ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly

Frank LLoyd Wright and Ennis House

2012-01-31T16:15:00.003+11:00

Ennis House is an impressive home in Los Angeles, designed in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) for Charles and Mabel Ennis, the owners of a men's clothing chain. Built in 1924, the first thing a viewer notices is that the property is spread over half an acre, along a ridge with awesome views of the Hollywood Hills.

The second thing to notice is the design. The structure is the largest of Wright's Los Angeles-based “textile block designs” i.e using thousands of interlocking, pre-cast and patterned concrete blocks. Concrete was still considered a new material for home construction in the 1920s, so Wright’s materials were certainly cutting edge. But more than that. The detail that immediately stands out is the relief ornamentation on its concrete blocks, inspired by the symmetrical reliefs of ancient Mayan temples.

Ennis House exterior, with amazing views

Wright built four houses with the textile block design – La Miniatura, Ennis House, Freeman House and Storer House. But I did not think it was attractive. Even Wright himself said “What about the concrete block? It was the cheapest and ugliest thing in the building world. It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. Why not see what could be done with that gutter rat? Steel rods cast inside the joints of the blocks themselves and the whole brought into some broad, practical scheme of general treatment, why would it not be fit for a new phase of our modern architecture? It might be permanent, noble beautiful.”

Architectural Digest (October, 1979) agreed, saying: "The Ennis House is one of the first residences constructed from concrete block. Wright transforms cold industrial concrete to a warm decorative material used as a frame for interior features like windows and fireplaces as well as columns. His 16” modular blocks with intriguing geometric repeats invite tactile exploration. The art glass windows and doors, reminiscent of examples from the earlier prairie period, here achieve greater colour suddenly as they graduate in intensity from darker at the top to lighter at the bottom. The metal work based on Mayan imagery is not of Wright's design, and may have been included at Mr Ennis' request. Yet from the very large iron grill at the main entrance to such minute details as light switches and lock plates, there is a unity of conception and materials that complements the entire structure."

I wonder why the house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but built and supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright. And I wonder why the early, horizontal Prairie Style was not utilised here. Because California was substantially different, in climate or in taste, from Chicago? Was the Prairie Style too arts and craftsy, and too early C20th for the sophisticated 1920s? It seems that Wright felt typecast as the Prairie house architect and was using the Los Angeles era to broaden his architectural vision.

In any case that Mr Ennis was a passionate scholar of Mayan art and architecture, even before he had discussions with the architect.

The house consisted of two buildings, the main house and a smaller staff flat, separated by a paved courtyard. Unlike the vertical orientation of the other three textile block houses, the Ennis House has a long horizontal loggia spine on the northern side connecting public and private rooms to the south.

living room, then steps up to the dining room

In 1940 the house was sold to a new family and then altered by Wright, adding a pool and some rooms. Augustus Brown, who owned the property from 1968 to 1980, was the last private owner of the Ennis house. To ensure its safe keeping, Brown created the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, now the Ennis House Foundation.

There had been structural problems with the Ennis House since the beginning; the concrete blocks had cracked and the lower sections of the walls had moved. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminium moulds to create the blocks. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position.Perhaps using decomposed granite from the site, to colour the textile blocks, introduced impurities to the concrete mix. And combined with Los Angeles’ specific air pollution problems, perhaps this had caused the concrete to moulder.

Nonetheless Wright firmly believed concrete held potential as a material for affordable housing.

More damage occurred due to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the record rain in 2004-2005. The Ennis House Foundation was very worried about the millions of dollars it would take for the full restoration project.

In 2005 the house was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of the Most Endangered Historic Places. In 2006 a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant was issued and the restoration work went ahead. The house has since been declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

dining room

In June 2009 the Ennis House Foundation put the house on the market, with an asking price of USA $15 million. In July 2011, The Ennis House Foundation announced that the sale would ahead, but for only $4.5 million (£2.8 million), as long as the new owner agreed to allow public open days on 12 days of the year. He did.

Harbin - China's Paris of the Orient

2012-01-28T07:45:00.005+11:00

Harbin was once a small snow-bound village, 1000 ks northeast of Beijing. In 1898 a city was established because the Russians needed to build the Chinese Eastern Railway. This railway line was to be an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway, greatly reducing the travelling time across northern inner Manchuria to the Russian port of Vladivostok. I wonder if the planners saw any problem in having a Russian railway line, using Russian currency, a Russian timetable, Russian passports and Russian equipment going through a foreign country!

The Harbin section of the Chinese Eastern Railway was built 1898-1902.

It seems not. In 1896 China gave permission for the railway to be built and for Russia to control a strip of land along both sides of the long railway. In a very short time, some 70,000 Russians and other citizens had moved to Harbin – railway workers, engineers, architects, shop keepers, teachers and road builders. By 1910, they had built a fully functioning, lovely European city de novo. Those who did well built themselves lovely villas and art nouveau apartment houses.

European architecture, Zhongyang Dajie (High St) in Harbin's old quarter

China Travel proudly reports that so many businesses were doing well that Harbin established itself as an international metropolis, a the centre of north eastern China. The Russians established a top class educational system for their citizens and published Russian language journals and newspapers. Other nations set up hundreds of commercial and banking companies in Harbin. The surrounding area had enormous reserves of gold, diamonds and timber, providing a reliable basis for new industries to be developed.

Saint Sophia Russian Orthodox Church, built in 1907.

The city became a centre of commerce, of course, but also of religion and culture. The Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia was given a majestic front with large doors and great arches. Completed in 1907, the traditional Russian architecture would have felt at home in Moscow or St Petersburg.

Because of its rich cultural life and ornate, European-inspired architecture, this Paris of the Orient became the City of Music.

Among the people who flocked to Harbin, Russian Jews arrived in their thousands. It is difficult to tell if they arrived because the Russian authorities were encouraging shop keepers, doctors and small business owners to move to Harbin, and so Jews were likely to be recruited. Or if the horrific pogroms in Eastern Europe forced young Jewish families, in particular, to look abroad for safely. What is certain is that in Harbin, Jewish citizens enjoyed all the economic, political and residential rights unavailable in Czarist Russia. And of course these rights were guaranteed (to all citizens) when the Soviet Union acquired the railroad zone later on.

Jewish cemetery and model of Old Synagogue, 1909

Jews in Harbin were furriers, bakers, shopkeepers, café owners, teachers and musicians, timber mill owners and factory workers. They built a moderate sized prayer centre, Old Synagogue, in 1909. When the community became bigger after the Russian Revolution, they built a larger prayer centre, New Synagogue, in 1921 (now a museum). The community also built its own school, hospital, music centre, sports organisation and welfare facilities.

By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Harbin started to look like a safe haven for about 150,000 refugees, largely White Russians, making the city the largest Russian community outside the Soviet Union. And the Jewish community grew and grew. Between 1918 and 1930, 20 Jewish newspapers and periodicals were published in Harbin, mostly written in Russian. Russian was the shared language for all ex-pats, as well as for their Chinese business associates and employees.

I don’t know much about Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in Sept 1931. But I do know that the Chinese army were forced to retreat from Harbin after bombing from Japanese aircraft. In 1935, the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese, which resulted in the first exodus of Russian emigres from Manchuria, in general and Harbin, in particular. Many ex-pat Russians went back to the Soviet Union, or to Shanghai.

New Synagogue, 1921, now a Jewish museum

Nor is it clear what happened to Harbin after WW2. Clearly the city's administration was transferred to the Chinese People's Liberation Army in April 1946 and became part of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. Within a couple of years, the rest of the European community quickly returned to their home countries or emigrated to Australia, the Americas or Israel.

Today Harbin's population is 10 million people, making it China's 8th largest city. Yet despite two generations (1896-1946) of Russian culture and development, nothing remains except the European architecture. Visit Harbin's old quarter today, near the Songhua River, and you will find many intact baroque and byzantine buildings that were constructed by the Russians.

Read Passage Through China: the Jewish communities of Harbin, Tientsin and Shanghai, written by Irene Eber. This catalogue accompanied the 1986 exhibition held in Tel Aviv’s Museum of the Jewish Diaspora.

map of the Chinese Eastern Railway

History is weird - the Hiram Bingham story

2012-01-24T16:44:00.009+11:00

On 24/4/2010, I wrote a post about the American Varian Fry: hero and rescuer of thousands. Varian Fry (1907–67) was a journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent for an American paper, Fry visited Berlin in 1935 and was very distressed by Nazi violence against Jewish citizens.

He went to Marseilles as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee, in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis. At first Fry only had a rather small pot of money and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by the Gestapo. But soon anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists and musicians were begging for his help.

Despite the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, Fry and his small group of volunteers hid refugees in a safe home until they could be smuggled out. 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the USA. Others he helped escape on ships leaving Marseilles for the French colony of Martinique. He was an absolute hero, a truly moral man who became the first American ever to be recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations in Jerusalem.

A year and a half later, on 2/9/2011, I was writing about a totally different continent and a totally different era: Machu Picchu in Peru - luxury exploration. Hiram Bingham III (1875–1956) was the American explorer who revealed the remains of the Inca citadel, Machu Picchu, in July 1911. He had traced Simon Bolivar’s footsteps, including the historic trade routes through Venezuela, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, funded largely by his wife, an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune.
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Hiram Bingham III, in Peru, 1911.

Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, is one of the most famous examples of Inca architecture and is located 112km from Cuzco, 2,350 ms above sea level. The ruins, probably built in the mid-C15th by the Inca Emperor, are surrounded by lush jungle. The ruins are situated on the eastern slope of Machu Picchu in two separate areas - agricultural and urban. The latter includes the civil sector (dwellings, canals and sophisticated irrigation systems) and the sacred sector (temples, mausoleums, squares and royal houses). The Machu Picchu citadel combines stunning natural scenery with a historic treasure trove, and is now recognised as one of the New 7 Wonders of the World.

Hiram Bingham III has often been cited as a possible model for the Indiana Jones character. His book Lost City of the Incas became a bestseller upon its publication in 1948.

What did these two apparently disparate history posts have in common? The Bingham name! The most important task for Varian Fry was obtaining the visas needed for the artists, writers and academics. He could not have succeeded without Hiram Bingham IV (1903-1988), an American Vice Consul in Marseilles who fought against US State Department anti-Semitism. Like the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of legal and illegal visas.

Hiram Bingham IV, in France, 1941.

Note the stamp was issued in 2006.

As it turned out, the Hiram Bingham who was the American vice-consul in Marseilles was the son of the discoverer of Machu Picchu. Though young Bingham has also been singled out for his help to artist Marc Chagall, Nobel prize winner Otto Meyerhoff and writer Lion Feuchtwanger, it was probably even more impressive that he provided assistance to a number of obscure refugees who would have otherwise been doomed.

The Varian Fry Institute has proposed to Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem that Hiram Bingham IV be honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations. The Institute also nominated five other colleagues who were working in Marseilles until 1941 of whom I shall mention only one.

Charles Fernley Fawcett also worked with Varian Fry. Fawcett was the groom in a series of six bigamous and bogus marriages, helping six Jewish women to get out of internment camps where they too faced certain death. Another truly moral hero of our times.

Oscar Wilde in Paris: insensitive or nasty?

2012-01-21T07:49:00.007+11:00

Was Oscar Wilde anti-Semitic? One character in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890 was a greasy, monstrous theatre manager, Mr Isaacs. Isaac’s Jewishness was so unsympathetically presented by Wilde that the reader felt sickened. What was worse, Wilde had written the character Dorian Gray as a vicious anti-Semite who attacked the theatre manager over and over again.

Wilde in London, in the great days pre-gaol

But I had forgotten about Mr Isaacs and Dorian Gray until reading “Oscar Wilde, Captain Dreyfus' Reluctant Hero” written by Eddie Naughton in 2009. No longer able to write, and living down at heel in Paris, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) survived for three years after he was released from wretched imprisonment in Britain.

Wilde's arrival in Paris coincided with the infamous Dreyfus trial of 1894 and its fall out, including the nasty role of Count Ferdinand Esterhazy (1847–1923). Wilde first met Esterhazy in a Paris cafe, and immediately the two men were drawn to each other. Wilde was fascinated by this unkempt, tubercular crook while Esterhazy pounded his new friend with relentless outbursts against Jews in general and supporters of Dreyfus in particular.

Count Ferdinand Esterhazy, the true spy in the Dreyfus Case

While Captain Dreyfus was shackled to the bed on disease-ridden Devil's Island, Esterhazy had been secretly unmasked as the real traitor by an intelligence officer, Colonel George Picquart (1854–1914), who was promptly court-martialled by the French and sent to prison for revealing secret documents. The French army elite preferred to see an innocent Jewish officer rotting in a hellhole than have their establishment boat rocked.

But it was Esterhazy's confession to Wilde at a dinner one night that brought the whole Dreyfus affair to a head. Along with Wilde and Esterhazy were an anti-Semite English journalist, Rowland Strong, and a pro-Semite young Irish bohemian poet, Chris Healy. At the behest of the pro-Dreyfusards, an indifferent Wilde prompted Esterhazy during his usual delirium about Jews into blurting out that it was he, Esterhazy, who'd been selling secret military intelligence to the Germans. Esterhazy proudly shouted that he put Dreyfus in prison, and all of France couldn’t get him out! Oscar Wilde’s reluctant role, according to Naughton, was in “outing” the real traitor, Esterhazy. As it happened, Wilde cared little for the pro-Dreyfusards.

Not so Chris Healy, who immediately made contact with French writer Emile Zola. At this time Zola was serving a prison sentence for libel after publishing his famous J'accuse, a devastating indictment of the French government, army and courts and their role in the framing of Captain Dreyfus. Zola tried to contact Wilde, but Wilde refused to co-operate with him. Why? Apparently because Zola had refused to sign a petition on behalf of Wilde at the time of his own conviction in Britain. Zola contacted other sympathetic journalists, and eventually they exposed and destroyed the corrupt cover-up that had been built around the Dreyfus case.

13 Rue des Beaux Arts, Wilde's last residence

Healy left Paris soon after this and never saw Wilde again. Wilde died alone and penniless in the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris.

Dreyfusian France is a subject I know very well, so I had ask myself if Naughton had the entire story? I soon found “A Tale of Two Scandals” by Nigel Jones. After parting from Alfred Douglas in Italy in late 1897, an unemployed, impoverished Wilde returned to Paris in early 1898, during Emile Zola’s trial over the J’accuse article. The political firestorm following Captain Dreyfus’ imprisonment and Emile Zola’s guilty verdict threatened the very survival of the Third Republic. Frenzied mobs, howling anti-Semitic hatred, were supported by the army, government, Catholic church and most of the press.

Jones certainly knew that the apparent villain of the affair, Count Esterhazy, was a crappy soldier, boastful, malicious, a gambler, drinker and womaniser. However Jones tended to believe the Esterhazy was really a double agent, deliberately planted on the Germans, rather than a true traitor. Even if Jones was correct, would that have made any difference to Wilde’s attitudes?

Oscar Wilde’s intimate friendship with Esterhazy seems bizarre to us. Wilde had himself been a persecuted martyr and victim of a viciously punitive homophobic morality in Britain. Surely liberal, socialist Wilde would have been on the side of the innocent man, not aligning himself with the forces of reaction, Church power and punitive right wing politics. Yet if Esterhazy had been innocent, Wilde suggested, the British author would have had nothing to do with the Frenchman. Thus Wilde was being paradoxical, provocative and ironic in his denunciation of Capt Dreyfus, not specifically anti-Semitic.

Esterhazy didn’t care. He saw himself and Wilde as the two greatest martyrs of humanity; Captain Dreyfus was a pushy, German-speaking Jew who, if he did not spy for Germany, probably wanted to.

In the end, Wilde contracted cerebral meningitis, was baptised into the Catholic Church in 1900 and died in poverty. Zola was asphyxiated in Paris in 1900. Commander George Picquart, the hero of the entire sordid affair, was freed from gaol and made a minister in the Clemenceau government. He died in 1914. Esterhazy escaped to Britain where he received a pension cheque every month from France and lived out his life in splendid comfort in Hertfordshire. He died in 1923.

What was the difference between Naughton’s and Jones’ attitudes to Oscar Wilde? Naughton saw Wilde as disinterested in the Dreyfus affair, so his role in exposing Esterhazy was accidental and reluctant. Jones saw Wilde as vitally interested in the Dreyfus affair and in Zola, so his role was intentional, paradoxical and in the end very risky.

Jones gave a reference to J Robert Maguire, “Oscar Wilde and the Dreyfus Affair” in Victorian Studies, vol 41, #1. I haven’t located the journal yet, but note that Maguire wrote the article way back in 1997. This story has been around for 15 years!

