A Dylan Thomas literary pilgrimage to Swansea

Dylan Thomas 1914-53 was born in Cwmdonkin Drive in the wealthy part of Swansea, South Wales and his childhood was largely spent there. His education was at a Dame School not that far from home and then onto Swansea Grammar School. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper and soon joined an amateur dramatic grp in Mumbles, but still continued to work as a freelance journalist. When he wasn’t writing, Thomas spent his days visiting the cinema and theatre in the Uplands, walking along Swansea Bay and drinking in all of Swansea's pubs.

Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan Thomas' childhood home

Thomas was also a regular patron of Kardomah Café Castle St in the centre of Swansea, a short walk from the local newspaper where he worked. It must have been a very exciting place for a young, want-to-be writer, particularly as a literary and artistic circle started to meet in the Kardomah Cafe in c1930. The poets, musicians and artists who gathered there became The Kardomah Boys. Dylan Thomas’ footprints are all over Swansea.

Why did it take so long for Swansea to recognise its most famous son in monuments, theatres, houses and pubs? Firstly from 1932 on, Thomas was outside Swansea more than he was in Swansea. As he became more famous, he lived in London. Later he had a house in the village of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, West Wales. A number of times he went on extended visits to New York.

Secondly, in February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a 3 nights' blitz. Rows of shops, pubs and buildings, including the iconic Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas later walked the bombed-out shell which was once his home town centre; he himself thought that his old Swansea was dead. Fortunately for Swansea historians, the Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland St, not far from the original location.

Uplands Tavern, Swansea

Finally Dylan Thomas was a difficult citizen and my guess is that the good burghers of Swansea had had enough of his antics. By the time his highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934, Thomas was already a heavy drinker. Even when he married Caitlin MacNamara and had three children (born 1939, 1943 and 1949), he and Caitlin binged and brawled their way around any pubs that were open. The children raised themselves in neglectful chaos. The young couple spent an inordinate amount of time and money in the late 1930s and 1940s drinking, so there was never enough money for ordinary family expenses. Needless to say, at the outset of WW2 Thomas was classified as too sickly to fight, suffering from chronic bronchitis, asthma and alcoholic damage.

But alcoholic or not, Thomas really did become famous, within Britain and elsewhere. Thomas was well known for being a dynamic speaker, best known for his poetry readings. His powerful voice captivated American audiences during his speaking tours of early 1950s. He made 200+ broadcasts for the BBC, including his best single work, Under Milk Wood, a 1954 radio play based around the inhabitants of a boring small Welsh village. Thomas' poems, And death shall have no dominion (pre war) and Do not go gentle into that good night 1951 became very well respected. When Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast of Milk Wood in 1954, the audiences couldn’t get enough of sexy Welsh males.

Dylan Thomas died in a New York hotel in November 1953, just after his 39th birthday. His body was brought back to Wales for his burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne, in the presence of his mother and his wife.

Thomas wrote half of his poems and many short stories while living at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive Swansea. The house has been recently restored to the tastes popular when bought by the Thomas family, and is available for house tours. Another monument stands in Cwmdonkin Park, one of his favourite childhood leisure areas, close to his birthplace. The memorial is a small rock in a closed-off garden, inscribed with poetry and set within the park.

Walk or ride along Swansea Bay's 8ks promenade which is still lovely to look at, and breathe the invigorating sea air. The tax payers of Swansea started creating a Memorial Thomas Walk in this very Maritime Quarter. The yacht marinas, museums, art galleries, a theatre, bars, restaurants, an observatory should all be visited. Stone sculptures and bronze statues dot the area, including a statue of Thomas’ seafaring Captain Cat and a statue of Thomas himself in front of his theatre. For great images of the port area, see Contested Terrain blog. For a very useful guide to 3 days in Swansea, see Wales Cymru blog.

Capt Cat statue, Swansea Marina

Dylan was a member of Swansea’s Little Theatre in the early 1930s, when they were based in Mumbles. The Little Theatre has its own exhibition as a tribute to Thomas. Apart from this theatre, performances of his work can also be seen at the Dylan Thomas Literature Centre (formerly the town's Guildhall and reopened in 1995) and during an annual festival each October. The Swansea Museum has a permanent exhibition on Dylan Thomas and his life, as well as a bookshop filled with his works. The Dylan Thomas Theatre is at the edge of Gloucester Place/square at the marina. In 2004 a new literary prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, was created in honour of the poet and is awarded to the best young published writer. Following this, in 2005, the Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award was established, run by the Dylan Thomas Centre and given at the annual Swansea Bay Film Festival.

