digital Exhibition is here.

William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain

William Kent

Whilst in Manhattan recently, I was fortunate enough to be able to take in the current Exhibition at the Bard Gallery - William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, which will move to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from March 22 to July 13, 2014.

The Exhibition contains nearly 200 examples of Kent's elaborate drawings for architecture, gardens, and sculpture, along with furniture, silver, paintings, illustrated books and new documentary films. As most of his best-known surviving works are in Britain’s great country houses, the exhibition is rich in loans from private as well as public collections.

As the Exhibition website tells us: "Kent devised a style that catered to the Grand Tour alumni, recreating the splendors of Roman palazzi. A jovial house guest of his patrons, ‘Kentino’ (as he was affectionately known) and his creations reminded them of the best days of their lives, before they returned, inherited, and dutifully managed their old family estates." Kent's notebooks and drawings kept during his own time in Italy form a part of the current Exhibition and it was fascinating to see these items, written in his own centuries ago, up close.

You may recall a recent post on this blog on Devonshire House in London and, if so, you'll know how delighted I was to find items from the House included in the Kent Exhibition.

Door and surround from the East Drawing Room (later the dining room), Devonshire House

Lord Burlington is the best- known today of several patrons who embraced Kent's design ideals and Kent lived in his London townhouse, Burlington House (today the home of the Royal Academy) for most of his life and was also, in effect, artist-in-residence at Burlington’s new Italianate villa at Chiswick.

Armchair for Devonshire House William Kent. Armchair for Devonshire House William Kent 1733-40. Carved gilt wood, modern upholstery.

As Victoria reminded me, some of the Devonshire House items were sold as part of the Chatsworth Attic Sale held at Sotheby's in 2010, which included some 20,000 items from the Duke of Devonshire's home. You can read all about that sale here. And you will find prices realized here. The sale brought in over six million pounds in total.

Of Kent's public works, the exhibition examines 10 Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, the Horse Guards at Whitehall, and the Royal Mews. One section is devoted to Holkham Hall, designed with the assistance of Lord Burlington for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, who was among Kent’s most important patrons. You can read Victoria's post on her visit to Holkham Hall here.

There is a book that's been published to coincide with the Exhibition entitled William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, edited by Susan Weber, and published with Yale University Press,
presents twenty-one essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century British art and design, including Julius Bryant (co-curator), Geoffrey Beard, John Harris, John Dixon Hunt, Frank Salmon, and David Watkin. The book is richly illustrated with over 600 color images, including the pieces featured in the exhibition. A chronology of Kent’s projects, an exhibition checklist, and an extensive bibliography round out this scholary publication.

You can read more about the Exhibition on the Bard Graduate Center website here.

Love & Marriage at Reasonable Rates

                                By Guest Blogger Adrian Teal

In spite of the ease with which the randy young bucks who populate my Gin Lane Gazette could secure the services of a prostitute, there seems to have been a ubiquitous urge to find a girl to hurry up the aisle in the Georgian era. Until the middle of the 18th century, there was a thriving industry of clandestine, ‘quickie’ marriages, which Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1754 was designed to ban. Under the existing system, a couple could be joined in matrimony by the simple expedient of exchanging vows before witnesses. Many an eligible heiress was cajoled to the altar by a false-hearted adventurer on the make, and many innocents who were too young to marry without parental consent later regretted having themselves shackled together in wedlock. Parish officers sought to make the bastard children of the poor the concern of other local administrations by arranging nuptials of the parents in next-door parishes, and countless drunken sailors and their sweethearts staggered up to a parson to plight their troths. 

 

 

 

 

With Hardwicke’s legislation threatening to end this freedom, there was a stampede of London’s citizens in the direction of amenable and avaricious clergymen, who would happily conduct an express wedding ceremony for a quart of gin. The purlieus of the Fleet Prison were infamous as the base from which these parsons operated, and their shotgun couplings became known as ‘Fleet Weddings’. The day before the Act was enforced, 45 couples were joined in Fleet ceremonies by 11 o’clock in the morning, and nearly a hundred pairs were married before the day was over.

 A little later in the century, you could always do a moonlight flit to Gretna Green in the Scottish borders, if you were determined to marry your girl a safe distance from parental interference. Scottish law permitted ‘irregular marriages’, which meant that as long as they were conducted before two witnesses, practically anyone could perform marriage ceremonies. This included the local blacksmiths, who were nicknamed ‘anvil priests’. Richard Rennison was perhaps the most famous, and he presided over more than 5,000 ceremonies. Less well-known than Gretna Green’s smithy, however, was an English equivalent located in the Peak District.

 
In the churchyard of Peak Forest, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, stand the ruins of a chapel. Christian, the royalist Countess of Devonshire (who was born on Christmas Day, hence the name) ordered the chapel’s construction in the 17^th century, and she eventually passed on its management to the local clergy. This put it beyond the jurisdiction of the Church, and the clergyman presiding was authorised to approve wills and issue marriage licenses off his own bat. He even had a seal of office to prove it. He made a tidy profit, as couples seeking a hurried wedding ceremony began to flock his way. He was often dragged out of bed in his nightshirt by furious parents in hot pursuit of amorous fugitives. By 1754 there were two ceremonies a week, netting him £100 per annum.

 

For those who had married in haste and were repenting at leisure, redress was very difficult to come by. The aristocracy could arrange a legal separation, but divorce was a protracted, expensive, and complicated business, and for the ‘lower orders’, it was nigh-on impossible. One solution was to hold a wife sale. This method of dissolving a marriage entailed the wife being led by a halter around her neck, and tethered to a post or fence in a public place. She was then auctioned to the highest bidder. Often, the purchaser was known to both parties, and before the sale there was probably a fair degree of collusion between the vendor, the wife, and the new ‘husband’ about the price and desired outcome.

 

Henry Brydges (1708-1771), Marquess of Carnarvon, and later the 2^nd Duke of Chandos, contracted his second marriage by such means. He married a former chambermaid called Anne Wells, who came from Newbury in Berkshire. They had first met a few years before, when the Duke and a friend were dining at The Pelican, on the London road at Newbury. A commotion in the inn’s yard caught their attention, and they were told that a harsh husband was going to sell his long-suffering wife, who was being led by a halter in the traditional fashion. The Duke was captivated by her looks and her stoicism, whipped out his purse, and bought her. He married her at Keith’s Chapel, Mayfair, on Christmas Day, 1744.

 

This chapel was run by the notorious minister Alexander Keith, who conducted innumerable clandestine weddings. In one year, Keith married 723 couples for a one-guinea fee, and he was excommunicated on Episcopal orders. In retaliation, Keith ‘excommunicated’ the angry bishop. He was committed to the Fleet Prison, but continued plying his trade. He coerced four Fleet parsons into conducting weddings on his behalf, and put his name on the marriage certificates. He even advertised his services in the newspapers, and married about 6,000 couples.

 

The first person to place a lonely hearts advertisement in their local newspaper is thought to have been a lady called Helen Morrison. In 1727, she ran a notice requesting approaches from potential husbands in the Manchester Weekly Journal. This approach was to become common practise as the century progressed, and the advertisements of 18^th-century singletons range in their tone from charming or importunate, via brusque, to downright cold and clinical. In Miss Morrison’s day, however, the world was unprepared for what it saw as her scandalous immorality and forwardness, and she was locked up in a lunatic asylum for four weeks.


Adrian Teal is an author and artist. Visit his site Teal Cartoons here and read Adrian's Huffington Post columns here. To read about Adrian's take on 18th century cartoons, click here.