Wilde's tomb, Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

Bacardi Rum's building resurrected in Havana

2012-01-17T16:38:00.006+11:00

With an ever-increasing European demand for sugar came the need for a larger work force and that need was met by bringing slaves from Africa to the Americas. Rum distilleries sprung up in the Caribbean and North America. This rum was then shipped around the Americas and to Africa where it was used to pay for new African slaves, bound for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. The trade of slaves, molasses and rum was very lucrative.

Bacardi Rum Building, built in 1930 in Havana, as it looked in 2001

Emigrating from Spain to Cuba in 1830, Don Facundo Bacardi and his family worked hard establishing themselves as business owners in Santiago de Cuba. Life must have been brutal, but Cuba had become the largest producer of sugar in the Caribbean. In 1862 the family bought its own rum distillery in Santiago and called it Bacardi. When Don Facundo’s sons took over, the secret rum formula was improved even further. During the 1880s and 1890s Emilio Bacardí (1844–1922) and his family were heroic supporters of Cuban freedom and independence.

By the end of the century Cuba had become very wealthy from exporting sugar, rum, tobacco and bananas, and the tiny island was a ready target for predatory super powers. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish troops outnumbered the much smaller rebel army of locals who therefore had to use guerrilla tactics to save their own homeland. The Spanish military governor of Cuba herded the locals into fortified camps where a quarter of a million Cuban civilians died from starvation and disease.

Spain and USA declared war on each other in Ap 1897. A year later the war ended when the two countries signed the Treaty of Paris; Spain ceded Puerto Rico and other, more distant islands to the USA. But what a nightmare for Cuba. From 1898-1902, and again from 1906–1909, Cuba was occupied by the USA. Under Cuba's new constitution, the USA retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and to supervise its finances and foreign relations! Self-government was not restored to Cuba until 1909.

central tower, Mexican free-tailed bat symbol

During the time of Prohibition (1920 on), Emilio Bacardi and the next generation of the family exacted revenge on the USA government. Cuba had become a popular destination for American tourists and by the 1920s the family was inviting those same tourists to come to Cuba to beat Prohibition at home. These were the boom years for Cuba, when Deco became the symbol of a vibrant future, with its distinctive buildings and colourful, extravagant shapes.

The Bacardi Building is one of Havana’s principal landmarks, standing on the western edge of the city’s historical centre. Its architect, Esteban Rodríguez Castells, originally won the international competition for its construction with a neo-Renaissance proposal. But after visiting the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, he completely reworked his design into the Art Deco style. Located on the Avenida de Belgica/Belgium, the Bacardi building of 1930 is one of Havana’s first sky scrapers (12 storeys high) and remained the highest point in Havana for a long time.

Cubaism (Cuba Tourism) described the building in great detail. The façade was lavishly decorated with red Bavarian granite, inlaid with brass embellishments. The upper floors and the tower, both raised in a pyramid shape, were of the exquisite and bright design that combined blue and dun stripes with bright gold panels. The upper part of the building was faced with glazed terracotta reliefs of geometric patterns, flowers and female nudes by the American artist Maxfield Parrish.

Its sumptuous interior details included blue mirrors; stucco reliefs; brushed and polished brass; mural paintings; mahogany and cedar panelling; stained and etched glass; richly coloured inlaid marble from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, France, Belgium and Hungary. The lamps and other fittings throughout the building were of course in the most modern Art Deco style. The colour of the ceramic flagstones covering the upper floors was bright yellow, referencing the white and gold rums exported by Bacardi.

1930s advertisement for Cuban Bacardi Rum. Note the yellow and the bat.

The building’s central tower was crowned by a three dimensional Bacardi bat, a figure that appeared throughout the building. I presume Bacardi rum featured the Mexican free-tailed bat as its icon because the bats were great pollinators of the sugar cane and because they devoured the insects that damaged sugar cane. In addition, as would be found in any Art Deco building, the decorations included sun-bursts, fans, waves, spirals and geometric patterns, and Art Deco roses, pineapples and other tropical fruit. And there were many other Art Deco objects, both functional and decorative, like lamps, lift doors and iron grills.

The company opened rum production facilities in Mexico in 1931 and Puerto Rico in 1936, as well as the New York based imports company in 1944. After the Cuban revolution, the company moved from Cuba to its Mexico and Puerto Rico factories, and build new facilities and offices in the USA, the Bahamas and Bermuda. Bacardí family members were now reputed to be strongly right wing and anti-Cuba, having close ties to the American right wing and to the CIA.

bar, mezzanine floor

In any case there was no money in the island nation for supporting its architecture, once the USA's obscene and brutal embargo on Cuba started in 1960. There was barely enough money for the 11 million Cubans to have food and medicine. Buildings start to moulder and crumble, including the once beautiful Bacardi edifice.

In 2001 the building was largely restored by an Italian firm to its original condition, including the beautiful marbles and Cuban Art Deco accessories. And then the work was completed in 2003 by the Office of the City Historian of Havana. The building is now the headquarter for representative agencies of tour operators. Visitors can inspect the lower floors and enjoy the bar located on the mezzanine floor, but cannot go up to the top storeys.
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Ground floor entrance, iron grills and marble floor

I have not yet seen the book Havana Deco, written by Alonso, Contreras and Fagiuoli. Published by WW Norton in 2006, the book explains the relationship between Cuban culture and the development of the Deco style there. The book places a heavy emphasis on Edificio Emilio Bacardi's exterior and interior because it serves as a good example of Cuba Deco.

Saving a historical industrial site in Brisbane

2012-01-14T08:02:00.031+11:00

We know a lot about the heritage-listed Colonial Sugar Refinery 1893 in New Farm Brisbane, thanks to the State Department of Environment and Resource Management.

Founded in Sydney in 1855, the Colonial Sugar Refining Co (CSR) started to dominate the Australian sugar industry in a time of enormous change in the history of sugar; it fuelled the growth of sugar as a new industry in places with suitable growing conditions i.e Queensland. Technological advances in the refining process transformed sugar from a luxury item to a staple food, at least in western countries.

The Refinery and wharf, 2011, Brisbane

Attempts at growing sugar cane had already been made in Queensland prior to statehood, but new government encouragement of the growing of sugar cane in the colony strengthened in the 1860s. Plantations in new areas along the north coast quickly opened up in the 1870s, including in the Maryborough, Bundaberg and Mackay districts.

By 1874, Queensland was exporting sugar to the other Australian colonies. CSR moved north and acquired large tracts of land for sugar growing near Mackay. In total CSR established 3 large mills in Nth Queensland where Pacific Islanders comprised the majority of the workforce.

By the 1890s, the plantation system was no longer dominant; the industry increasingly required large companies. CSR needed to concentrate more on the value adding end of the market i.e. milling and refining. CSR's Brisbane refinery was the 4th in a chain of refineries that they established in Australia's capital cities; refineries were opened in Sydney (Pyrmont 1878 Australia’s largest), Melbourne (Yarraville c1875), and Adelaide (Glanville 1891).

The original red face bricks

Brisbane was rapidly growing. In 1892 CSR acquired a riverside site of 3.5 hectares on the New Farm peninsular by buying up allotments on a recently sub-divided estate. The location had two major advantages: it enabled access for large ships and was also close to the city's markets. So the wharf (1893), on the river in the front of the main building, became a central part of the plan.

The 1893 complex consisted of the refinery building comprising char house, cistern house, pan house and refined sugar store; raw sugar store; melt house; boiler house; workshop; a two storied building containing offices, laboratory and hessian rooms; and the wharf. Most of the original machinery was made in Scotland. The char house, by the way, was middle step in the sugar refining process, in between the melting stage and the crystallisation stage.

Built during a time of economic depression, the Brisbane refinery was important in demonstrating the company's dominance of both the Queensland and Australian sugar industry for over a century. This was thanks, one assumes, to the Queensland Government's protectionist trade policies in the decade prior to Federation.

New Farm was already the industrial and warehousing district of Brisbane. But CSR added something new; they successfully lobbied for the building of the Bulimba branch railway (completed 1897). Later development of the area benefited from the availability of both wharfs and rail facilities, and included the woolstores (1909) and the New Farm Power House (1928).

The Refinery’s main building (1893) was a long narrow structure, facing the river. The walls were composed of face bricks laid in English bond, around a combination of timber and cast iron framework. It was four storeys high at the southern end and five storeys at the northern end. Rising above the corrugated iron roof line was a hexagonal shaped tower, originally used for the storage of char.

But nothing stays the same. In 1988, the residence was removed from the site; in 1989 the rail link to the refinery was closed; and CSR totally ceased operations at the New Farm refinery in 1998. The buildings fell into ruination.

Industrial feel to the apartment interiors

Now the exterior of The Refinery has been totally restored; the transformed interior now houses 30 apartments, thus converting a large industrial processing building to a residential use. And saving it. The main 1893 refining building still demonstrates the principal characteristics of a C19th industrial building, including use of fully visible face bricks, restrained embellishment and a narrow, vertical form. Note the char tower with its decorative brackets and finial, the grassed banks, fence, wharf and river. Directly behind the central core is the raw sugar store, flanked by warehouses on the southern side and ancillary buildings.

Internally many modifications have been made, resulting in some alterations to the floor levels, most notably in the char house. The framing in the southern end (refined sugar store and pan house) is timber, whilst that in the northern end (cistern and char house) is of cast iron. The renovated interiors retain this industrial image.

The refinery is now one of the last surviving industrial sites on the inner city reaches of the Brisbane river and one of the last to retain its wharf. So it is important. It had to be saved, and it was!

River frontage

Questions to ask, as a result of this experience:

1. Do important industrial sites deserve heritage protection, like churches and historical homes?

2. If the original industrial architecture was not aesthetically pleasing, can it be tarted up?

3. Should a preservation order cover the industrial building's interiors as well?

4. Do the outbuildings in industrial sites need to be protected?

Leica cameras and its Jewish employees: 1938

2012-01-10T16:27:00.023+11:00

In 1849 Carl Kellner had established an optical institute in Wetzlar for the development of lenses and microscopes. Ernst Leitz I (1843-1920) became a partner in the company in 1865 and took over sole management in 1869. Ernst Leitz was a socially aware employer whose humanitarian attitude to his employees was best seen in his whole-hearted acceptance of health insurance, pension and housing schemes, and, by 1899, an eight-hour day. The number of his employees expanded to 120.

The first Leica camera prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, in Wetzlar (north of Frankfurt) in 1913. Intended as a compact camera for landscape photography, particularly for challenging mountain trips, the Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera. Soon after Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956) became sole owner of the business in 1920, the Leica prototypes had moved to the manufacturing stage. It was very successful.

Leica advertisement, 1938

Ernst Leitz II ran the company with the same humanitarian values his father had held, but in the years just before WW2 erupted in 1939, many companies were moving in the other direction - fostering a close association with the Nazi regime. So although there was still time to help their Jewish employees escape, very few companies bothered. Yet the Leitz family, designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, actually tried to save all its Jewish workers.

As soon as Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Ernst Leitz II increasingly got worried calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were protected from Nazi Germany 's Nuremberg laws, which controlled the work, movement and liberties only of Jews.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz carefully designed a programme that would allow Jews to leave Germany; they were Leitz employees who were simply being "assigned" overseas. Employees, retailers and family members were each given a Leica camera and were assigned to Leitz sales offices in USA, France, Britain & Hong Kong.

And not just long-standing members of the firm. The Guardian said he began taking on a string of young Jewish apprentices from the town of Wetzlar, to train them from scratch so that they could work abroad. After their training, Leitz personally applied for an exit permit to send the new employees abroad, to assist in generating sales.

Particularly after the Kristallnacht catastrophe of November 1938, German employees travelled on the ocean liner Bremen and made their way to the Manhattan, London or Paris offices of Leitz Inc. Apparently an editor of the Leica Magazine called every Leitz account in Britain, France and the USA, to help place the new employees in local jobs in the photographic industry. Leitz paid full salary for 3 months, and half salary for the next three months! It must have been difficult at first since the recent arrivals couldn’t speak a word of English or French, but out of this migration came some of the best designers, repair technicians, salespeople and writers for the photographic press.

Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956)

The Leica Freedom Train, as the programme came to be called, peaked in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to safety every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland in Sept 1939, Germany sealed off its borders. By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had already escaped abroad, thanks to Leitz's heroic efforts. The programme saved their lives and the lives of their children.

How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it? Leitz Inc. was an internationally recognised brand that reflected credit on the powerful Third Reich and Leitz was a man above suspicion. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also the German government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the USA. To the Nazi government, the programme was transferring skilled salesmen abroad, to generate hard currency sales.

How ironic that, due to the Nazis' dependence on the military optics that Leitz's factory produced, as well as their belief in the importance of the Leica camera for their propaganda purposes, the company was able to get Jewish workers and their families out of Germany! The Guardian said that the government actually DID know what he was doing; that the Gestapo turned a blind eye, so important was it to them that production at the plant continued.

Even so, members of the Leitz family did not get off scot-free. One Leitz executive, Alfred Turk, was gaoled for helping Jews. Ernst Leitz's own daughter, Dr Elsie C. Kühn-Leitz (1903-85), was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. Both Turk and Kühn-Leitz were eventually freed, but the risks were clearly very high.

In all, nearly 300 people benefited from the programme, perhaps two thirds in the USA and one third in Britain and other parts of Europe. Yet when Ernest Leitz II died in 1956, his efforts remained unrewarded, as far as I can see. His daughter Dr Kuhn-Leitz, on the other hand, received many honours for her humanitarian efforts. So if the story was known after the war, why has it been forgotten since? And why did the family insist that no story be published until the last member of the Leitz family was dead?

Read the book The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train, written by Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith. And a film is being made about the great courage of the Leitz family/company during the years leading up to WW2. The film, called One Camera, One Life, is being produced by Liz Boeder and Doris Bettencourt, and directed by Mark de Paola.

Ballets Russes: 1936-1940

2012-01-07T08:07:00.008+11:00

When Sergei Diaghilev died in 1929, a number of Ballets Russes dance companies were formed. In the years just before WW2 erupted, three of the companies were brought to Australia via theatrical agents JC Williamson, performing 44 works on tour. Thus the Australian public was introduced to a brilliant and exotic company of dancers, productions, stage designs, costumes and music, the likes of which could not have been imagined, this far from Europe. And so shortly after the Great Depression!

Presented in Australia by Diaghilev’s successor, Colonel Wassily de Basil, the Ballets Russes revitalised the art form of ballet and had a profound impact on Australian cultural life in the years 1936-40. Australians of all backgrounds were captivated by the dancers, who in turn came away with fond memories of Australia and its people.

Some dancers elected to remain here during the tours, and thanks to them, The Australian Ballet is able to trace a direct link to the Ballets Russes. Madame Helene Kirsova, for example, started a Russian ballet school at Macquarie Place in Sydney in 1940. In the following year, she started Australia’s first professional ballet company.

Mark Carroll ed, The Ballets Russes in Australia and Beyond, 2011.

In 2006, The Australian Ballet launched a great celebration as part of the research project Ballets Russes in Australia: Our Cultural Revolution. The project focused on the legacy of those pre-war visits to Australia, and culminated in 2009, the centenary of the founding of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris. I discussed one of their exhibitions, Ballets Russes art and design, in this blog some time ago. Another part of the project was an analysis of legendary Russian choreographer, Leonide Massine, who was Serge Diaghilev’s third and most influential dance maker.

The Legacy the Ballet Russes project concluded with a 4-city, 12-day tour of central Europe, with a luxury travel tour company, Beyond the Curtain. Although this tour in April 2010 seemed to have me in mind when it was designed, I didn’t read the review in Luxury Travel Magazine until just recently. Perhaps a kind reader will provide some feedback on what was possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

The tour couldn’t have been led by a more qualified person. Amanda Clerke-Moulds began her ballet training in Sydney with Edouard Borovansky, one of the original stars of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. Later she successfully auditioned for the Australian Ballet. Under the direction of Sir Robert Helpmann and Dame Peggy van Praagh, she danced with Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and the company all over the world.

The travellers’ task was to explore the inner workings of some of Europe’s greatest ballet companies; they could watch the dancers in rehearsal, attend receptions with the stars of the ballet world, and take the best seats in the house for the performances. Tour guests could stay in grand old hotels close to the theatres in every city. You can find the detailed itinerary easily.

The tour began in Zurich, home to one of Europe’s most respected Ballet companies, the Zurich Ballet. There the visitors went on a private backstage tour of the Zurich Opera House, a building gilded with a history of famous composers and their music. Tour guests could meet the dancers before taking their seats for the company’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

Leaving Zurich behind, a first-class train journey took the tour through the stunning Swiss Alps and the quaint Bavarian countryside en route to Munich. The hotel was in Maximilianstrasse, a royal avenue known for its art galleries, designer stores, luxury boutiques and its proximity to the National Theatre.