Dylan Thomas Literature Centre

Several of the pubs in Swansea also have associations with the poet. The Queen’s Head claims it is one of the few remaining traditional pubs in Swansea, and was a favourite haunt for Thomas when he worked as a cub reporter at the South Wales Evening Post newspaper. The Uplands Tavern boasts the Dylan Thomas Snug, where the writer used to sit.  One of Swansea's oldest pubs, the No Sign Bar, was another of his favourites and was mentioned in his stories. The seafront pub, Antelope, which stands in the famous Mumbles Mile, is looking decrepit. This old pub, complete with its open fire and 1930s architecture, will be renovated with its Thomas memorial material in situ. Having a Thomas association is very good business for a Swansea pub.

Amazing botanical artist II: Marian Ellis Rowan

Marian Ellis Ryan (1848-1922) was born in Melbourne and grew up near the Strathbogie Ranges. She was raised in a family which had an appreciation of natural history, gardens and art, but like Marianne North, she had no formal art training. Nonetheless her favourite subject was Australian wildflowers.

Ellis made her first trip abroad at 21, basing herself in Britain. In 1873 Ellis married Frederic Rowan, a British Army officer and settled in New Zealand. The couple, and their only child, then moved to Melbourne and while living there, she further developed her skills as a wild flower painter. Talented and enthusiastic, she emerged as a decent artist and won important art prizes in Australia and overseas. I don’t suppose the professional male artists were very pleased with her success.

The couple returned to Victoria 1877, exhibited her work in international exhibitions in Australia, India, England, Europe and the USA 1879-93, winning more medals. In an age when most middle class women did not work outside their own homes, Ellis travelled widely.

From the 1870s on, Ellis painted thousands of largely watercolours. Like Marianne North, she travelled extensively, relishing settings which were both difficult to get to and dangerous. Her images ranged from the large, boldly coloured and carefully detailed flower studies to small, more intimate garden scenes and bird studies. And she confidently publicised her own adventures, visiting Queensland’s rain forests, West Australian arid goldfields, New Guinea and New Zealand mountains. She had become a fine painter of wild flowers, insects and birds, combining scientific accuracy with freshness.

Christmas bells and wildflowers, Western Australia, 1879

Ellis visited Western Australia a number of times during her life. It was in Albany in 1880 that Ellis met the English painter Marianne North, and after a few years, they went on a painting tour together. North was generous with her younger student. She shared ideas about writing her adventures and also of how to house and promote her works for posterity.

Anyhow the fast fading nature of a newly picked flower meant working quickly, often out in the bush. Most of Ellis’ original water colour studies were painted in less than optimum conditions, in the heat of the Australian bush. Yet her ability to compose a complex image, use of colour and her quick painting skills, without preliminary sketches, were often commented on.

The 1880s was a highly productive era for Ellis: she painted rare species for one scientist’s work and she made several versions of her more popular subjects for sale in exhibitions. This was a wise career move. Many engravings of her flowers and scenes were published, her watercolours became bolder in colour and presentation, and she began to paint in oils as North had encouraged.

Because of her fame, Ellis became an important example of the independent Australian woman artist. Of course male artists may have dismissed her paintings as Not Real Art. And they may have been right in one small way: her work was at the boundaries of art and natural history illustration. More than simply recording the physical appearance of plants, each painting revealed a strong sense of design and colour. Her flowers and birds images were often set in an environment which was done in an impressionist style. Her images of New Guinea moths and butterflies showed her draughtsmanship and accuracy.

Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand was published in 1898. Flushed with success, Ellis left to visit America and stayed for 7 years. In New York, she met another young female botanist and together they travelled the USA and West Indies, collaborating on 3 books which became standard texts for botany students: A Guide to the Wildflowers 1899, A Guide to the Trees 1900 and Southern Wildflowers and Trees 1901. Her book illustrations were hugely successful.

Tropical jungle flowers, Johnston River Qld, 1887

Ellis returned to Australia 1905 and set a new goal for her art: to find and record every species of wildflower on the continent. Even during the hardships of WW1, when she was nearly 70, Ellis set off to New Guinea for seven months. The Royal Worcester Porcelain Company had commissioned her to paint flowers and birds of paradise in New Guinea. During these New Guinea visits, Ellis found and illustrated many unclassified flowers, birds and butterflies. Ever mindful of the importance of publicity, many of these 1,000 paintings were later exhibited in Sydney in 1920.

After her husband’s death, Rowan returned to Christchurch in New Zealand where she was delighted to discover the work of Margaret Stoddart. What a brave and unconventional woman Ellis was. The trips were discomforting in terms of her health and safety, but later she said that they were also extremely exciting and stimulating for her art.

Rothschild's Bird of Paradise, Papua New Guinea c1917

Ellis Rowan died in Oct 1922. This prolific artist left 3000+ paintings of scientifically accurate native flora, birds, and insects. The Australian government bought 947 of her wild flower works in 1923; the National Library of Australia now holds the largest collection of Ellis' work. Queen Victoria received three of her paintings in 1895, the South Australian government bought 100 and the Queensland government bought 125. For a good selection of Ellis’ beautiful flowers and birds paintings, see Peintures Musique et Poésies blog.

What might have started off as a genteel wifely pastime turned into a profitable, respected public career. This was no mean achievement in Victorian and Edwardian times, as Paluma Print blog attests. But when art historians say she was a very ambitious woman, I wonder if it is damning Ellis with faint praise. Pencil and Leaf blog said Ellis Rowan was a self opinionated, obsessive, vain and gritty artist and a tireless self publicist, who painted more species of Australian and international flora than any other artist then.

The book, The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan, published 2002

Amazing botanical artist I - Marianne North

Marianne North (1830-1890) was the eldest child of an MP in the British Parliament. She had shown an interest in painting and writing, proper accomplishments for a young Victorian lady and suitable hobbies, but not career, for the daughter of an upper middle class family.

North, Jamaican cultivated flowers, 1871

Her father Frederick North certainly introduced her to the great and the good in the world of politics and of science. Frederick travelled throughout Europe and the Middle East, on both business and pleasure, and Marianne would often accompany him. On these trips, she learned to improve her skills as an artist, being taught first by a Dutch woman artist, and later by Valentine Bartholomew, a flower painter connected to the royal court. While visiting Kew, she met Sir William Hooker who presented her with specimens to sketch. But she had little formal training in drawing and painting.

North, Tobacco Plants

With her father’s death in 1870 and having never married, Marianne received much of her father's very pleasant estates in Lancashire and Norfolk, and now sought to use it in her passion: painting flowers in their natural settings. She clearly had the means, funding her own trips to the far corners of the world to find her flowers in their natural environment.

And, as Edwardian Promenade has shown, there was new wave of lady explorers travelling the globe not as mere appendages to their male kinfolk, but as scholars in their own right. This blog also lists some wonderful books on Victorian lady travellers and scholars.

Her first journey alone was in 1871, when she travelled via Jamaica to the United States and Canada. Being well connected from birth, she of course had suitable letters of introduction, so initially it would seem that her travels were comfortably looked after. However sometimes she had to make her way through rough landscape, scaling cliffs and enduring swarms of insects.

North learned to paint in a fast, impressionistic style that was seen as either a feminine weakness or a scientific triumph, full of vitality. She understood plant taxonomy, being a keen naturalist herself, and had a number of species named after her.

Her second solo journey took her to the jungles of Brasil, where she stayed for 8 months and completed 100+ paintings. Then in 1875 she travelled across America on her way to Japan and Ceylon, then she returned home. In a very short time, she was on her way again, this time to India. She remained in India for 15 months and produced a remarkable 200 paintings of mostly plants, but also of the local buildings she liked. Upon her return to London in 1879 she exhibited her work at The Conduit Street Galleries, where visitors seemed to enjoy her work.  LITTLE AUGURY, Heather on her travels and Squidoo blogs have image after image of North’s beautiful work

Marianne North Gallery, Kew Gardens

In 1879 she wrote to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sir Joseph Hooker, suggesting that she bequeath her collected works, along with a building suitable to house them, to his Gardens at Kew. There was only one extra request: that this site should serve as place for garden visitors to rest. Her donation was accepted and Kew gained one of it most significant components, The Marianne North Gallery. Her friend, architectural historian James Fergusson, designed the building after her favourite Indian colonial sites. Later (in the 1880s) she carefully arranged all her 832 paintings in a dense mosaic on the walls, sorted according to geographical location of subject.

Charles Darwin, a close friend of old Mr North, encouraged Marianne to travel to Australia and New Zealand, to paint Antipodean native plants in oils. In that expedition she met and befriended the younger artist, Marian Ellis Rowan, an important meeting, as we will see next post. In the meantime it is of interest to note, according to Laura Ponsonby, that North considered Darwin the greatest man living and had hoped that he would open her Gallery in 1882. Sadly he died some weeks before the event.

In 1883 North was in the Seychelles and in 1884 in Chile, still painting. After a life time of travel, no mean feat for a woman of that era, having lead an adventurous and productive life. She retired to Gloucestershire, where she died in Aug 1890.

Her book, published 1892, two years after her death

After her death, Marianne’s extensive journals were edited down and cleaned up by her sister, Catherine North Symonds, and published in two volumes in 1892 as Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, London, Macmillan, 1892.

Marianne North was the best connected and the most intrepid woman artist of this era, but was her oeuvre considered popular and talented during her own life time? I can find a few contemporary references to her work by admiring women activists, but none by male artists.