The Bavarian State Ballet was preparing for the week long Munich Ballet Festival. The rehearsals for all the ballets in the Festival repertoire provided a behind the scenes look at a day in the life of a ballet company, the dancers and famous principal artists in action. Guests could explore the Bavarian State Opera House and then stay for a performance of Fiery Mazurka, a passionate, modern dance.

Hélène Kirsova and Igor Youskevitch, Le Carnaval, Sydney,1937. Nat Library Australia

A four-day stay in Prague was based in a hotel with views of Prague Castle. There was of course a private backstage tour of the National Theatre and a day tour of the Karlstejn Castle. And while Prague normally evokes a bygone era with its opulent architecture, the Prague Opera Ballet’s performance of Causa Carmen was a sultry, contemporary interpretation of the operatic classic.

In Vienna guests stayed at the historic Grand Hotel Wein, once the hub of Viennese society. This hotel is close to the Vienna State Opera House, a sumptuous neo-renaissance opera house with its world renowned Wiener Staatsoper Orchestra and Ballet. A meal with the artists of the Wiener Staatsballet was arranged and a private backstage tour of the historic Weiner Staatstheatre. The highlight of the evening was seeing the performance of Coppelia. I would not have wanted to go home!

Has any other Behind The Curtain Ballet Tour been organised before or since, from Australia or from anywhere else?

For a comprehensive analysis of the Ballets Russes in Australia between 1936 and 1940, read Australia Dancing. Or find the book The Ballets Russes in Australia and Beyond, a series of essays discussing how the tours of the Ballets Russes companies created a lasting legacy in dance, visual art and music. It was published by Wakefield Press in August 2011.

Costume for a squid, designed by Natalia Goncharova, Nat Gall Australia

Two exhibitions of British landscapes

2012-01-03T17:42:00.033+11:00

It is a truism to say that the first half of the C20th witnessed some of the most destructive and yet creative decades in Europe’s history. These were eventful and brutal years! But they were also exciting times for artists, with the inter-war generation responding to changing social, political and religious values, as well as responding to the Empire’s military exigencies.

Two British art galleries have just held special exhibitions that a] examined the nation’s response to tough financial times and b] went some way to display the spiritual quality of landscapes.

Sir Alfred Munnings, The Caravan, 1910, Art Museum at Castle House Dedham

Falmouth Art Gallery in Cornwall recently finished a major project called British Impressionism. The location was appropriate, since Cornwall played a major role in 20th century British Impressionism, arguably one of the most popular movements in British art. The exhibition featured important loans from Cornish collections and included works by Dame Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings, Henry Scott Tuke and John T Richardson.

As Richard Moss noted, Cornwall’s pleasant climate offered the chance to capture the local landscape in impressionist paintings which relished bold colour and highly visible brushstrokes, both before and after WW1. The artists were soon producing boat and harbour scenes around Falmouth Bay, a place that captured the frailty of the English sun and the way it played upon the sea.

Together with scenes of pastoral and coastal harmony, the everyday figurative elements of Cornish Impressionism were shown in works such as The Caravan by Alfred Munnings c1910 and Abbey Slip by Stanhope Forbes 1921. Hazy, romantic and harmonious – with hindsight, interesting responses to a time of rapid social change and war.

Stanhope Forbes, Abbey Slip, 1921. Penlee House Gallery & Museum

Restless Times, Art in Britain 1914-45 was curated by Museums Sheffield as part of the Great British Art Debate. After Norwich Castle Museum, the exhibition moved to Tate Britain where it stayed open to the public until Nov 2011.

The exhibition told the story of what would become a turning point in the history of Modern British Art. Again with hindsight, the inter-war era was a period defined by the devastating experience of two world wars, an era that saw fundamental changes in British society. During the mass upheavals, Britain became a destination for displaced people from across Europe. This migration brought foreign artists from across the continent and with them, an influx of new and influential ideas.

Exploring the impact of this remarkable cultural exchange, Restless Times considered how artists sought to redefine the changing face of the nation - from the horrific impact of war and a retreat from the harsh realities of life, to the celebration of the pastoral idyll and the embracing of new ideas and technologies. The exhibition examined how artists engaged with both the uncertainties and possibilities of the time, especially Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Barbara Hepworth, Cyril Power, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Christopher Nevinson, Vanessa Bell and Henry Moore.

Following my previous post on Inter-war landscapes in general and the South Downs in particular, I was delighted to see The Cornfield painted by John Nash in 1918. The Tate said that The Cornfield was the first painting he made after WWW1 which did not depict the subject of war.

John Nash, The Cornfield 1918, 94 x 101cm, Tate (Country Life 23/3/2011).

In its ordered view of the landscape and geometric treatment of the corn stooks, The Cornfield prefigured his brother Paul's landscapes. As That’s How The Light Gets In explained, John and his brother Paul used to paint for their own pleasure only after 6 PM, when their work as war artists was over for the day. Hence the long shadows cast by the evening sun across the field in the centre of the painting. It is difficult for me to remember that The Cornfield was painted as early as 1918 – a full decade or more before by South Downs landscape artists were painting in a similar style.

George Henry, Hikers at Goodwood Downs, 1930s, Graves Gallery Sheffield

Hikers at Goodwood Downs, by George Henry (1858-1943), dated from the 1930s and showed ramblers enjoying Goodwood Downs in West Sussex. Rambling was a fashionable pastime during the 1930s, particularly amongst the working classes, since the activity was both free and health-giving. At weekends hundreds of walkers would leave the city to explore their rural surroundings. The Restless Times exhibition was showing that art and social history were almost indistinguishable.

James Russell's book, published 2011

Readers might like to locate the book Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings 2011. Written by James Russell and published by The Mainstone Press, the book celebrated and commemorated the wartime career of Eric Ravilious, until he tragically died in 1942. The images created a vivid portrait of life in the wartime Britain, including coastal defences, observation posts and rolling countryside filled with the detritus of war.

The High Line, New York: an urban park in the sky

2011-12-31T08:43:00.007+11:00

The High Line was built under an agreement between the New York Central Railroad, New York State and New York City, to elevate dangerous and congesting railroad traffic ABOVE city streets. It was used to transport freight along the Westside waterfront, replacing the street-level tracks at 10th and 11th Aves. Built in 1929 at a cost of $150 million ($2 billion today), it originally stretched from 35th Street to St. John's Park Terminal, now the Holland Tunnel rotary. It mostly ran mid-block, designed to avoid dominating an avenue with an elevated platform. The warehouses and markets in the Meatpacking District were major users of the freight line.

The viaduct was raised off the ground in 1929, to serve the Meat Packing District

Actually The High Line was part of the larger solution, known as the West Side Improvement Project, which was completed in 1934. The West Side Improvement Project, which included the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway, stretched for 21 ks; it extended from the Riverdale section of the Bronx at its northern edge... to Spring Street at the south. It eliminated 105 street crossings, added 32 acres to Riverside Park, and brought food and merchandise into the city.

The rise of trucking in the 1950s led to a drop in rail freight on the High Line, and in the 1960s, the southernmost portion was torn down. The final train carried freight down the High Line in 1980. In 1993, more of the viaduct, between Bank and Little West 12th Sts, was demolished.

Although the elevated structure is basically sound, the abandoned 3 ks stretch of railroad viaduct was ugly and overgrown with weeds. Worse, it was accessible only to those who risked life and limb, trespassing on Railroad property. It was mostly forgotten, except by architects, conservationists and neighbours who were mesmerised by its solitude and wild quality.

In 1999 the Giuliani administration signed an agreement joining the property owners’ move to DEMOLISH the rusting and ugly High Line. So a community-based group, Friends of the High Line, immediately got itself established. Locals Robert Hammond and Joshua David created plans to turn the High Line into an elevated park or greenway, similar to an unused rail viaduct in Paris’ 12th arrondissement that became the Promenade Plantée. The Municipal Art Society, American Institute of Architects, the Society for Industrial Archaeology, the New York chapters of the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Architects also urged preservation.

Sunbaking in the greenery, just next to where High Line meanders through Chelsea Market

In 2004, the New York City government committed $50 million to establish the proposed park. A design competition was conducted, attracting 720 entries from 36 countries, and in July 2004 the four finalists’ proposals went on display at the Centre for Architecture on LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village. The semi finalists included plans for all sorts of facilities - high-flying pools, wetlands, outdoor art projects, bicycle paths and nature trails.

At places where the High Line went through buildings, like the former National Biscuit Company building that is now the Chelsea Market, the decision-makers were open to commercial uses for the High Line. This was presumably to generate income to maintain the project.

In April 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided over a groundbreaking ceremony, marking the beginning of construction on the High Line project. By early 2007, most of the old rail tracks had been removed, making way for the elevated park.

By mid 2008 a natural oasis was created in an urban city. This southern section included five access stairways and three elevators. A hotel developer built The Standard Hotel, straddling the High Line at Little West 12th St. The Gansevoort Street terminus at the south end of the High Line was considered for a new museum by a number of organisations.

The new Standard Hotel straddles the old High Line

In June 2011 another ribbon cutting ceremony to open the High Line's second section, from 20th Street to 30th Street, was held. This time the mayor, politicians and dignitaries were all there.

The High Line Channel features art films and videos, including historic works, new productions and curated series. During the High Line’s regular operating hours, the Channel can be viewed from the Seating Steps at West 22nd St.

Having a 22-block elevated urban park that connected neighbourhoods and provided a special sense of place… was a unique and transformative public experience. I actually believe it was a radical demonstration of people-power and local planning. What an interesting premise - that an open space can be at the heart of neighbourhood revitalisation.

Can there be further growth in the future? Of course. Someone may be inspired to built a beach on the High Line, or a golf course, or a music bowl. Architect Steven Holl hopes one day to make the High Line part of a green loop, connected to the new Hudson River Park by a series of pedestrian bridges that would soar above the fierce traffic of West Street. The sky is the limit!

The sense of wild plants has been maintained

And High Line has had important financial considerations as well. Like the Promenade Plantée in Paris, High Line has spurred the construction of domestic and commercial buildings in the surrounding area. 8000 construction jobs were created on High Line itself, and many more on other neighbourhood developments. Two million people a year visit the structure, half of them tourists. Needless to say, citizens in other American cities are now looking very carefully at their own rusty, industrial hulks.

Bedford Park 1875-80: the first garden suburb?

2011-12-27T15:53:00.013+11:00

The garden city movement was a British approach to urban planning that was founded by Sir Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s book Garden Cities of Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform came out in 1898, just one year before he founded the Garden City Association in 1899.

The intention was to combine the advantage of town life with the attractions of living in a healthy rural environment. Garden cities were to be planned, self-contained communities surrounded by green belts. They were to include carefully balanced areas of residences, industry and agriculture. Standards had to be maintained beyond the design and building phases; it was important that both the town and the agricultural belt would to be permanently controlled by the public authority under which the town was developed.

Semi detached Queen Anne houses in Bedford Park

In my earlier post, I had discussed Letchworth Garden City 1899, Hampstead Garden Suburb 1907 and Welwyn Garden City 1919, all of them in or near Greater London. All of which begs the question, where did Ebenezer Howard and his association's ideas come from?

Bedford Park Garden Suburb was one of the world's first garden suburbs. As far as I can see, the merchant Jonathan Carr was politically progressive but he was not interested in free housing for impoverished families and he did not believe in communal living. Since we know, for example, that Carr formally created the Bedford Park Company, we can assume that Carr was interested in raising money for his speculative ventures. As it happened, the Company later collapsed, but that only meant that the remainder of the Bedford Park land was sold off to other developers.

Shops and tavern in Bedford Park

Jonathan Carr bought 24 acres of land, just beyond the western fringes of London, in 1875. In his discussions with potential architects, Carr prioritised his needs: attractive houses for middle-class families; clean and healthy village living; and an easy commute into London.

The first architect for the estate was Edward William Godwin a leading member of the Aesthetic Movement. Developer and architect did not get on well together, and as Bedford was not built in the cooperative manner like some later developments, Carr simply asked Godwin to pack up his plans and pencils, and leave. In 1877 Carr hired the architect Richard Norman Shaw instead.

Individually designed detached and semi-detached houses, arranged as terraces, were used at Bedford Park. Shaw adapted C18th styles in red brick and white joinery that he called Queen Anne. So his scheme was important because Bedford was one of the first garden suburbs, but it was also unusual in architectural terms. The nature strip, with its mature street trees, as well as the private garden separated from the neighbours by low fences, appeared everywhere. It won’t surprise anyone that Shaw’s work became very influential.

St Michael and All Angels Church, Bedford Park, 1880

The modern historian Richard Cavendish thought the strong sense of community grew out of the estate’s dendritic layout, with the streets spreading out like tree roots from Turnham Green station. I suspect the newly arrived residents also loved the idea of having a pub, church, club, parish hall and shops at the centre of their village.

St Michael and All Angels Church 1880 was not just any old church, of course; it was designed by Shaw as the centrepiece of Bedford Park. I wonder how the rest of the community sympathised with Shaw’s Anglo-Catholic preferences. Perhaps they were mollified by the presence of the great pub, mentioned above, opposite the church.

The concept of a special estate owed much to the Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s, a movement that romanticised the simple and honest rural life, and celebrated freely expressed beauty. Bedford in turn attracted the families of artists, architects and other aesthetic types, and provided dedicated studios in many of the houses. Perhaps only fashionable, very literate people could afford to live there eg writer WB Yeats, painter Camille Pissarro and Granville Fell, editor of Connoisseur (my second favourite learned journal).

T. Affleck Greeve's book, Bedford Park: The First Garden Suburb

So a full 25 years before the Garden Cities Association was formed in 1899, Bedford Park had showed that many of Sir Ebenezer Howard’s goals were achievable. Bedford Park also showed that arts and crafts developments thrived in the garden suburbs in and near London, as Hampstead Garden Suburb later did.

In 1967 the government formally listed and protected the greater part of the estate, a total of 356 houses. Many of them have since been renovated.

You might like to read Bedford Park: The First Garden Suburb, written by T. Affleck Greeves and published in London by Anne Bingley in 1999. The book includes a selection of old photos taken soon after the suburb was built in 1875. Other illustrations include maps, drawings and architectural plans.

James Joyce - the great years in Trieste

2011-12-24T08:47:00.038+11:00

James Joyce

I have had a great deal of pleasure writing up the life and times of important authors and artists for this blog eg Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, Sigmund Freud and Dylan Thomas. But writing about Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941), who lived happily in Trieste for most of the years between 1904-20, proved to be more difficult.

Had he chosen to live in Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, Florence etc, I would have felt right at home. But James Joyce lived in Trieste, 116 ks NE of Venice.

Trieste was one of the oldest parts of the Habsburg Monarchy from the high Middle Ages until the end of WW1. And it had been a very beautiful Adriatic port. So in his years there, Joyce witnessed the last years of the city's Austro-Hungarian glory and saw the impressive buildings that had belonged to prosperous Habsburg merchants.

Presumably because of its unique location, Trieste was a cosmopolitan city loved by Bohemian artists and writers.

Bronze statue of Joyce, canal bridge in Trieste

Joyce met Nora Barnacle in 1904 in Dublin, just before the writer was attracted to Trieste. The couple arrived there in 1904, an impoverished Joyce apparently planning to fund some time on the Continent by teaching English.

map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trieste is marked with a cross

Joyce and Nora didn’t marry until many years later (1931), although they had two children (in 1905 and 1907). James didn’t sound like a reliable family man; in fact his family probably would not have been properly fed and clothed without the help of his younger brother Stanislaus who also moved to Trieste. Despite the brother, James Joyce’s many moves between flats seemed to have occurred because the rents were rarely paid on time and rarely paid in full. Perhaps endless boozing was responsible.

When James did manage to make a regular income, it was because he was working for the daily paper, Il Piccolo. At other times, he worked as an English teacher at the Berlitz language school and was an English tutor to some wealthy Triestine families.

Joyce breakfasted on presnitz at the Pasticceria Caffè Pirona

This was a creative and productive period. While living in this city, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, first published in 1914. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was also written in Trieste and was serialised in The Egoist magazine in 1914 and 1915. Portrait was not published in book form until the Egoist Press published it in 1917.

Now there is a Literary Trail. Modern visitors can walk between the eight houses that Joyce lived in during his Trieste life and to dozens of his favourite haunts. His happiest years were spent in #4 Via Bramante, near some elegant steps leading to the Basevi Gardens. The upper floors of a different palazzo have been converted into a hotel called Hotel Victoria, recently opened. It is described as a "literary hotel" because Joyce was once a tenant there.