Florilegia, collections of flower paintings, have been done since Sir Joseph Banks depicted and published images of plants he collected on the Endeavour in the 1760s. Yet it is only now (1995) that Chelsea Physic Garden established its own Florilegium Society whose primary aim is the portrayal of the Garden's entire collection. These modern scientific artists would have loved having North as part of their team.

In the next post, I will write Amazing botanical artist II - Marian Ellis Rowan.

Boscombe beach pods, Bournemouth

I had been fascinated by the popularity of beach huts in Australia and Britain, and wrote up a history of the humble huts with a sense of nostalgia. It seemed inevitable that the huts, so hugely popular after WW1, would never increase in number and could well decrease.

Overstrand Building, with pods to both sides of the central facilities

Now an alternative has been brought to my attention. Retro-style beach pods offering panoramic views across Bournemouth's artificial surf reef appeared for the first time in the BBC News in April 2009. 400+ people registered interest in buying the lovely pods within the Boscombe Overstrand complex. Boscombe Blog was of course very excited about the new lease of life for the area. Half of the pods will be sold on a 25-year lease, with the remaining pods will be reserved for casual hire from the council.

Pod interior

Proleno Blog noted that Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway were commissioned by Bournemouth Borough Council to revive the dilapidated 1958 Overstrand building and Grade II listed Boscombe Pier of 1889. Not surprisingly, seaside regeneration was always one of the favourite goals of the Hemingways. You can see that the centre of the Overstrand will be the public areas: shops, restaurant and surf school. On each wing, to the left and right, stretch the rows of pods.

A single beach pod will cost a fortune (£90,000) but unlike the old beach huts, will have mains electricity, hot and cold running water, kitchen units and French doors leading onto a small private balcony overlooking the beach, but no fridges. To prevent people sleeping overnight in the pods, power will be switched off at night. Each pod has one wall that is a piece of retro, coastal art in its own right.

Boscombe has indeed reinvented the beach hut.

David Ben Gurion's house-museum in Tel Aviv

David Ben-Gurion was born in 1886 in Płońsk, then part of the Russian Empire and now Poland. In 1912, in his 20s, he moved to Turkey to study law at Istanbul University, then settled in Palestine. Thrown out by the Turks for political activism, Ben Gurion settled in New York City in 1915; there he met and married his wife Paula. The family returned to Palestine in 1918. Three children were born: Geula was born in Tel Aviv in 1918, Amos was born in 1920 in London and Renana was born in 1926 in Tel Aviv.

Ben Gurion house-museum, Ben Gurion Bvd Tel Aviv

A modest house in the midst of Tel-Aviv’s activity is the place that was the first long term residence of David Ben-Gurion and his family. Now located in a street named after him, the house was built in 1930-31 when the first workers' neighbourhood was established in Tel-Aviv, on Jewish National Fund land.

The building itself is an early example of Bauhaus design that the growing Tel Aviv came to specialise in, during the 1930s. But The Bauhaus didn’t close down until 1933 and the young Jewish architects were still in Germany in 1930, so how did the Bauhaus taste reach Tel Aviv so early? Via architectural journals, perhaps.

When the State of Israel was declared on 14th May 1948, a few hundred dignitaries were invited to the ceremony, held at the Museum of Art in Tel Aviv. As Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion of course had the unbelievable honour of declaring the independence of the new state.

Ben Gurion declared the birth of the State of Israel, May 1948

The Ben-Gurion family lived in this Tel Aviv house until they settled in Sde-Boker in the Negev, in 1953. They never sold the Tel Aviv house, and always had a place to stay when they were living/working /holidaying in Tel Aviv. I am pleased that a socialist politician should live in surroundings no plusher than the ordinary citizens, but I wonder if this house is the best site for a modern museum.

Family dining room

The Ozi Zion blog writes about the house-museum and provides a virtual tour. It is the home's second floor, used solely by Ben-Gurion himself, that houses 4 library rooms and a bedroom. This is where visitors can really look into the private world of an-otherwise very public man. Ben-Gurion's impressive personal library bears witness to his serious scholarship. It includes a collection of books and journals totalling 20,000 volumes, in his daily languages (Hebrew, Russian, English, Turkish and Yiddish) plus Greek, Latin, Spanish and French, covering politics and other disciplines. The house and its objects remain as they were when the Ben-Gurions lived there.

One of the upstairs libraries

Through the Land of Israel blog has wonderful images of the small rooms. On the first floor, visitors can see the family house, especially the kitchen and Paula's room where Ben-Gurion spent his last days. This floor also includes his daughter's bedroom, which served as his own bedroom and shelter during two wars, the Sinai Campaign and the Six-Day War. In the bedroom photo, you can see a bricked-in window that made the area relatively safe as a bomb shelter.

Daughter's bedroom

Before his death in 1973, Ben-Gurion bequeathed his house to the state, on the condition that it became a public institution dedicated to research. The Knesset soon passed the Ben-Gurion Law which proclaimed that house would be used for the purposes stated in the will, and it has been open to the public since 1974. The Second World War blog described research he actually did in this house-museum.