Trieste's funicular tram

Joyce was a good walker, despite Trieste having steep hills. A funicular tramway had already opened before Joyce and Nora arrived, and operates still, offering magnificent views over the harbour.

Joyce loved high bourgeois coffeehouses like the Caffè San Marco, still evocative of Viennese elegance, and the Caffè Stella Polare near the Canal Grande. Pasticceria Caffè Pirona was Joyce’s breakfast place of choice, an historic Art Nouveau bakery still in business. Apparently Joyce was passionate about presnitz, a horseshoe-shaped pastry stuffed with raisins and walnuts—a house specialty since Alberto Pirona founded the shop in 1900.

Via San Nicolò was where the Joyces lived above the Berlitz School which employed Joyce. Next door is the Umberto Saba Antiquarian bookshop, still in business.

I was not surprised to read that Joyce frequented the Teatro Verdi to watch opera, but alas he was limited to the cheapest seats. What WAS surprising was that Joyce enjoyed different centres of religious architecture. As the main port of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste embraced many different cultures. One of Joyce's favourites was the exotic Greek-Orthodox church of San Nicolò with its twin towers facing the sea. Many of his most friends and students were from the even more exotic Jewish community, which was confident enough to open a beautiful synagogue in Via San Francesco d'Assisi. Joyce's timing was perfect - he could watch every step of the synagogue's construction process (1908-12).

Trieste synagogue, built between 1908 and 1912

Susan Griffiths’ article provided very helpful information. She mentioned The Hotel James Joyce which is located in the colourful historical area of old Trieste, and I would love to know whether Joyce was ever a guest there. She also noted 45 plaques around the city that mark places of Joycean interest. One of these plaques highlights the red light district of the Città Vecchia quarter, including a brothel at 7 via della Pescheria. Another helpful suggestion was the guide book James Joyce: Triestine Itineraries by Renzo Crivelli. A bridge over the canal has a distinctive bronze statue of the ex-pat Irishman, sunning himself in this old Austro-Hungarian-Italian city.

World War One must have been a difficult time. Although Joyce was too old to be a soldier himself, it must have been galling for him when his students were called up to fight in a war between Italy (and the Allied Powers) versus Austria-Hungary (and the Central Powers). So in 1915 the Joyces moved to Zurich, a neutral city that became home to exiles and artists from across Europe. They didn't return to Trieste till 1918.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not dissolve until the end of the war and many of its border areas were disputed among its successor states. In November 1918, a treaty was signed to end hostilities between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Trieste was occupied by the Italian Army and the city was formally absorbed into Italy.

James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941 and was buried there. Nora died in 1951 and was buried alongside her husband. Stanislaus died in Trieste in 1955, and was buried in the Trieste cemetery. None of the bodies was repatriated back to Ireland.

Despite our perhaps preconceived ideas, Literary Traveller said it was Trieste that claimed James Joyce. Trieste was more significant than Dublin, which Joyce immortalised in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; more than Zurich where he was buried; more than Paris where he wrote Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. I have not read John McCourt’s book The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920, but it may be very helpful.

James Joyce Hotel, Trieste

Degenerate Music, Dusseldorf 1938

2011-12-20T15:58:00.004+11:00

It stands to reason that some nations profited immensely from the unexpected arrival of brilliant musicians and artists who fled Nazi Germany and Austria from 1933 on. I certainly knew all about the visual artists from Nazi-controlled countries. But what happened to the musicians who were still in Germany before the war and what happened to those who came to Australia?

In 1938, senior Nazis wanted to open a Degenerate Music Exhibition in Dusseldorf, much like the Degenerate Art Exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937. As fuzzy as the concept of Degenerate Art was, at least it was visually detectable – anything Jewish, Bolshevik, abstract, negroid, abstract, cubist or anti-Teutonic. But what was Degenerate Music?

catalogue cover, Degenerate Music Exhibition, 1938

Because the Dusseldorf curator in 1938, Dr Hans Ziegler, was an expert on theatre and was not a musicologist, he had no idea what “degenerate music” meant. But he was a very loyal member of the Nazi Party and did his best. Ziegler decided that a simple chord structure was inherently Germanic and natural. And anything which departed from tonality was basically Jewish and therefore degenerate. Hitler believed that music had absolutely immense power and that with music, a human personality could be shaped. Thus Dr Ziegler also thought that music was powerful, and that they needed to mould their fellow citizens along approved cultural lines.

The 1938 Degenerate Music Exhibition included works by Jewish composers or those with Jewish parents or grandparents (eg Felix Mendelssohn, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Gustav Mahler), by socialists, by modernists and by jazz musicians. Why a right winger like Igor Stravinsky was included as a degenerate eludes me, but he was just as reviled as the Jewish and Jazz musicians were.

For this event, a small catalogue was published that included the opening-speech by Ziegler and Goebbels, quotations of Hitler's words, photographs, caricatures and paintings as they appeared in the exhibition.

Dr Ziegler must have done his job well. After Dusseldorf, the Degenerate Music Exhibition travelled to Weimar, Munich and Vienna, where the displays continued to be very popular.

Visitors to the Degenerate Music Exhibition, 1938. Anne Frank Museum photo.

No musician was safe from scrutiny or Nazi re-branding. In his recently published book Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, Erik Levi explored the way in which the Nazi regime manipulated Mozart's music for political gain. Puccini and Verdi seemed to have been subject to a similar appropriation.

Now let us leap forward to the 1980s. Dr Albrecht Dumling is a Berlin-educated musicologist who was responsible for Entartete Musik in 1988, a reconstruction of the Nazis’ Degenerate Music Exhibition in Dusseldorf fifty years earlier (in 1938). How perfect that the reconstruction opened, of all possible places, in the Dusseldorf Tonhalle. The exhibition travelled to other countries, but alas did not come to Australia.

In 2003-4 the same Dr Dumling used the National Library of Australia’s music and manuscript collections to document both the personal experiences of refugee musicians and their professional contributions to the musical life of Australia. In his new book The Vanished Musicians: Jewish Refugees in Australia, 2011, he discussed the reception Australia offered to German-speaking refugee musicians who arrived in Australia from 1933 on.

book by Dr Dumling, The Vanished Musicians: Jewish Refugees in Australia, 2011

Australia should have felt blessed when world-famous Jewish musicians arrived on our shores. Consider Jascha Spivakovsky and the other two members of the trio (Nathan Tossy Spivakovsky and Edmund Kurtz), Artur Schnabel, Richard Tauber and Yehudi Menuhin and the conductor Maurice Abravanel. German born and educated Felix Werder was only 18 when he was imprisoned on the Dunera ship in 1940, so his splendid works, including his symphonies, chamber music, choral works and operas, were all written in Australia. The composer and bassoonist George Dreyfus was even younger when he left Germany in 1938, so he did all his musical studies in Australia.

How tragic that these Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazism at home, would be declared enemy-alien-Germans in Australia. Most were imprisoned in rural camps, in isolated Hay and Tatura.

The modern viewer wants to ask if at least the Musicians’ Union of Australia tried to save these professional musicians and composers during the late 1930s. Apparently not. The Musicians’ Union of Australia felt it was hard enough to find full-time work for “real” Australian citizens and applied pressure to the Immigration Department to turn foreign musicians away from our shores or put them in non-musical jobs.

The idiocy of making a truly gifted violinist become a shoe-maker must have seemed breath-taking. If a musician wanted citizenship in Australia in 1939, he was well advised to say he was a factory worker or farmer. Most did.

Spivakovsky-Kurtz Trio c1936, published in The Australian.

William Bland - convict, surgeon, politician, inventor

2011-12-17T08:06:00.004+11:00

“Lost and Found” is a television programme that focuses on the contents of The State Library of NSW, one of Australia’s loveliest heritage buildings. Inside lurk plenty of amazing, yet little known stories that shine a light on Australian history in the earliest decades. One character I had never heard discussed, except at the University of Sydney Medical Museum, was Dr William Bland.

William Bland (1789–1868) was born in London, the son of D Robert Bland. He trained in medicine and was qualified by the Royal College of Surgeons as surgeon's mate in the navy in 1809. He was promoted to the rank of naval surgeon in 1812. While serving on a navy ship in Bombay, this middle class naval officer was involved in a brawl with the purser. As a result, Bland fought a duel with the purser and killed him. Bland was tried for murder in Bombay in 1813 and found guilty. It is not clear why he was recommended for mercy, but luckily he was only sentenced to transportation for seven years. He was not hanged.

Dr Bland, c1845, oldest daguerreotype known in The State Library of NSW

Bland was shipped to Australia, reaching Hobart Town in January 1814 and then Sydney in July 1814 where he was a prisoner of His Majesty’s at Castle Hill gaol. Once again the gods shone on William Bland - he was totally pardoned in January 1815! Presumably this was because Bland was the first private doctor to arrive in Australia.

He immediately began private medical practice in Sydney, which apparently did very well, to the extent that in 1817 he was able to afford an assistant. But clearly he didn’t learn to stay out of trouble. In September 1818 Bland was back in court and convicted of libel against noone less that the Governor, Lachlan Macquarie. This time the good doctor was given a hefty fine and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment which he served at Parramatta.

Bland returned to his private medical practice, and in 1821 began a long association with the Benevolent Society, providing much needed medical services at the Castle Hill lunatic asylum. This was the colony's first mental hospital, established in 1811, which was in fact an old barn surrounded by a stockade. He must have been a very busy man, since he was also on the staff of the Sydney Dispensary. Plus he lectured and wrote on important medical topics such as Dislocations, Sanitary Reform and Bites of Venomous Snakes in Australia. The surgical instruments that he invented were published in The Lancet.

Most people agreed that despite his argumentative and somewhat prickly personality, Dr Bland was an able and patient surgeon who showed selfless affection for the sick and the poor.

133 Macquarie Street, Sydney, built on land that Dr Bland once owned.

For a medical man, I think some of his greatest contributions were, surprisingly, in the field of education. In 1830 Sydney College, which later became the very prestigious Sydney Grammar School, was founded with William Bland as president. He was also a generous benefactor to the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts and helped in its formal opening in 1833. [Happy Mechanics’ Institutes were my favourite providers of education to working families in the 19th century].

Only on one occasion was he a major promoter of higher education yet was not credited for his contributions. Dr Bland was very involved in the foundation of the University of Sydney, but his name was dropped from the senate because former convicts were excluded from taking part in the management of that august institution.

Bland was a person of well thought out political views. In 1830 he actively opposed attempts to alienate large areas of crown land, and in 1831 joined the committee of the Australian Landowners Association to fight against land regulations. At another public meeting in 1830 a committee, which included Bland, was formed to demand legislation by representation and to appoint a parliamentary agent in the House of Commons.

NSW Parliament House, Macquarie Street, Sydney

He had some failures. Petitions demanding representative government and trial by jury failed in 1830 and 1833. But he also had amazing successes. Clearly having been a transported convict and a gaolbird was no handicap, politically. Bland was an elected member of the NSW Legislative Council twice (1843–48, 1849–50) and after the introduction of responsible government, was appointed to the NSW Legislative Council once (1858–61). A banquet was held in July 1856 to celebrate the granting of a new Constitution by the British government. Dr Bland was given the honour of chairing the evening.

In 1858 he was given a valuable award for his services to the community.

Perhaps the greatest medical office that he achieved was becoming the inaugural President of the Australian Medical Society, following its foundation in 1859. Bland continued in active medical practice until his death.

In 1861 he was surprisingly declared a bankrupt, even though he had at one time been a large landowner, with property at Prospect Hill, Hunters Hill, Yass etc. What went so badly wrong? Bland died intestate in Sydney in 1868 at a decent age, and the family graciously accepted a state funeral. Not bad for an ex convict.

Sydney University had become a very impressive campus, 1859

A recent book will be helpful. Duelling Surgeon, Colonial Patriot: The Remarkable Life of William Bland was written by Robert Lehane and published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in Dec 2011.

Napoleon, The Briars and the Melbourne connection: The Balcombe family

2011-12-13T09:56:00.014+11:00

Earlier this year I published a post about Napoleon's house in exile, on St Helena Island and noted that sections of the Napoleon’s island House Museum were crumbling and in urgent need of repair. An appeal has been launched by the Foundation Napoleon to rescue the house, its grounds and its woods, hopefully attracting tourists and historians back to St Helena.

What I didn’t know and didn’t mention in that post was that there was a connection between Napoleon Bonaparte, St Helena Island and Melbourne. His intended prison home, Longwood, was not finished by the time he arrived on the island in December 1815. So Bonaparte had to stay with the merchant and Purveyor for the East India Company William Balcombe (1779-1929). The prisoner lived in a garden pavilion on the family estate, The Briars, and according to all reports, Napoleon became particular friends with the family's youngest teenage daughter Betsy.

Betsy’s friendship with the “enemy” did not endear the Balcombes to the governor of St Helena. But it seems more likely that William was suspected of being an intermediary in clandestine correspondence with Paris. In either case, William Balcombe decided to return to Britain in 1818 with all his family. Napoleon, as it happened, died soon after.

An excellent blog called Reflections on A Journey to St Helena was very useful. It discussed why the Balcombe family lived in very straitened circumstances back in England and why the governor of St Helena might have eventually removed his objections to Balcombe's juicy new preferment, a government post as Colonial Treasurer in New South Wales in 1823.

The Briars 1842, Balcombe homestead near Melbourne

The Balcombe family eventually settled in Australia in 1824. William died after only a few years while still Treasurer (in 1829), leaving his widow with a handsome land grant but no pension. She returned to London to plead her case and the Colonial Office gave her money to return to Sydney, together with promises of government posts for her sons.

William’s son Alexander Balcombe (1811-77) took up lots of land at Mt Martha just outside Melbourne in 1840. He and his wife were creating a large family, so they quickly built a rough-hewn slab house, and called it The Briars. The 1842 Briars homestead, one of the oldest pastoral properties on the peninsula outside Melbourne, recalled The Briars home on St Helena Island.

The family prospered and Mrs Balcombe moved to East Melbourne sometime in the 1850s, first into a prefabricated house that used British materials and an Indian design. Then the Balcombes built a new and large house in East Melbourne c1857 which they called East Court. Alexander Balcombe must have been dividing his time between town and country. He settled down to pastoral pursuits and the life of a country squire, was appointed a magistrate in 1855 and was first chairman of the Mount Eliza Road Board from 1860 on.

Napoleon's own furniture, in The Briars museum near Melbourne

In another remarkable connection, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes (1890-1975), Australia’s most famous society and charity leader, was the granddaughter of Alexander Balcombe. She was the president of every charitable and cultural organisation in Melbourne. And she married well. Her husband Norman Brookes won Wimbledon in both the singles and doubles, and was later appointed commissioner for the Australian branch of the British Red Cross in Cairo. After the war ended, Norman resumed his previous employment at Australian Paper Mills Co. Ltd, becoming chairman in 1921. He too led a blessed life.

But it was Dame Mabel’s connection with Napoleon that most interests me here. In her older age, she wrote St Helena Story and had the book published in 1960. She wrote of her family's substantial collections of furniture, objets d'art, books and relics of Napoleon. She even purchased the freehold of the pavilion that Napoleon had occupied on her great-grandfather's estate on St Helena, and presented it to a grateful French nation in 1960.

Dame Mabel Brookes’ city home, East Court, had some of the furniture used by Napoleon on St Helena, a teak table used by both Wellington and Napoleon, a writing desk bearing Napoleon's kick marks on the lower panels and the Frenchman’s death mask. The Briars homestead near Melbourne is now a museum where visitors can see the Dame Mabel Brookes Napoleonic Collection. It includes furniture that Bonaparte shared upon his stay with the Balcombes, plus some of his hair, papers, letters, a legion d'honneur medal and artworks.

The St Helena Story 1960, a book written by William Balcombe's great grand daughter

I was interested to see a reference to Betsy Balcome Abell's book To Befriend an Emperor: Betsy Balcombe's Memoirs of Napoleon on St Helena, Welwyn Garden City, Ravenhall, 2005. Betsy, the little girl who had been so kind to Prisoner Napoleon, was the great aunt of our other author, Dame Mabel Balcombe Brookes.

The link between Napoleon Bonaparte, The Briars on St Helena Island, William Betsy and Alexander Balcombe, The Briars in Melbourne and Dame Mabel Brookes' Napoleonic Collection is irresistible. The Briars homestead-museum is open daily.

The connection between Napoleon Bonaparte and the Australian politician Michael Kroger is less persuasive, but the timing (for my blog post) is sublime. My Napoleon Obsession noted that Kroger collected a vast array of Napoleonic objets d'art in his Melbourne home, taking decades to amass imperial eagles, candelabras, clocks, vases, paintings, furniture and military paraphernalia. In October 2011, all these precious Napoleonic objects went up for auction in Paris. And left Melbourne for good.

Buyers of Napoleonic artefacts at the Paris auction did not seem to have been deterred by the Euro’s recent difficulties. A clock in Levanto marble, with rich gilt and bronze decoration, sold for €22,000. A watercolour pennant design for Napoleon's 2nd Artillery sold for €39,000. A post-abdication portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, made €39,000.

Portrait of Napoleon, by the school of Delaroche, painted 1845 or after

Other collectors of Napoleonic artefacts existed, of course, including collectors I had written up in this blog. The Napoleon Room in Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, for example, was large enough to accommodate the sprawling 22-piece acanthus-tailed griffin suite of furniture designed for the Emperor's uncle, Cardinal Fesch. All the furniture and artefacts in the Napoleon Room were bought by Lord Lever specifically because of their associations with the French Emperor, although many of these associations have subsequently been brought into question.

The very ugly side of British Fascism, 1936

2011-12-10T09:26:00.002+11:00

I first heard about the 1936 Battle of Cable Street in the early-middle 1950s, a story told with great pride by my grandparents. Then this year, at a conference, I heard the story discussed again.

Sir Oswald Mosley arriving at a Fascist rally, London, 1936

The Battle of Cable Street took place on 4th Oct 1936 in London's East End. On that day, Britain’s Fascist movement was enjoying the triumphs of its brethren in Italy, Germany and Spain, convinced of its righteousness and invincibility, claiming to voice the frustrations of the abandoned and disenfranchised.

Presumably the Fascists believed they were popular, locally. They carefully targeted areas where there were large numbers of immigrants and where the left wing parties were trying to gain support. The Fascists were harnessing their energy to a renewed national purpose i.e promising a “Greater Britain” by getting rid of Jewish and socialist citizens and by giving their jobs to the deserving unemployed.

The East End of London had been specifically targeted by the Fascists. In 1936 the Jewish population of Britain was 350,000 (0.7% of the total population). However nearly half of the nation’s Jewish population lived in the East End – 60,000 in Stepney alone.

Police clearing demonstraters from Cable St, Oct 1936. In History Today

All through the summer of 1936 the British Union of Fascists (BUF) had organised street-corner meetings, fire-bombing and smashing the windows of Jewish shops, daubing racist abuse and launching physical attacks.

Later that year, Sir Oswald Mosley planned to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of his Fascist party; he wanted to send 3,000 uniformed black-shirts in four marching columns through London’s East End streets where the terrified Jewish community was living. The Jewish People’s Council quickly organised a petition calling for the Fascists’ march to be banned, but the government refused to cooperate.

It turned into a clash between the police protecting the Fascists on one side, and local Jewish and socialist groups on the other. As the photo shows, the anti-fascist groups erected road blocks in Cable Street in an attempt to prevent the march from taking place. The police tried to clear the barricades. As a result, there was a series of running battles between the police and local residents.

Why did the police look after the Fascists and not the local residents of Cable St? Why did the government not protect local residents' homes and families? I am assuming the government felt hamstrung; after all Sir Oswald Mosley was a member of the aristocracy, as was his first wife and his second wife. But even more importantly, the list of titled donors and supporters closely connected to the British Union of Fascists read like Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage.

Some 300,000 demonstrators from the local East End population turned up. They included many from the equally struggling Irish citizens, the very people Mosley had tried to turn against the Jews. The residents' slogan was the same as the Spanish Civil War slogan - "they shall not pass".

Police baton charging local residents to allow the Fascists through, 1936, The Socialist Newspaper.

A human wall blocked every entrance to the East End, especially at Gardiner’s Corner Aldgate, and a series of barricades were built in Cable Street. Seven thousand police, including the whole of London’s mounted police regiment, could not clear a pathway through for the Fascists. Much to the surprise of the Fascists, the police and the government, Police Commissioner Sir Phillip Game called the march off two hours into the rally; Mosley conceded defeat and disbanded his troops. 80 anti-Fascists and 75 policemen lay injured in the streets, but at least the march had been stopped.

Even today, there is debate about exactly how successful the anti-Fascist Cable Street action was, in the long run? The left wing newspaper The Daily Worker reported on the next day: ‘The rout of the Mosley gang is due to the splendid way in which the whole of East London's working-class rallied as one to bar the way to the Black Shirts. Jew and Gentile, docker and garment worker, railwayman and cabinet-maker, turned out in their thousands to show that they have no use for Fascism.’ This quotation probably did illustrate a general feeling among those who vigorously opposed Fascism, but what of the others?

One great result was that a housing estate was established where unity between the Irish and Jewish communities could be reinforced.

Even more significantly, the Home Office was forced to act, to ensure greater public order. As a result of the Cable Street events, the Public Order Act 1936 was quickly passed. This made the wearing of political uniforms in public and private armies illegal, using threatening and abusive words a criminal offence, and gave the Home Secretary power to ban marches. And local authorities in other cities started to forbid the use of town halls by the BUF.

Perhaps we can conclude that Mosley’s movement had their pride dented at Cable Street, but it was hardly a huge body blow to Fascism. Subsequent BUF rallies attracted larger and larger crowds, the party's membership increased and BUF candidates stood in London local government elections in 1937. Along with most active Fascists in Britain, Mosley was not interned until May 1940!! Saving the lives, homes and businesses of the East Enders had not stopped the Fascists. It took until the second year of a catastrophic world war before the British Government saw a clear threat to national security in Mosley and the BUF.

Tower Hamlets mural commemorating the Battle of Cable St, painted 1980s

In the 1980s, a large mural depicting the Battle was painted on the side wall of the old St. George's Town Hall building in Cable Street. Designed by a local artist, Dave Binnington was forced to abandon the project after it was repeatedly defaced by modern-day Fascists. Varnish protects the mural today from those who would destroy its powerful images. And just off Cable Street, at the junction with Dock Street, a red plaque commemorates the success of the anti-fascists on that October day.

Helpful reading:
David Rosenberg Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s, Five Leaves Publications, 2011.

Daniel Tilles, Fascism and the Jews: Italy and Britain, Vallentine Mitchell, 2011.

Learning history; preparing for life

2011-12-06T18:12:00.001+11:00

The History Boys was a film directed by Nicholas Hytner that I first saw in 2006.

Set in 1980s Britain, Cutlers' Grammar School in Sheffield was trying to get its students into the university and college of their choice. It was a process that everybody I have ever met in my entire life has gone through, so members of the audience were all nodding their heads in recognition. Even better, the two senior teachers, played splendidly by Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths, were characters I knew very well from my own Matriculation experience in 1965. Clive Merrison, the principal, was less successful, but I suppose that was the very point the director was trying to make.

The language used by the boys and by the staff was brilliantly written, and remained a key part of the film, regardless of the scenes. I presume that was because the film had been adapted by Alan Bennett from his play of the same name; the script had not originally been written for a book or for the screen. In plays, there can be sets, costumes and actions, but the language remains central. Perhaps the language was, if anything, too sophisticated. As with anyone who has raised or taught boys at that stage of their development, I know they grunt a lot. And hit each other, instead of using words. And they talk about sex a lot, often in poorly constructed English.

The history students and their three teachers, Sheffield, 1980s

Still... these were clever boys, and motivated to do well academically. The conflict only appeared when a very young man named Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) was invited into the school to assist the more traditional teachers in preparing the boys for the university entrance exams. I am not sure what Irwin's exact duty statement contained, but the boys were asked to prepare slick and polished historical presentations, regardless of content. The search for documented facts and historical truths became secondary.

Since I am a lecturer in history and art history, there was something compelling and personal about this film. I now realise why first year history students at university these days are more assertive in their historical perspectives than I had been in the 1960s, but less well equipped for seeking solid evidence.

I would have liked to end the film after these talented young lads went to Oxford or Cambridge for their interviews, filled with awe at the endless grounds, the stunning buildings and the serious college staff. It was wonderful seeing the day when the universities’ letters arrived, received by excited and anxious families in their kitchens.

In real life, there is normally no way of knowing what will happen to boys in their future lives; the last day of school is normally the end of one (perhaps beloved) era and the start of a totally unknown new era. But the director decided to let the viewer know who became successful in their careers, who became ordinary workers and who died tragically in the army. Although this annoyed me, I suppose from a teacher’s perspective it would be very satisfying to find out what happened to their once-young charges.

Broken Hill: outback yes, gold rush yes, but Jewish?

2011-12-03T10:40:00.003+11:00

As I suggested in the history of Ballarat, Jewish migrants came to Australia in response to the Gold Rush in the 1850s, where they largely acted as shopkeepers and traders. Thus there were Jewish communities in remote gold rush cities, including Broken Hill (NSW), Bendigo and Ballarat (Vic), Kalgoorlie and Koolgardie (WA).

Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was the huge mining company that ran the town of Broken Hill for its 27,000 citizens at the turn of the new century. 1100 ks west of Sydney, this outback city could not have been more isolated from the urban centres of Australia, nor more remote from the centres of Jewish learning. From Broken Hill, Sydney is 1,167 kms, Melbourne 817 kms and Adelaide 506 kms. Yet Jewish migrants were attracted to Broken Hill, presumably because employment was always available and small businesses always had a ready market with the mining families.

Broken Hill synagogue, opened 1910

Some early evidence of the community comes from the tombstones. The first Jewish burials in Broken Hill’s cemetery occurred when a typhoid epidemic hit the town in 1888. Other gravestones tell of how the young son of Rebecca and Isaac Joseph died in 1892, and how Louis Dias was killed in the mines by a runaway cart in 1895.

The Broken Hill Jewish community was formally inaugurated in 1900, but as there was no special building available, religious services were held in the Masonic Hall. The first minister, the Rev Zalel Mandelbaum from Minsk, was appointed in 1905.

The foundation stone for the synagogue in Wolfram Street was dated 1910, at a time when the Jewish population of Broken Hill was c150. The façade was roughcast stone brick, but the rest of the building was corrugated iron, a typically Australian material. Next to the synagogue there was a house for the minister and his family, the place where Sunday school classes were held.

Plaque outside Broken Hill synagogue, marking the opening ceremony, 1910

Broken Hill's great days were in the 1920s and 30s, but WW2 was the beginning of the end of this impressive community. All young male citizens went into the army, the mines were closing and the remaining Jewish congregation was thinking of moving to Melbourne or Sydney. In 1962 the synagogue was permanently closed, with fittings given away to a Melbourne congregation. The last senior citizens of Broken Hill’s synagogue, too elderly to move once again, eventually died and were buried in the Jewish section of the local cemetery.

The synagogue building has been heritage listed and in 2004 it was taken over and restored, without its fittings, by the Broken Hill Historical Society. To celebrate the centenary of the synagogue in November 2010, a programme of historical talks and personal reminiscences about the Jews of Broken Hill and their contribution to the town was organised. They also arranged a bus tour of places where Jews had lived and worked, a walking tour of the Jewish section of the cemetery, and a tour to the Miners’ Memorial Arch. 200 ex-members of the town, or their children, gathered in the restored synagogue.

Restored synagogue interior

During the weekend, the visitors viewed the exhibition prepared for the Broken Hill Art Gallery. This was where the book, Jews of the Outback: The Centenary of the Broken Hill Synagogue 1910-2010, was launched by Professor Colin Tatz. He spoke about the issues relevant to a rural city: migration, family life, isolation, hard labour and assimilation – key elements that had been so well illustrated in this particular community.

The book Jews of the Outback, was edited by Suzanne Rutland, Leon Mann and Margaret Price, and published by Hybrid Publishers in 2010
*

Map of SE corner of Australia, showing just how remote Broken Hill is from the state capitals

Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad

2011-11-29T00:16:00.001+11:00

Because the Nizams were a ruling Moghul family in Hyderabad who had not fought in the first Indian War of Independence, they were given special privileges by the British. Thus although Hyderabad was just one of the princely states of British India, it was allowed to retain control of its internal affairs. This worked out well for the Nizams - they ruled their state as a inherited monarchy for 223 years (1724-1947), until Indian independence.

Falaknuma dining table - longest in the world?

As befitted a wealthy, cultivated royal family, the Nizams aspired to be important patrons of the arts. Their stunning and indecently expensive architecture, pearls, diamonds, furniture, art works, jade, carriages and cars came from various cultural traditions - often European, blended with Hindu and Islamic tastes. Of their ten palaces, one was more beautiful than the next.

Nawab Vikar-ul-Umra, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad, started building Falaknuma Palace in 1884, choosing to use an English architect. He completed the giant task within 9 years. Alas he couldn’t pay all the costs, so by 1898 the palace had to became the home of his nephew, the 6th Nizam Nawab Mahboob Ali Khan. His family used and loved the palace until after the end of WW2.

Falaknuma Palace was, since the beginning, filled with Italian marble, stained glass windows and Venetian chandeliers in its 220 rooms and 22 halls. When an important hotel chain started renovating and restoring the palace in 2000, they wanted to preserve the taste of the Nizams wherever possible in the new hotel. The rooms and halls were decorated, as of old, with ornate furniture, rich handcrafted tapestries and brocades. They retained 40 huge Venetian chandeliers and intricate frescos, paintings and statues.

Falaknuma Durbar Hall

The old palace opened as a hotel in November 2010. As the Taj Hotel’s history page reports, the palace library is home to the rarest of manuscripts and books, selected and brought back by the Nizam himself. Its walnut carved roof was designed to imitate the one at Windsor Castle. A marbled staircase still takes guests to the upper floor, complete with balustrades, marble figurines holding candelabras and an historical picture gallery along the staircase walls.

Although spouse and I always stay in university digs or cheap bed-and-breakfasts when overseas, the new hotel has two significant rooms that I would like to cast my historian’s eyes over. Firstly the 101-seat dining hall, considered the largest in the world, where the Nizam ensured that his banqueting guests ate from solid gold plates. Secondly the Durbar Hall, complete with its carved wooden ceilings, long line of chandeliers and parquet flooring. The Durbar Hall, typically the ruler’s formal meeting space, once hosted royal guests like King George V and Czar Nicholas II.

The renovated palace hotel, 2010

Falaknuma Palace Hotel even has a resident historian, Mr Prabhakar Mahindrakar. The Style Saloniste blog tells of meeting and spending time with Mr Mahindrakar, examining the architectural and art treasures of the palace hotel. Her interior photos are worth a closer look.

Hyderabad, India

C19th ferneries, greenhouses & conservatories

2011-11-26T10:18:00.004+11:00

It is said that by the late Georgian years, everyone in England was becoming excited about the science of exotic plants: collecting, studying and classifying specimens from all over the world. In time it was ferns that fascinated country home residents and gentlemen botanists.

Bicton Park palm house, 1820

The Palm House at Bicton Park in Devon is the earliest glass structure I could find. It dates back to the 1820s and was amazingly constructed using 18,000 panes of glass. 1st Baron Rolle must have been passionate about things horticultural because he also commissioned a hermitage garden, rose gardens, fernery and a pinetum for conifers.

The architect, John Loudon, was said to make the domical conservatory his signature shape. He wrote booklets on the construction of hot houses in 1805, 1817 and 1818, and greatly influenced Joseph Paxton who erected his great conservatory at Chatsworth at least 15 years after Bicton Park was completed.

The availability of cast iron and mass-produced glass to build large glass houses for growing tender and exotic plants could not have come at a better time. The loveliest part of Syon Park's gardens was the Great Conservatory. The 3rd Duke of Northumberland commissioned Charles Fowler to build a new conservatory in 1826, one of the first of its kind to be built out of metal and glass. It was originally designed to act as a show house for the Duke's exotic plants and, like Bicton Park, is said to have inspired Joseph Paxton in his designs for the Crystal Palace.

Syon Park conservatory, 1826-30

Surgeon and amateur naturalist Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward soon realised that he needed to provide a special environment for growing these delicate plants, a micro-climate that was light, airy, warm, moist and pollution free. Not easily achieved, I'd imagine. But he soon popularised large structures for ferns that had glass panes in the sloping roof sections. These could be carried on ships returning from exotic locations, ensuring that collectors back home received their precious speciments in a thriving condition.

James Bateman and his wife Maria, who bought Biddulph Grange in Stoffordshire in 1840, had a passion for plants AND the money to make their botanical dreams come true. Of course it was not difficult when James' father made a fortune in coal mining... and left it all to James. Nonetheless Bateman had every single explorer and scientist who ever sailed to Egypt, China, North America and other lands bring back fabulous botanical samples. This Victorian plant-hunter became an expert botanist, especially re pines, orchids, dahlias, ferns, azaleas and rhododendrons.

In the late 1830s Joseph Paxton, 6th Duke of Devonshire’s estate manager, built a wonderful conservatory at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire (now destroyed). This was the largest glass building in the world, at the time.