The David Ben Gurion Museum in Plonsk (Poland) will be bigger.

Suffragette shops: ideal business experience for women

As I wrote in Selfridge’s, Suffragettes and Fashion, the innovative shopping experience promised by Selfridge’s in London (1909) could give middle class women a pleasurable day out of shopping, fashion, socialising with friends in the first in-house coffee shop or in the roof top restaurant and use of beautifully presented ladies bathrooms. The women were surrounded by neo-classical columns, impressive entrance and rich decoration. Of course Gordon Selfridge was a canny business man. He founded his store just as the women's suffrage movement was becoming successful and the London Underground was bringing respectable ladies into town.

Suffragette Cookery Book, A Dowson ed, 1913

But to suffragettes, the department stores were both attractive AND ideologically unsound at the same time. Many women loved the financial emancipation involved in buying their own goods, but some of the more radical women disapproved of the trivial pleasures the shops offered. They feared that middle class women were going to be seen as merely a new market to exploit! When hordes of suffragettes ran through the West End shattering shop windows in March 1912, it was evidence of this ambivalence.

WSPU shop in Liverpool
*

The emergence of shops arose from the profitable nature of the WSPU’s campaign, and from the expansion in retailing. Shop-keeping was a common female activity, so it became a respectable foray for women to move gently into business and the public sphere. And, as expected from a women’s organisation campaigning for female suffrage, the shops became feminine spaces, with an emphasis on colourful decoration, attractive items for women and domestic products.

Playing cards with suffragette images

And they were not radical. The shop encouraged new members who could give talents, time and money to the campaign. Many of the shops saw the necessity of drawing in women who would not have ventured into a branch office; they wanted to create environments that were attractive to everyone, even ambivalent women. Identifying their outlets with the private business community rather than with political activism helped de-radicalise the branches’ image.

The organisation developed into a formidable propaganda machine. It successful raised funds and this allowed the purchase of property inside London and elsewhere. In London, the WSPU established its headquarters at Clement’s Inn and in May 1910, opened a shop in Charing Cross Road, the Women’s Press. As well as earning money for the WSPU, the shop publicised the cause. John Mercer, University of Portsmouth  noted that the opening of the first Votes for Women shops began in 1907. The trend for occupying retail space grew, with the emergence of shops in large cities like Liverpool, Edinburgh and Bristol in 1909. The general election of Jan 1910 saw the WSPU campaign for a protest vote against the Liberal government. As part of this campaign, most major WSPU branches took temporary shops and committee rooms, to assist in their work.

But for many branches, the appeal of a suffrage shop led them to take permanent premises. By the end of the election, people were in and out of the shop all day long. The sale of badges and the crowd that collected round the windows showed how much could be done, if kind friends helped to retain the premises permanently. By 1914 there were 19 WSPU shops in London alone. More remote towns like Plymouth were expanding their offices into retail outlets.

Suffrage workshop, behind a WSPU shop
*

The central WSPU held a Women’s Exhibition in 1909 which focused on promoting its purple, white and green merchandise. Suffrage shops took these propagandist and fund-raising concerns to more sophisticated levels, providing permanent spaces for the sale of themed merchandise. The growing range of suffrage merchandise certainly contributed to the financial viability of specialist suffrage shops: motor scarves, brooches, hatpins, handkerchiefs, leather purse bags, regalia eg sashes, badges, ribbons, belts and buckles, ties, suffrage buttons, games and playing cards.

The range of objects for sale in the suffragette shops seemed to have been based on ideas of middle-class domesticity and personal adornment. Even for non-suffragettes, these ideas complied nicely with conventional gender identities. The emphasis on visual appeal, comfort and luxury presented these shops as places of shopping pleasure, so I suppose that the militant women were no happier with the movement’s shops than they were with Selfridge’s.

One Penny Weekly, on sale at suffrage shops, 1912
*

Not that the main department shops had to worry. Suffragette shops could only hold a small range of products. And in any case, advertising campaigns targeted the Modern Woman, trying to attract her patronage – in hats, corsets, suits. Swan and Edgar, or Selfridge’s could provide whatever she needed for the next parade.

An appropriate symbol would be on the suffrage teasets 1908 eg an angel, standing tiptoe and blowing on a curved trumpet. This symbol was designed by Sylvia Pankhurst and placed on china that mostly came from Williamsons of Longston Pottery in Staffordshire. For enthusiastic shopkeepers, the Christmas week was the busiest and nothing sold more popularly than the Suffragette Cookbook. But it wasn’t all politics. Women's magazines, like Queen, were stimulating a taste for consumer goods as well.