Palm House, Kew, 1844-8

Temperate House, Kew, 1859-98

Besides educating visitors in the natural world, one of the functions of English green houses at the time was to display the exotic range of plants and flowers that flourished in the British Empire. Inspired by Chatsworth and by the passion for scientific knowledge, architect Decimus Burton and iron founder Richard Turner designed the much larger palm house in the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in 1844-48. Palm House was 363’ long, 100’ wide, 66’ high. For big, beautiful photos of Kew Gardens, inside and out of the glass houses, see Architecture of Europe blog.

At Kew Gardens, this summer holiday, they are filling the Palm House with the sounds of the rainforest with Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves sound installation, recreating the rainforests of South and Central America. The education, and the pleasure, continue at Palm House, 160 years after it all started.

In 1859, the Government allocated a substantial budget to build the Temperate House at the Botanic Gardens and directed Decimus Burton to prepare designs for the conservatory. The Treasury was clearly having budgetary problems but the building was finally completed in 1898. Temperate House was the greenhouse that had twice the floor area of the Palm House and is the world's largest surviving Victorian glass structure. It still contains plants from all the world’s temperate regions.

Crystal Palace, interior, 1851

Joseph Paxton achieved great fame by his designs for Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition in 1851 in Hyde Park London. Crystal Palace was another stunning cast-iron and glass building. It may not have looked very different from previous greenhouses in shape, but it was gigantic compared to earlier structures. It was five times as long as the Palm House in Kew and nearly twice as high.

A very fine collection of gardens was assembled at Tatton Park near Tatton Hall in the beautiful Cheshire Peak District. The first formal gardens were already well established and consisted of a walled garden to the south of the house, a formal semicircular pond to its north and formal lines of trees to the east and west.

But by the 1850s, the Egerton family needed a top quality fernery built, specifically to house their collection of ferns, especially tree ferns, from New Zealand and Australia. Tatton’s fernery and Italian garden, which first appeared in 1859, were designed by the very same Joseph Paxton. And Paxton’s assistant in the Tatton project was his son-in-law, George Stokes. Once again Paxton designed Tatton’s fernery to be a structure of glass and cast iron.

Tatton Park fernery, 1859.

Today the glass houses, fernery and showhouse at Tatton Park are open to visitors. The fernery still contains tree ferns and the showhouse has changing displays of flowering plants. How wonderful that Paxton could find it exactly as he had left it, 150 years ago.

Ballywalter Park conservatory, mid 1860s

Ballywalter Park is located on the outskirts of Ballywalter in Ireland. It is a classic example of an early Victorian county house in the palazzo style. A fine conservatory was added to the garden in the mid 1860s, containing important collections of rhododendrons and roses. The architect Sir Charles Lanyon had considerable experience in designing conservatories - his 1840 palm house at Belfast botanic garden was one of the earliest examples of curvilinear iron & glass construction. The delicate glass dome at Ballywalter Park is both functional and beautiful to look at.

Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, exterior

The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, in the park of the Royal Castle in Brussels, were and are a vast complex of monumental heated green houses. The complex was originally commissioned by Belgian King Leopold II, designed by Alphonse Balat and built towards the end of the 19th century (1874-95). The total floor surface of this immense complex is 2.5 hectares so it requires a substantial amount of heating. Unfortunately these greenhouses are not open to the public for most of the year.

Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, interior

Now to something quite different. The first time I saw the Palmenhaus in Vienna’s 1st District, I thought it was a Paxton building... with the shape of Crystal Palace and the role of a greenhouse. The site had been occupied by a greenhouse which was from the 1823-6 era, built according to the designs of architect Ludwig von Remy. The architecture was in neo-Classical style and was actually inspired less by Paxton and more by the orangery of Schönbrunn, the Imperial Summer Palace in Vienna.

Palmenhaus Vienna, exterior and interior

At the turn of the century (1900-1), the first Palmenhaus greenhouse was demolished and a new one built, 128 metres long and 2050 square metres in area. The current Palmenhaus was built by architect Friedrich Ohmann, combining 19th century historicist architecture and the Jugendstil/Art Nouveau taste. Palmenhaus still houses plants of course, but it is today it is better known as a restaurant.

William Morris and Tudor architecture in Adelaide: Carrick Hill

2011-11-22T15:48:00.011+11:00

A few C19th South Australians became very rich, owning huge pastoral leases and later investing in very successful copper mines. Robert Barr Smith (1824–1915) was such a pastoralist. At least two Adelaide institutions were substantially funded by this Australian-based son of a Scottish minister: St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral and The University of Adelaide’s very grand Barr Smith Library.

But it was through their collecting that I first heard of the Barr Smith family. From the 1880s on, Robert and Joanna Barr Smith were major clients of William Morris' London shop, furnishing seven of their vast South Australian houses almost exclusively from the firm.

Small Barr carpet, William Morris 1890, now in Art Gallery of SA

hand knotted wool pile, 280 x 280 cm

Robert’s son, Tom Elder Barr-Smith (1863–1941), his wife and their five children used the stately home Wairoa in the Adelaide hills as their summer house for 30 years. During this period the Tom Barr-Smiths made a number of alterations to the house. But most importantly for us, they refurbished the interior of the house with William Morris wallpapers, curtains and rugs.

Today the Art Gallery of South Australia says it holds the most comprehensive collection of Morris & Co furnishings outside Britain; the first and finest of its purchases was a Morris & Co tapestry, The Adoration of the Magi, which arrived in 1917. Later the Gallery has brought together furnishings from the Barr Smiths’ richest rooms, including the large Drawing Room at Torrens Park. Embroideries have been conserved for display, including a large 1890s hanging, designed by May Morris, depicting fruiting trees, birds and foliage in silks. And many new items have been acquired directly from London, including the famous Trellis wallpaper, designed in 1864.

Later in his life, William Morris could publish books with the establishment of his Kelmscott Press in 1890s. Some of these beautiful books, catalogues and pamphlets have now been collected together by the State Library of South Australia.

Carrick Hill house and gardens

So I was looking forward to seeing Carrick Hill, the estate that grew out of the 1935 marriage of members of two of Adelaide's most prominent families: Ursula Barr Smith (1908-70), daughter of our very wealth pastoralists and Edward Bill Hayward (1903-83), son of the wealthy merchant family that owned John Martin's, once Adelaide's greatest department store.

Bill & Ursula honeymooned for a year in Britain. It was then they came across Beaudesert, a grand old Tudor manor house in Staffordshire , owned by the Marquis of Anglesea. As quickly as they could, the honeymooners acquired much of its Tudor and later panelling, doors, staircases and windows. The house was already being destroyed, and the fittings and fixtures would have ended up in the skip, had the young couple not rescued them and sent them in shipping containers to Australia.

When they returned to Australia, Ursula's father gave the couple the land on which Carrick Hill now stands as a wedding present. This was a very substantial gift - 40 hectares of prime real estate with fantastic views of the city. A family friend in Adelaide, architect James Irwin, designed a house for them around Beaudesert’s fittings.

I wonder if Adelaide society noted the inconsistencies in a moderately sized 1930s Australian house complete with Tudor fitted interiors, Arts and Crafts decorative elements and modernist paintings.

The ground floor is dominated by the large panelled hall. Australia's finest collection of antique oak furniture is to be found in the dining room downstairs, where the Haywards lived a British lifestyle. The Jacobean-style staircase is large, very grand and definitely the centre-piece of Carrick Hill. It leads from the grand entry hall to a very decent gallery above, a gallery covered with paintings.

Tudor panelled hall, staircase and art collection

The art in the gallery includes amazing paintings and sculpture. Many of the paintings preserve and celebrate Australia’s British heritage, as analysed in The British Collection at Carrick Hill, ranging from John Dicksee 1876 to Stanley Spencer 1945. Since most Australians used to believe that it was possible to be both British and Australian, the Hayward collection should not be dismissed out of hand as Anglo-centric. In fact these paintings might specifically enable the modern viewer to critically examine the consequences of colonialism, of empire and of nation building.

Nonetheless it is inevitable that the couple would largely support the contemporary Australian artists they were closest to, especially Russell Drysdale, William Dobell, Donald Friend, Nora Heysen, Jeffrey Smart and Adrian Feint. In time William Dobell introduced them to Patrick White, and their creative circle grew.

Upstairs the bedrooms have an unusual mixture of Georgian furniture and Victorian oak pieces, mostly inherited from Ursula's family, and used to fit in as needed. But the bedrooms are also where daddy’s Arts and Crafts objects are most in evidence; in fact the bedrooms signal William Morris’ only appearance in this house. I wonder why did Bill and Ursula not want to fill their house with her parents’ Arts and Crafts treasures.

Carrick Hill was being built from 1937 on, and within two years the couple had moved in. 1939 was also the year in which Ursula started designing the rather splendid garden, trees, water features and external statues. It is worth repeating that these two very wealthy and cultured Australians established a stylish British way of life; Ursula and Bill’s parties, music and wine must have seemed rather wonderful.

Dining room, set for 10 guests

Carrick Hill was just one of the Haywards' four homes. The one I would most loved to have seen was the townhouse in Mayfair, situated near many of their favourite London art and antique dealers.

The honours rolled in. In 1953 Ursula was appointed as trustree of the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 1961 Edward was knighted for his service to the community and to business. A decade later Sir Edward and Lady Ursula Hayward agreed to bequeath Carrick Hill to the people of the state.

Women's Institutes - "For Home and Country"

2011-11-19T09:07:00.000+11:00

Women’s Institutes originated in Canada in 1897, as a direct result of the work done by a Mrs Adelaide Hoodless (1857-1910). Hoodless had been pushed into advocacy when her youngest son died in infancy after drinking impure milk. Along with farmers Erland and Janet Lee, Hoodless drafted the charter for the Women’s Institute movement and helped organise the first Institute at Squire’s Hall, in rural Stoney Creek, Ontario.

The 1897 meeting planned a path for the Federated Women’s Institutes across Canada. The women affiliated to the Farmer's Institute and actively pursued the support of the Minister of Agriculture. Government cooperation was important from the start of the organisation.

Erland and Janet Lee Museum, Hamilton, Canada.

In 1910 Mrs Hoodless made an appeal for a university faculty of Home Economics. Although she didn’t live long enough to see it, Hoodless had done the pioneer work for the founding of a Department of Household Science at Toronto University. She organised Household Science classes at the YWCA in Hamilton and persuaded the Province of Ontario to undertake a province-wide programme. She influenced Lord Strathcona to assist in financing the Ontario Normal School of Domestic Science and Arts in Hamilton in 1900. Mrs Hoodless convinced tobacco millionaire Sir William Macdonald to contribute financially to the establishment of Macdonald Institute, Guelph and to Macdonald College, Quebec.

In 1915 the Agricultural Organisation Society in Britain, under the Ministry of Agriculture, were looking to Canada to start a similar organisation in the heart of the British Empire. The object of the Agricultural Organisation Society was to organise farmers into co-operative societies for the purchase of agricultural requirements and for the sale of produce. So they invited a Mrs Madge Watt, who was visiting from Canada, to address them.

Clearly the British men saw the value of the Women’s Institute movement in war time, to get rural women working co-operatively and to increase food production. The first Institute in Great Britain was started that year in Llanfair PG in Wales. And the Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes soon became very popular as well.

From 1915 – 1917, the British Women’s Institutes adopted rules specifically based on the Canadian model and agreed that they would:
a) study home economics;
b) provide a centre for educational and social intercourse and for all local activities;
c) encourage home and local industries;
d) develop co-operative enterprises; and
e) stimulate interest in the agriculture industry.
From 1917-1919, under the Board of Agriculture, the same Women’s Institutes concentrated on food production to help the war effort.

Women's Institute meeting, 1920s

Two publications appeared in Britain. The Landswoman, shared with The Women's Land Army, appeared from 1917-1919. After 1919, a subscription magazine called Home and Country was published monthly.

How many women became members? The British membership is said to be 210,000 in any given year. Would that number have risen during the two world wars?

The idea of Women’s Institutes was first introduced to New Zealand by Miss Ann Spencer on her return from war work in England, where she had seen the organisation in action . In Feb 1921, in conjunction with Mrs Francis Hutchinson, Spencer formed the Rissington Women’s Institute in Hawkes Bay, and thence to the rest of the country. It is interesting to note that, whereas Institutes in other countries had received financial assistance from their Governments, the movement in New Zealand had been built up solely by the endeavours of the members themselves. A request in 1927 for government assistance was refused.

ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee noted that a number of women’s organisations in Australia became very active during WW1, including the Australian Women’s National League, Australian Red Cross, Country Women’s Association, Voluntary Aid Detachment, Australian Women’s Service Corps and the Women’s Peace Army. The trouble is, I can’t find any mention of a branch of the Country Women’s Association before the NSW branch was formed in 1922. It started at a Bushwomen's Conference held in conjunction with the Royal Agricultural Show in Sydney.

In its written history, this Australian branch tied itself back to the same Mrs Hoodless in Canada. But was there really any connection between Canadian, British, New Zealand and Australian country women? The CWA in Australia has generally been a conservative organisation. Yet while the CWA in many ways defended traditional gender roles, it has occasionally been a progressive force - eg consider its encouragement of rural women to take an active part in public affairs or in environmental issues. As early as 1936, for example, the NSW branch passed a resolution in favour of equal pay for women.

In general, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand all placed a strong emphasis on community service and personal growth for rural women. But I suppose each national federation of women’s institutes had its own priorities – one wanted a body that could support women in rural communities, a second might have wanted to build domestic science classes for female students and a third might have been mobilising women for war work. What they did NOT do was concentrate solely on baking fluffier scones or making more succulent orange marmalade.

The goals were best specified in the 1920s when the British women agreed “to improve and develop conditions of rural life; to give to all country women the opportunity of working together through the Women's Institute organisation; to provide for the fuller education of countrywomen in citizenship, in public questions both national and international, in music, drama and other cultural subjects; and to secure instruction and training in all branches of agriculture, handicrafts, domestic science, health and social welfare”. Clearly the important and shared role in every country was to reduce rural isolation, give women an opportunity to develop confidence in their views and to participate in relevant health, welfare and educational projects.

The Women's Institute, a history of the British movement written by Susan Cohen

Simon Goodenough wrote Jam and Jerusalem: A Pictorial History of the Women's Institute, published by Collins in 1977. Jane Robinson wrote A Force To Be Reckoned With: A History of the Women's Institute, published by Virago in 2011. The Women's Institute by Susan Cohen came from Shire Publications in 2011.

Port Sunlight - a model village for Lever Brothers' workers

2011-11-15T13:21:00.007+11:00

You may remember that The Great Western Railway built a small village to house its workers, 1.5 ks north of Swindon town. In the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s the Company built the families’ cottages, railway work shops, a good quality school for the children, accessible health care and dental care, a mechanics institute for adult education, a swimming pool and a library. By the 1860s New Swindon saw its first gas street lights installed and a fresh water supply was piped to the families’ cottages.

Did New Swindon become a role model for other employers looking to build villages for their workers? Looking At History blog suggests there were many models in the last half of the C19th, with a range of industrially paternalistic, humanitarian, philanthropic and Christian motives. And, the blog noted, it was in the industrial Midlands and north that the most significant contributions were made: Lever’s Port Sunlight in 1888, Cadbury’s Bournville in 1895 and Rowntree’s New Earswick in 1902.

Why would the Lever Brothers (and other capitalists) care about their workers? Clearly the growth of the factory system and the increase in population caused by the demand for labour, coupled with the influx of poor immigrants, had led to disgusting living conditions and disease. The sight of such wretchedness and poverty left an impression on William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) which influenced him in the future.

Port Sunlight houses facing The Dell

In 1887, Lever Brothers Co. began looking for a new site on which to expand its soap-making business, on which they could also build housing and services for their workers in the soap factory. They bought 56 acres of flat unused marshy land very close to Liverpool that looked uninviting, but was well located near a railway line.

The site became Port Sunlight, where William Lever built his industry and his model village. The name was derived from Lever Brothers most popular brand of cleaner, Sunlight. Lever personally supervised planning the village, and employed many architects, commencing in 1888. He wanted a healthy, happy and productive workforce.

By the time WW1 broke out, 800 houses had been built to house 3,500 people. As well as allotments, the garden village had communal buildings including a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall, open air swimming pool, church and a temperance hotel. Lever introduced welfare schemes and provided for the education and entertainment of his workforce, especially in all the arts. Later the Lady Lever Art Gallery was established.

Lever claimed that Port Sunlight was an exercise in profit sharing, but rather than share profits directly, he would personally invest them in the village. He recommended that the workers leave their profits with him and he would provide everything that would make their lives pleasant. I wonder if he “recommended” that the money be handled this way, or he “insisted”. I also wonder if all decisions were made unilaterally by the employers or if a town council of workers and employers decided collectively.

I assume that community decision-making did eventually become democratic because Lever himself had originally established a temperance hotel in the village. Only later did the good citizens vote overwhelmingly to have a licence granted and a proper pub established.

The timing was perfect for Lever to adopt the architectural and landscape values of a Garden Suburb. Although the garden city movement approach to urban planning was not formally founded until 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard, Ruskin, Morris, writers, artists, architects, designers and craftsmen were already dreaming of a picturesque, green Arts and Crafts utopia when the village was started. So each house in Port Sunlight was individually designed, complete with half-timbering, carved woodwork and masonry, ornamental plaster work and moulded chimneys.

The Lyceum, originally a school

Other communal buildings of importance included the Lyceum (which had been a school), the Gladstone Theatre and Hesketh Hall. The village contains a church and opposite is a small primary school. Port Sunlight’s open air swimming pool, now a garden centre and café, was the recreational centre of the village.

Lever was created a baronet in 1911 and raised to the peerage as Baron Leverhulme in 1917.

But for a small town, the most amazing facility was the Lady Lever Art Gallery which didn’t arrive until after WW1 (1922). A dedicated art collector, Lever was very proud of his treasures. This art gallery reflected Lever's personal collecting principles, and is particularly strong in Pre-Raphaelite art - Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt. I am assuming that Lever was displaying the taste typical of high Victorian industrialists, especially his gorgeous Alma Tadema, Watts and Leighton paintings.

What I could not have predicted was that Napoleon Bonaparte was Lever's political hero and that a special part of the Lady Lever art gallery would be dedicated to Napoleonic artefacts.

So was the town a socialist utopia for workers? The design of Port Sunlight certainly expressed the utopian ideal espoused by theorists – equality through labour, and top quality housing and communal facilities available to all. It worked! The workers must have been delighted with the lifestyle their families could enjoy. But the village’s development was based on wealth generation by a large, privately owned company, not by the workers themselves.

Still, one has to assume that the workers loved William Lever. When Lord Leverhulme died aged 74 in 1925, his funeral was attended by 30,000 people.

Port Sunlight contains 900 Grade II listed buildings, and was declared a Conservation Area in 1978. At that stage, all residents were still employees of Unilever and their families. However in the 1980s the houses were sold off.

Lady Lever Gallery.

Arts and Crafts Tours recommend visits to the planned communities of Port Sunlight, Saltaire, New Earswick, Bournville, Letchworth Garden Suburb and Hampstead Garden Suburb. As well as understanding how late 19th century workers lived in attractive and well equipped villages, modern visitors can visit the homes of many of the Victorian patrons, the churches they built, and the art galleries and museums which now house their collections.

Two books have been useful. Edward Beeson's Port Sunlight; Model Village of England, a Collection of Photographs (New York, 1911) concentrates on town planning. Edward Hubbard and Michael Shippobottom's A Guide to Port Sunlight Village (Liverpool UP, 2005) considers the village in its historical context, with particular emphasis on the architectural aspects.

It will be interesting to see how much Bournville Village in Birmingham, built for Cadburys' workers, was based on the Port Sunlight village. Both projects commenced in the late 1880s.

Leo and Gertrude Stein, salonieres or collectors?

2011-11-12T08:48:00.002+11:00

When Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was 3 years old, the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English from childhood. Her father then moved the family back to the USA in 1879 but died suddenly in 1891, so the oldest brother Michael had to sustain the whole family.

Another brother, Leo Stein, moved back to Europe, painting and immersing himself in art in Florence. In 1903 Gertrude also moved back to Europe. She eventually ended up in Paris, with Leo, at a painting studio at 27 Rue de Fleurus on the left bank. Their large independent income, which Michael and his wife Sarah sent each month, made a bohemian life-style in Paris easy to sustain.

How did the Leo and Gertrude Stein become so knowledgeable about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy an early work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson took both Steins under his wing in Florence.

I have lectured many times on the Steins as cultural salonieres, but the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is now suggesting that the family was more important as art collectors. I may change my mind, but I doubt it.

Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905, San Francisco Museum of Art

In 1905 Leo and Gertrude saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse at a crucial point in his art development. It was at a time when he and other avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press. Soon the Steins were visiting the Matisses socially.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s, who had turned a pharmacy into an informal art gallery. Soon after, the first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background, a rose-period nude of a girl. Then the Steins bought some works of Renoir, two Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and some Cézanne water colours.

The friendship with the Matisses cooled only when Gertrude developed a much greater interest in Picasso. But all was well since it was actually Michael and Sarah Stein who continued to collect Matisses in particular.

Etta and Claribel Cone were two wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimore women. Etta inherited her wealth at 27, giving her a handsome yearly income to spend. The Steins and Cones all travelled to Florence in1905 where Bernard Berenson introduced the Cones to art by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Friesz. The Steins took Etta to meet Picasso at his studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and persuaded Etta to buy Picasso drawings whenever that artist was short of funds.

Back left: Leo and Gertrude Stein, back right = Sarah and Michael Stein, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c1905.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905/6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his apartment over the Seine, and both sisters bought as many paintings and drawings as they could afford. Gertrude also sold the Cones a number of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a group portrait by Marie Laurencin that showed several of the regulars of the Stein salon, including Picasso.

Baltimore ultimately benefitted from the Cones' collecting.

27 Rue de Fleurus became the first real and permanent home for the Steins, and one that Gertrude remained in for 40 years. This is where the Steins provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris. They inspired, supported and, most importantly for the modernists, they bought art. Their home became known as a salon, with paintings covering all the wall space in their home. Works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne and others overflowed into every room of the household. Artists, writers and critics became frequent callers, for the Saturday night art parties.

Michael and Sarah Stein also held open house on Saturday nights, near the younger Steins, and the participants could move easily fromone home to the other. These evenings enabled the young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable collections of paintings by good artists. Their salons functioned as galleries.

Picasso, Nude on a Red Background, 1906, Musée de l'Orangerie Paris

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By this time Stieglitz was well acquainted with the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, and began to actively negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their massive art collection in his gallery. Other young modernist painters eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurençin, Robert Delaunay, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, frequented their salon.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was prepared to associate her reputation with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris frequently visited in the 1910s, finding Stein accepting of the more radical art styles that other people tended to reject out of hand.

For the newly arrived young Jewish artists from Eastern Europe, starving in their Paris garrets, the Steins’ salons filled with food and drink were also much appreciated. The Steins and Cones might have all been secularist Jews, but they went out of their way to help young Jewish artists arriving weekly from Eastern Europe, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani.

The fact that all the Steins, the Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas all spoke Yiddish or German as their mother tongue must have helped the young Eastern Europeans integrate, during their first difficult years in Paris. And, let me repeat, the endless supply of food and wine!

Alice B Toklas decided to sail from the USA to Europe and while in Paris, she was invited to a Saturday night party at #27. Toklas was soon besotted. She soon became a regular visitor and began going to the galleries and theatre with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into the rue de Fleurus household and became Gertrude's right hand woman, secretary, reader and critic.

But several years after Alice arrived, there was a family rupture. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a fan of Cubism. Gertrude and Alice visited Pablo Picasso at his studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Les Demoiselles was the work that marked the beginning of the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912, Gertrude and Alice took all the Picassos, Leo the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes. Leo moved to Italy, permanently!

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas in their art salon, rue de Fleurus.

The Steins had established the first “museum” of modern art. But the salon wound down with war breaking out in 1914, when Gertrude and Alice moved to Spain. However Gertrude still befriended people like writer Ernest Hemingway and designer Jean Cocteau. And Gertrude was still in close contact with Claribel Cone who happened to be in Munich when WWI broke out.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel rented a large apartment in the same building as Etta’s and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. The excellent Cone collection of art eventually entered the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Claribel Cone died in 1929, Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

The recent San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important and difficult-to-assemble paintings that haven’t been together since pre-WW1 Paris. The Stein collection had been divided and subdivided constantly among relative, friends, dealers and collectors. Gertrude and Leo traded back pictures to acquire new ones, a practice that made it difficult to track down their possessions. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein salon and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I am convinced the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, but in the long term less successful as collectors of art.

I hope people fascinated with the Paris salon saw The Steins Collect Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA, May - September 2011. Second best would be getting hold of the catalogue.

Rev. Thomas Oliver - Canadian inventor, USA businessman

2011-11-08T11:46:00.000+11:00

The Oliver typewriter was invented in the 1890s by a Canadian minister from Ontario, the Rev Thomas Oliver (1852-1909). The minister wrote at least one sermon a week, plus speeches at weddings, funerals and baptisms. He needed to stand in the pulpit and read clearly to his awaiting congregation, not stumble over illegible hand writing. So like every doctor and cleric before him, this reverend gentleman had to deal with his legibility problem.

Oliver type writer, 1895 production type

In 1888, Oliver began to develop his first typing machine made from strips of tin. After years of development, he had developed a prototype model, composed of 500 parts. I don’t know why the good businessmen of Ontario didn’t invest in the machine. But if Rev Oliver was going to realise his dream, he felt he had to move to Epworth Iowa, continue his work with the Methodist church and look for investors.

He married Mary Ann Eddy, a Canadian, and had two children, but I cannot find what happened to her. The second wife was also a Canadian who moved withRev Oliver after he decided he would be more successful south of the border. The children of the second marriage were born in the USA where he resigned his ministry and threw himself full time into inventing.

Conventional typewriters then had the type arms laying on a bed in a well in the bottom of the machine. When the key was struck, the arm rose up in an arc and hit the page on the platen above it, before falling back into place. Why not, Oliver proposed, mount the arms in twin towers, above the platen, on either side of the typewriter. Thus his arms would utilise gravity by falling from the towers when struck, down on the platen.

I don’t know if he specifically wanted the user to see what he/she was typing – perhaps it was just serendipitous. But having the type-bars swing down to the platen from the two type-bar towers allowed for "visible typing". In addition, Oliver mounted the type face in the middle, creating a sturdier machine.

1904 advertisement for Oliver Typewriter (called the visible writer)

The Oliver Typewriter Co. was incorporated in 1895 and immediately begun operating in the USA, with its tiny administrative headquarters in Chicago. Then in 1907 the company took the first five floors of the Oliver Building which was build in North Dearborn Street, Chicago.

Soon the manufacturing sector of the business moved from Iowa to a factory in Woodstock, Illinois on a 12 acre lot next to the Union Pacific railroad. This was the real home of The Oliver Typewriter Company. Employee recreational activities included a company band and baseball team. Oliver built a bandstand for the Oliver Typewriter Band in Woodstock's Square in 1908.

Not only was the design clever, but so was the method of sales - the company established sales networks by encouraging customers to become local distributors. Although I have seen paid advertisments in newspapers and magazines, it seemed that world of mouth advertising was cheaper and more effective.

Thomas Oliver died in 1909 so he didn't see his company's sales go gangbusters. When the company was at its peak, some 400 typewriters were produced daily and sold. The Oliver Typewriter Co. employed 875 workers in the Woodstock factory alone, and there were branch offices across the USA including Baltimore, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Only when they changed sales tactics to a mail-order scheme in 1917 were the branch offices closed.

Competition and a recession in 1921-1922 caused many customers to default on their payments. In 1926 the board decided to liquidate, so the American plant closed and the company moved to the UK, becoming the British Oliver Company.

The Rev Thomas Oliver (1852-1909)

Sometimes I find information in amazing sources eg the Canadian Boer War Museum. The Oliver Typewriter had a slow start in the early 1890s but became popular just as the Boer War was reaching its worst era in 1900-1901. During the war this would have been the typewriter used to send messages or to type up news stories. The Canadian Boer War Museum was keen to add the machine to its collections, in order to preserve important Canadian heritage memorabilia.

German Expressionist art - fakes!

2011-11-05T01:05:00.001+11:00

An art copier has admitted in court in Cologne that he faked 14 modern paintings that sold for millions of euros (see The Age 29/9/11). Together with 33 other suspected forgeries not included in this indictment, the case is believed to be biggest art deception in Europe in living memory. A total of three other people are accused of fraud in the same case, but those three are still awaiting their day in court.

Did anyone in the art world suspect that the 14 paintings were fakes? In the early 1990s the canvases were presented for sale to an auction house in Germany. The first warning that something may have been amiss didn’t come until 2008, when a George Grosz expert questioned the authenticity of the Gallery Fechtheim labels on the picture-backs. Two years later, word of possible forgeries had leaked out and the Berlin state criminal police started an investigation. Only now, in 2011, has 60 year old Wolfgang Beltracchi become the first of the four people accused of fraud to admit to the charges.

Campendonk, Man Horse Cow, c1918, 64 x 77 cm, private collection. Legitimate

The cost so far: €16 million in forgeries, resulting in total damages of €27 million. The list of fakes included works apparently by Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, André Derain, Kees van Dongen and Fernand Léger. If I was designing a course for students on Expressionist artists, I could not have selected a better group of artists myself.

Rich investors were tricked into buying what were claimed to be long-lost paintings by these German and Dutch artists of the early 20th century. According to the story given to the auction house, the paintings had belonged to a rather secretive collector, Werner Jaegers. Werner who?

Jaegers was said to have been a client of Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937), the famous Jewish gallery owner whose business really WAS seized by the Nazis. Jaegers' granddaughters said he had bought this degenerate art from Flechtheim and had to hide it in the mountains near Cologne. Jaegers, according to the granddaughters' story, feared Nazi art-confiscators might discover his stash and take the offending pictures away. This was the reason, the women said, why the paintings were totally unknown by the modern art world.

Wolfgang Beltracchi, who had once been a student in an art school, had learned to copy art from his father, an art restorer who did replicas of the Old Masters. Beltracchi said he began copying on a professional basis in the 1970s, not because he liked the art market, the greedy dealers or the greedy buyers, but because he loved doing the paintings.

Why did Beltracchi choose to copy lesser known WW1 era expressionists and not, for example, Cezanne or van Gogh where he could have made more money per fake? I am assuming because a mother lode of previously unknown Cezannes and van Goghs would have provoked amazement in the art world, and therefore close scrutiny. WW1 expressionist works were less well known, more scarce and their prices were rising at a slow but acceptable pace. All that was missing was an adequate supply of new works, which Beltracchi and his team provided.

Campendonk, Landscape with Horses, 1915. Faked by Beltracchi

Judge Wilhelm Kremer said it was amazing that art collectors had not noticed the deception about the supposed collector, Werner Jaegers, who was in reality the grandfather of Wolfgang Beltracchi's wife and co-defendant. “Jaegers was supposed to have collected Rhineland expressionist artists from the age of 16 or 17”, said Judge Kremer incredulously. As it turned out Jaegers, who died decades ago, did not collect art at all.

My feeling is that Judge Kremer was overly optimistic. I probably know a little bit more about the pre and post-WW1 German Expressionists than the average person on the street, yet there is no way I would have picked up their fake status via inspection. Furthermore I most certainly would not have checked the provenance of a painting, IF the auction was being run by a reputable firm.

And examining the estimated prices for bargains that were too-good-to-be-true would not have been helpful either. In the biggest fake sale, Red Picture with Horses, supposedly painted by Heinrich Campendonk (1888-1957), sold at auction in Cologne for $A3.4 million. It was the highest price ever paid for work believed to be by the Rhineland expressionist - not a bargain at all!

According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, a famous American film star bought one of the forgeries in 2004, believing it to be a 1915 work called Landscape with Horses by Campendonk. If the film star’s expert art advisors didn’t pick the fake, there is no way that an ordinary art lover could have known.

In thinking in particular about Heinrich Campendonk, I would have been personally quite pleased to “rescue” one of his works. A German artist, he had been a member of the famous Der Blaue Reiter group in the years just before WW1 erupted in 1914. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was among the many modernists labelled as degenerate artists, his paintings were removed from German galleries and his career prospects were slim. He emigrated to the Netherlands where he spent the rest of his life working at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

van Dongen, La parisienne de Montmartre, 1911, 65x 54cm, Le Havre, Musée des Beaux-arts André Malraux. Legitimate

I would have liked a Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968) as well. This Dutch artist began to exhibit in Paris, and participated in the controversial 1905 exhibition Salon d'Automne, along with the other artists who created the bright colours beloved by the Fauves. He was also a member of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke for a time. van Dongen's portraits of well dressed women with beautiful hats and jewellery were a delight.

van Dongen, Portrait of Woman in a Hat. Faked by Beltracchi

Like artnet, I would want to know how an art fraud of such magnitude could be so successful? How did all the control mechanisms in the art market fail so comprehensively? Clearly the supporting documentation was of no assistance since the collection’s authenticity was "confirmed" by fake documents and fake photographs.