Badges, stickers and inexpensive jewellery were popular

A Walk in History blog located Clements Inn. The London School of Economics now stands in the headquarters of the WSPU, from 1906-12. A plaque notes that in 1908 the Women’s Press was also situated in this building. The blog concludes that like other shops, The Women’s Press sold items like books and pamphlets, of course, but also badges and scarves. The suffragette newspaper Votes for Women was written and produced at Clement’s Inn and sold by volunteers and via horse-drawn press carts, as well as in newsagents.

Sashes for sale, in movement colours
*

Suffragette shops were really the first place for women to effectively market themselves. But clearly the shops were not merely retail outlets. Krista Cowman  said shops helped with recruiting work and helped to develop a sense of team work. I believe the popularity of women shops with the WSPU’s constituent branches also showed the need for their own space. Lectures used to be held in public buildings eg a town hall or they were held as open-air meetings.

From an organisational point of view, the use of their own shop made the planning of meetings easier to organise and control. Workshops were opened. And one more critical issue - facing increasing hostility over its militant activities, the organisation’s own space offered protection.

China teaset, with angel symbol designed by S Pankhurst

Sylvia Pankhurst and her American colleague, Zelie Emerson, took over a baker's shop opposite Bow Church in Bow Rd, and in October 1912 set up the first East London branch of the Women's Social and Political Union. Friends build a wooden platform outside the shop and from which Sylvia would address the passing crowds.

Sylvia's Suffragette Shop, Bow Rd, East End of London

Yet the suffragette shops themselves suffered from men’s physical violence! There was a major window-smashing campaign leading to damage in suffragette shops in Oxford and Regent Sts, and Piccadilly. There was an attack on the Bristol WSPU shop in 1913 by university students, in which windows were smashed, signs painted-over and furniture burnt. Meanwhile in Newcastle, the WPSU shop’s windows were smashed three times. With male violence and the decline in merchandise due to WW1, the shops’ retail identity never recovered, even after the war. The years from 1906-1916 were the magical years.
*
John Mercer, my favourite writer on this subject, published another article which I recommend: “Shopping for Suffrage: the campaign shops of the Women's Social and Political Union”, in Women's History Review, 18, 2, April 2009.

Beach huts in Australia & Britain

Brighton, Melbourne

In 1752 Dr Richard Russell published a Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands, particularly scurvy, jaundice, leprosy and consumption. He is seen as one of the people who built up a passion, based on science, for beach culture in the early 19th century.

So the seaside had to be "invented" as a realistic holiday destination and we can see amazing images of the sand, water, donkey rides, icecream vendors, punch and judy shows, umbrellas, fully dressed adults and children in bathing suits. Victorian and Edwardian Paintings has wonderful photos from the era eg Blackpool 1903. as does British seaside resorts  eg Ramsgate.

The first wheeled bathing machines soon arrived. Georgian bathing machines, which might have used as far back as the 1730s according to a 1735 engraving by John Setterington, were horse- or human-drawn devices. Then Benjamin Beale’s Invention for Bathing Machines was formalised in 1750.

There seemed to have been two reasons why people would use these bathing machines. Firstly they protected the modesty of fashionable bathers, especiallywomen. Secondly they may well have enabled frail or sick visitors to the health-giving sun and sea water to make their way to the water's edge.

Catherine R noted that Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast was the world's first seaside resort which became popular when doctors began prescribing cold-sea treatment as a cure for many things. This was where the mobile changing room or swimming machine first appeared. My favourite description of summer holidays at the beach comes from the Victorian History blog and my favourite  image of bathing machines in Scarborough came from Pruned blog

bathing machines, Scarborough

crowded bathing machines, 1900

By the C19th Queen Victoria made sea bathing even MORE fashionable with her machine on wheels at Osborne Bay on the Isle of Wight. So these machines enabled queens and ordinary women to roll the machine down to the water’s edge, without having to run immodestly across the open sand in their bathing suits.

In Sydney,  the Woolloomooloo baths looked after women carefully; see Sydney City and Suburbs blog. Between 1833-1955 this area of the Bay was the site of 4 separate ladies’ bathing facilities: Mrs Biggs’ Ladies Baths, Robertson's Ladies Floating Baths, the Corporation Ladies Baths and the Domain Baths for Ladies.

Beach huts came next. They were small wooden buildings located on the foreshore and fixed to the ground, unlike the horse-drawn bathing machines. They were still responding to the bathers’ need for modesty and privacy, just as the bathing machines had done.
 

Brighton beach huts with tee trees, Melbourne

You would expect British customs to have been adopted and adapted across the Empire, especially in countries were summer weather was hot. But I wonder if Australia was actually copying British customs or vice versa. Bathing boxes in Melbourne were reputed to have existed as far back as 1862. They were usually brightly painted with timber framing, weatherboards and corrugated iron roofs. They backed right into the tee-trees, to keep the sand from eroding and to add a smidgeon of shade in summer.

Small, simply furnished and with a minimum of decoration, the interiors would do no more than allow a family to store bathing suits, towels, sandwiches and swimming equipment, and to change their clothes modestly. An open box at Edithvale will show the simplicity of the interior.

open box at Edithvale, Melbourne

The boom in beach huts came straight after WW1 and they are now a significant part of Melbourne beach culture. They probably started in Brighton then spread across Port Phillip Bay and Western Port Bay.

In Britain, Bournemouth had beach huts alongside the pier by 1908. However across the British world, beach huts were not widely introduced until WW1 ended. This was about the time when attitudes changed, allowing men and women to swim at the same time. Many seaside councils erected beach huts for people to use, I am assuming because they thought it would attract well heeled holiday makers and because it would keep their beaches respectable. In Britain, the huts were erected on Crown land and owners had to pay council rates and public liability insurance.

Beachhutworld reported an issue that was relevant for British beaches, but not Australian. WW1 restrictions had put much of the coastline out of bounds, especially in southern England. Elaborate defences against invasion along the beaches usually included coils of barbed wire at the top of the beach head, thereby effectively preventing use of the beach.

Beach huts were constructed from whatever materials were available after the war. Yet beach huts have large retained their original appearance: single room, gabled roof, usually simple timber, next to no windows and a locked double door. On the beach side of some huts, there was a simple porch construction, allowing two adults to sit and watch the children play. Bright colours enabled families to easily identify which, of the dozens of otherwise identical huts all in a row, was theirs. In Britain, as in Australia, there were never any facilities like running water and electricity inside the huts.

Shedworking  is a wonderful blog for images and histories. Littlehampton on the south coast has many beach huts owned by the local authority alongside its broad promenade which provides free access to the beach and the beautiful River Arun. At St Helens on the Isle of Wight, the beach huts have been made from some of their redundant railway carriages and until very recently they all had cladding. Different designs may also be determined by the local coastal environment and the date when the huts were built.

uniformity at Great Yarmouth

Shedworking recommends two books by Kathryn Ferry: Sheds on the Seashore: A Tour through Beach Hut History, 2009 and Beach Huts and Bathing Machines, 2009. I will add another by Fred Gray Designing the Seaside: Architecture, Society and Nature, 2006

small porches, Southwold

George Lambert: Australian WW1 artist

Although raised in Germany and Australia, George Washington Lambert (1873-1930) moved to Paris to study art, spent much of his career in London and didn’t return permanently to Australia until 1921. Lambert was well known and well respected for very fine society portraits and allegorical scenes that we have come to expect of the late Victorian-Edwardian era-WW1 era, as can be seen in the 2 Blowhards blog. Art Inconnu was mesmerised by his very talented draughtsmanship.

Charge at Beersheba

While based in London Lambert couldn't enlist in the Australian Imperial Force there, so he joined a Voluntary Training Corps Lambert. And in 1917, he volunteered to become an official Australian war artist. He arrived at Alexandria in January 1918 and many of his 1918 sketches were exhibited later that year at the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists' War and Peace Exhibition.

I have two paintings from his time as an active war artist. The Australian Light Horse Remount Camp at Moascar North Egypt was near Ismailia on the Suez Canal, on the main route from Egypt to Palestine. The poet Andrew Barton Banjo Paterson was in charge of the Remounts Section, where untrained horses and mules from Australia were broken in and trained. Lambert’s tiny (23 x 28 cm) oil painting was particularly telling since Paterson and Lambert had known each other in Australia and both were professional horse men.

In March 1918 Lambert learned about the Charge at Beersheba from men in the 4th Light Horse Brigade whom he met in Palestine during his tour of duty. Apparently he rode the course which the charge had taken. The Lambert was given a really clear idea of the mass of horses and men involved in the charge when Light Horsemen staged a re-enactment of the event for him at Moascar Remount Camp. This large oil painting (123 x 247 cm) demonstrated the story: chaos, horsemen galloping under fire, men and horses falling, a horse rearing with its rider, and soldiers fighting in a hand-to-hand struggle.

Australian Light Horse Remount Camp at Moascar

Now I want to examine his post-war tour with the Australian Historical Mission. This Mission was headed by war historian Charles Bean and included war records section staff, professional photographers and officers. The mission's primary tasks were to report on the state of the war graves at Gallipoli. George Lambert was asked by Bean to go with the mission and to make oil and pencil studies that could later help him create two large works commissioned by the Australian Government for the future Australian War Memorial.

The Mission left for Gallipoli in Jan 1919, sailed up to Constantinople then travelled by train across Turkey, Syria, Palestine and finally Egypt. Wherever Lambert went, his works documented Australia’s iconic involvements in the war.

By early 1919 the Australian camps were being dismantled and the surviving soldiers had been largely returned to Australia and demobilised. However it is significant that the Graves Registration Unit was still working in the area, finding the remains of allied soldiers so they could be decently buried. The war may have been over, but Lambert was sketching and painting in an area still filled with trenches, bodies and deserted campsites. He said that the beauty of the battle sites, although often desolate, overwhelmed him. Further he felt an enduring respect for the men of the Light Horse which eventually found expression in his large commissioned paintings.

Anzac, The Landing 1915

Anzac, The Landing 1915 was a large (191 x 351 cm) oil painting that wasn’t completed until c1921. It depicted the Australian soldiers of the covering force climbing the seaward slope of Plugge's Plateau which overlooks the northern end of Anzac Cove. The view is to the north, towards the main range. The viewer can see the white bag that each soldier carried, holding the rations which were issued before the landing. It seems natural that his Gallipoli would be sombre and muted in colour. After all the landscape of Gallipoli was harsh in its geography and flora, and melancholy in its recent history.

When Lambert visited Gallipoli, it was bleak winter weather. Despite the conditions, understanding the landscape, its form, structure and colour was an important aspect of his work. Any direct attack across the narrow section of land known as the Nek, towards heavily defended Turkish trenches, was suicidal. Yet the Light Horsemen were ordered to charge anyhow on the grounds that everything must be done to assist the New Zealanders to make the main attack on the heights. The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, August 1915 is a large (153 cm x 306 cm) oil painting that wasn’t completed until 1924. Wave after wave of Australian teenagers were cut down by Turkish machine guns.

Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, August 1915

I find it ironic, and satisfying, that the area is now part of the Gallipoli Peninsula Peace Park. The site of appalling massacres of young men is now included on the United Nations list of National Parks and Protected Areas.

There are two very useful references for Lambert’s war art. Thirty Years of an Artist's Life was written by George Lambert’s wife Amy in 1938. This book drew on accounts of his time working as a war artist in the Middle East and Gallipoli. And George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine Landscapes, a catalogue published for the Australian War Memorial Travelling Exhibition and published in 2007.

Ben Ezra Synagogue in Coptic Cairo

Readers will remember the beautiful Great Synagogue of Oran, 1880-1963 in Algeria being examined in this blog. This time I want to examine a syngagoge in an Islamic country that retained its Jewish architecture and purpose.

Ben Ezra Synagogue, exterior

The Ben Ezra Synagogue is situated in the Coptic section of Old Cairo. According to local tradition, there are two possible reasons for locating the building on this particular site. Either this was where the baby Moses was found in the bull rushes, hidden from danger, or this was where the adult Moses prayed to God that the Jews might be taken out of slavery in Egypt. Not surprisingly the synagogue soon adopted a votive role.

The land for the synagogue was purchased in 882 AD by Abraham ibn Ezra of Jerusalem. The Amazing Idiot Girl blog noted that like the neighbouring Hanging Church, the Ben Ezra synagogue was designed in the basilica fashion. It has two storeys, ground level for men and an upper gallery for women. The main floor is divided into three parts by steel bars, and in the centre is an octagonal marble bima/desk for Torah reading. There are 12 marble-like columns supporting the roof and 6 marble steps leading up to the wooden altar, inlaid with ivory. The synagogue is decorated with geometric and floral patterns in the Turkish style.

Aliza in Cairo blog has a lovely photo of the delicate ornamentation above the synagogue gate.

Since Fostat was the main Jewish suburb in Cairo, you would expect the synagogue complex to contain all the resources that a large, thriving community (7,000 Jewish citizens in the 12th century) would need. The synagogue precincts, for example, were meeting places for social functions. A large library was given a central position. The Rabbinic Court heard cases in a smaller building, behind the synagogue. A mikveh-well was on the site for religious ablutions. A market place, Souk of the Jews, was located outside the synagogue, attached to the outer wall.

Men's seating on ground floor, women's gallery above

This was the synagogue whose geniza or store room was accidentally found in the late 19th century. When permission was obtained to open the room, it contained a veritable historical treasure trove of stored sacred manuscripts, as well as bills of sale, contracts, letters and other secular documents. The collection, known as the Cairo Geniza, was taken to Cambridge University for preservation and scholarship. Ferrell’s Travel Blog has good links for the geniza.

The Supreme Council of Egypt Antiquities has indicated that the building holds a special spiritual value to Copts since at one time it had been turned into a Coptic church. Furthermore it is of interest to the Muslims since it was built in Islamic style during the Era of the Caliphs. The Point of no return blog recorded that Ben Ezra synagogue is under a government preservation order and the government has decided to use its own funds to renovate the building.

marble desk and marble columns,

looking towards the ark