Castlemaine: 1850s and 1860s glory

2011-11-01T13:12:00.005+11:00

Located 120km from Melbourne, Castlemaine was one of many settlements established as a fine area to farm. In 1851 a group of shepherds found gold at Specimen Gully, and in Sept 1851 a letter was published in the Argus newspaper announcing the discovery. The gold rush, once focused on Ballarat, soon descended on the nearby Castlemaine area.

Buda, home to the Leviny family, 1861-1981

The arrival at London’s port of six ships carrying tonnes of Victorian gold in April 1852 excited Britain. Instead of convicts being forcibly sent, all the new arrivals were now very keen volunteer settlers. A camp was set up and the area north of the camp was surveyed in 1852; Castlemaine was officially born. At this time, 25,000 people were living in tents on the goldfields; fortunately the area turned out to be one of the richest alluvial goldfields in the world.

In early 1854 the gold commissioner ordered diggers to evacuate the shanty town and to start building a proper town. Many significant buildings that are still standing today were erected as a result of that 1854 order - 5 churches, several hotels, solid shops and residences quickly went up. A red-brick court building built then, and located in the current Goldsmiths Crescent, is Victoria’s oldest remaining goldfields building.

The 1850s was a very busy decade. By 1860 the town supported six banks, two newspapers and 30,000 people. The first Castlemaine brewery, home of Castlemaine XXXX, was opened in 1857 by two locals, the Fitzgerald brothers.

The Old Castlemaine Gaol was based on the radical concept of institutional design associated with the Pentonville Model Prison of 1842. Built during the late 1850s, it opened as a penitentiary in 1861 and continued operating as a prison & reformatory until it was finally closed in 1994. During that period, 10 inmates were hanged there and were buried in one of the gaol's outdoor courtyards. The sandstone gaol is one of nine built in Victoria during the mid-1800s, all essentially based on the same radical concept. Of those nine, the massive Castlemaine Gaol was the earliest to be commenced and completed. Its high red brick wall and circular watchtowers are still horrible to look at.

Second court house, built 1858

In 1858 the present courthouse was built, a rather lovely building designed by prominent colonial architect, Henry Ginn. A classical porch was added, as Castlemaine became a more elegant town.

The Botanical Gardens were reserved in 1860, laid out by Baron Von Mueller, who designed many of Victoria's public and private gardens. They are now amongst the state’s oldest and feature the English Oak planted by the Duke of Edinburgh during his 1867 visit.

The Castlemaine Market 1861 was originally part of a larger market complex designed by William Downe, town surveyor. Centrally located in Market Square, it reflected the influence of Christopher Wren and was built of stone and brick with cement rendering. Its Classical Revival structure was a symmetrical design centring on a large and elegant portico, capped by a pediment which incorporated a rising sun motif. On the roof line a statue of Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture/fruitfulness, was placed.

Market hall, pillared pavilions, 1861-2

The halls, restored by the National Trust, once housed 22 stalls which vendors accessed through side doors. Market hall's light, spacious interior was based upon a Roman basilica with a clerestory roof featuring unique curved wood trusses. So the space was an excellent venue for celebratory balls: in 1862 for the opening of the railway and in 1867 for the Duke of Edinburgh's visit. The Old Market is now a historical museum.

Unlike Ballarat's and Bendigo's goldfields, the Castlemaine district didn’t have deep reefs of quartz gold. With the exhaustion of the alluvial gold, mining slowed and was replaced by other industries. Fortunately the slate quarry (1859), flour mills, railway foundry and brewery all provided employment. The state’s first large-scale woollen mills opened in 1868, Thompson’s iron and brass foundry in 1875, and Castlemaine Bacon Co. in 1905. Thus Castlemaine, once exclusively a gold town, survived the end of the gold rush.

The elegant Theatre Royal was first built in 1855, the place for Lola Montez to perform her famous Spider Dance in 1856. The original theatre was burned in 1857 but immediately replaced by a stone and brick building with a substantial iron roof, and has been operating ever since. The Theatre Royal and the Royal Hotel were eventually joined by a shared lobby. When the Royal Hotel wanted to go out of business, the Theatre was rebuilt, utilising the whole block. With the coming of moving pictures, the next owners moved with the times and the venue became the deco People's Popular Picture Palace. It was extensively re-modelled in 1938 having lost its High Victorian veranda, dress circle, fixtures and fittings in the early 1920s.

By the early 1970s the Theatre had fallen on hard times. It had a crumbling art deco façade and showed only one performance a week. Then it was renovated and modernised. Amazingly Castlemaine’s Theatre Royal has a history of over 150 years of continuous entertainment in substantially the same building, renovated as needed. It is thus the oldest continually operating theatre on the Australian mainland.

Delhi Villa was built in 1861 by the Baptist missionary Rev James Smith; he had chosen the site for retirement, after the sweatiness of his mission service in India. When Delhi Villa became the home of noted Hungarian silversmith Ernest Leviny and his new bride in Dec 1864, they changed the name to Buda. Ernest and Bertha soon had 10 children! Included in the Buda collection today are beautiful silverwork and jewellery designs by Ernest Leviny. I also saw artworks including embroidery, metal craft, photography and woodwork by the five unmarried daughters who resided in the house most of their lives. The two generations of the Leviny family occupied Buda for a period of 118 years (1863-1981).

Leviny was president of the Mt Alexander Castlemaine Horticultural and Agricultural Society in 1863. He invited Baron Ferdinand von Muller to be a regular guest at Buda, whenever the great garden designer was visiting from Melbourne (to work on the Castlemaine Botanic Gardens). Today visitors can walk through the Buda garden to understand the aspirations of those keen Victorian gardeners.

When the postal service was transferred from the gold commissioner's camp in 1859, a wooden post office was built to serve Castlemaine. But in time, a new, more gorgeous building was required. The new post office 1873-5 replaced the old one on the same spot, but the second version was designed as a decorative Classical Revival Italian palazzo, with a splendid central clock tower, arched bays and beaded colours on grey. Knowing the town’s glory days were already fading, why did the good burghers of Castlemaine want or need such an expensive building?

Present post office and tower, opened in 1875

Adjacent to the courthouse is the former School of Mines 1889 and, on the Frederick St corner, was the large red-brick town hall 1898. The façade of this very late Victorian town hall looks better, I think, than it used to. The red bricks have disappeared under stucco, highlighted with white paint.

Founded in 1913, the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum has an excellent collection of Australian art and of local historical items. The 1931 art deco building, which has been extended a number of times, is noted for its elegant design and is now Heritage listed. The gallery specialises in Australian paintings and art objects, featuring the Heidelberg School especially Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts. Collectively the three Victorian art galleries in Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine hold some of Australia's key 19th century art pieces.

Record goldfields populations could not persist. The population for the municipality was 25,000 (in 1851), 30,000 (1861), 7,000 (1871), 5,000 (1891), 7,200 (1961) and 6,900 (1991). Officially proclaimed a city in 1965, gorgeous Castlemaine is now home to only 7,600 people. But it retained its gorgeousness almost by accident. When the alluvial gold dwindled and the town ceased to grow, the older buildings were deemed adequate for a small town. So many of the mid 19th century structures were never pulled down. These include the Library, Court House, Theatre Royal, the old gaol and the Market Building.

Town hall, built in 1898

Compare the Victorian architecture in this town with that in other large gold rush cities and small towns: Ballarat, Beechworth, Maryborough and Daylesford. And examine the rise of court house architecture in Victorian gold towns. I will be coming back to Bendigo's special architecture in the near future.

meaning of the USA's Civil War - in 1861 and in 1961

2011-10-29T11:21:00.003+11:00

Richard Cavendish wrote that the American Civil War was fought to preserve the Union. There had long been tensions between the rights of the states and those of the federal government, going back to the issue of tariffs in the 1830s. But it was slavery that brought matters to a breaking point. Slavery had been made illegal in all the northern states by the early 1800s and, with European immigrants supplying cheap labour for the industrialising economy, the North was pleased when the abolitionist movement gained strength. Northerners seemed ashamed that slavery had ever been tolerated in the USA.

But the South regarded slavery as crucial to its plantation economy, to its society and its traditions. It was estimated that c650,000 Africans had been exported to the USA before the British abolition of slavery in 1807. By 1860, slaves accounted for 4 million people, out of a total population of 23 million (17.4%) and a quarter of all white families in the South owned slaves. Southern cotton production was making record profits.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln became the Republican president, carrying all the northern states bar one. His triumph convinced politicians in the South that slavery would soon be banned by an amendment to the constitution. There were committed unionists in all the southern states, but the prevailing opinion was that the sudden liberation of 4 million Africans would be a nightmare. And, presumably, a financial catastrophe for the South.

Blue areas = Union states, including those admitted during the war.
[Light blue areas = Union states which permitted slavery].
Red areas = Confederate states.
Unshaded areas were not states before or during the Civil War.

In Feb 1861, a congress in Montgomery Al. adopted a constitution for the new Confederate States of America – Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas would together create the new nation. Then Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee joined the Confederacy and both sides organised their armies. The War Between the States eventually killed almost 700,000 young men.

Now let me leap to 1961 when Americans prepared to mark the 100th anniversary of the nation’s worst ever conflict, the Civil War. According to Robert Cook, the centennial had been planned by the USA Civil War Centennial Commission as a means of steeling citizens in the Cold War struggle against communism. High-profile heritage projects were designed to showcase America’s commitment to liberty. The Freedom Train, a travelling collection of the nation’s canonical documents, was a prime example of how public elites sought to use their version of history to build support for the anti-communist crusade.

The anniversary of a bloodthirsty civil war may have seemed an unlikely subject for national unity, Cook noted, particularly as that conflict had left southern whites embittered by defeat. And particularly since the Civil War Commission had assumed in 1961 that the anniversary would be a whites-only affair. The entire project seemed shocking when black delegates to the Commission were banned from racially segregated Charleston hotels.

The Civil War had to be quickly rebranded in the national memory. Once a vessel for myriad internal hatreds, the war was to become the moment when America had been reunited, and a modern superpower was born. Did it work? Celebrating the southern states’ secession from the Union made perfect sense to the 1961 segregationists who dominated the region’s state centennial agencies. What better way to mobilise grass roots opposition to court-ordered desegregation and black civil rights activism than to remind ordinary whites of their ancestors’ vigorous resistance to Federal tyranny!

4th USA Coloured Infantry (Union army), Fort Lincoln, Washington DC

In fact there was so much enthusiasm for the Confederacy in the South that advisors were telling President John F Kennedy that the centennial could totally endanger the USA's unity. So it may not be surprising that the combination of neo-Confederate theatre and the exclusion of blacks proved disastrous for the centennial. Blacks and Northern whites were appalled by the ease with which segregationists had co-opted the centennial.

In Sept 1962 a hastily reorganised Civil War Commission hosted an event at the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Although the commission chose to equate emancipation with the anti-communist crusade for human freedom, rather than the fight for racial justice at home, major civil rights campaigns in 1963 and 1964 made them unresponsive to southern fears that the CWCC had become a mouthpiece for integration. Cook concluded that when it ended in April 1965, most Americans simply disregarded the Civil War centennial.

Because I am not an American history scholar, I have tried to quote Cavendish and Cook as closely as possible. However there are still questions that I would like to ask. What proportion of soldiers on both sides were black? I know that in July 1862, Congress passed an Act that freed slaves who had masters in the Confederate Army. Recruitment was slow until black leaders encouraged black men to become soldiers, to ensure eventual full citizenship. At the same time, the National Archives suggest that by the end of the Civil War, 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the USA Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war. Were they not an important part of the Civil War, especially on the Union side?

I really do understand why slaves were an important part of the Southern economy and I can almost understand why southern states would go to war in 1861 to protect either their states’ rights against Federal or northern intervention, or to protect their economies. But why were these powerful symbols of separation still valid by 1961??

Normally after a civil war, the seceding states would use their symbols of separation only in two cases – firstly if they won the civil war or secondly if they were still hoping to secede some time in the future. Robert Cook was right. The anniversary of a miserable and destructive civil war was an unlikely subject for national unity, no matter how it was rebranded.

devastation of war, Navy Yard at Norfolk Va (Photo from USA National Archives).

Railway workers in New Swindon - utopia?

2011-10-25T10:03:00.015+11:00

In 1835 Parliament approved the construction of a railway between London and Bristol, to be designed by the Chief Engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In 1840 Brunel chose Swindon as the site for the railway works he planned for the Great Western Railway. The town was perfectly located, half way between Bristol and London. As a result, the tiny market town of 2,000 residents became a substantial railway town of 50,000 within a few decades.

Swindon railway workshops, now a railway museum and shopping centre

Swindon’s first facility, the locomotive repair shed, was completed in 1841, then multi-storeyed Swindon Junction station was quickly completed and opened only one year later. Both of these facilities made sense since every train, in either direction, stopped for at least 10 minutes to change locomotives. As a result, Swindon station hosted the first recorded railway refreshment rooms. It must have been a rather fancy railway station since there were refreshment rooms on the ground floor for hasty access, and the more leisurely station hotel and lounge were available upstairs.

The boiler and tender making shops opened in Swindon in 1875, necessary to produce parts for locomotives, and marine engines for the GWR's fleet of ships and barges. These workshops were critically important for the Company, but I am more interested in the workers’ needs.

New Swindon, workers’ cottages

The Great Western Railway built a small village to house some of its workers, 1.5 ks north of Swindon town. These railway workers’ cottages in New Swindon were built in limestone by one firm, based on a single model. The cottages may have been small, but they were considered to be of a good standard.

Later in the 1860s iron rolling mills were established at the works, so a new type of skilled worker was required; this resulted in an influx of men from Wales and its iron industry. Only when hundreds of these new railway workers flooded into Swindon looking for permanent work did overcrowding and poor sanitation become problematic. In 1864 New Swindon saw its first gas street lights installed and in 1868 the workers gained a fresh water supply, piped to the cottages.

This was a remarkable project, set up to look after the needs of workers and their families – partially to be Christian and charitable, but mainly to maximise the workers’ productivity. Since Swindon had few services before the railways arrived, the entire town benefited from the new educational and health facilities.

I suppose that for the workers, the top priority was for education. Firstly they built and staffed a good primary school for the workers’ children. And within a couple of years, in 1843, Swindon College was founded as a technical school for railway families.

Swindon Mechanics’ Institute, opened in 1855 and extended 1892

The Mechanics' Institute, probably started in 1855, was the critical service that helped workers towards self-improvement and created well educated manual workers. And another educative component was even more impressive – Swindon had the nation's first lending library.

Health care was also critical. Important community services within the village were the GWR Medical Fund Clinic at Park House and its hospital. From 1871, GWR workers had a small amount deducted from their weekly pay and put into a healthcare fund. In 1878 the fund began providing artificial limbs made by craftsmen from the carriage and wagon works, and nine years later opened its first fully equipped dental service.

GWR Medical Fund Hospital, Swindon, opened 1872

Even retired railway workers continued to receive medical attention from the doctors of GWR Medical Society Fund, which the Institute had played a role in establishing and funding. This responsive and extensive provision of health care services apparently provided a model for the NHS in the next century. Decades later, in the 1890s, the health centre housing clinics, a pharmacy, laundries, a pool and some baths opened Near Park House.

The Steam Railway Museum and English Heritage, including the National Monuments Record, now occupy part of the old works. They are worth seeing.

A useful book to read is The English Urban Landscape by Philip J. Waller. Waller concluded that New Swindon was not a workers' paradise. Although the health and educational facilities provided excellent services to workers and their families, life in a company town could be difficult. If the GWR was doing badly, and staff were laid off, the entire family would lose its cottage in New Swindon, its income and any ability to argue with the railway authorities. Air pollution was endemic and noise was constant throughout the day and night. Nonetheless New Swindon was altogether rather impressive for workers in the mid Victorian era.

Museum of the Great Western Railway, today

The Brunel Shopping Centre was first built in the old, disused railway workshops in 1978. Later it was revamped and turned into Brunel Arcade and Brunel Plaza (in the 1990s).

Did Napoleon step on British soil or not?

2011-10-21T12:34:00.101+11:00

The Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 was the end of the French/English war, when Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by Wellington's army. Napoleon first choice was to call upon the country and renew the conflict. This would not only have perpetuated the foreign war - it would have plunged France into civil war. Clearly a large part of the country had come to the same conclusion as the Allies - that as long as Napoleon was at large, peace was impossible.

So the Frenchman must have been considering his options very carefully. Off the port of Rochefort, north of Bordeaux, only two ships were in harbour – one going to the USA with a completely French crew and one going to Britain with a British crew. Napoleon would have done just about anything to leave Europe for America. But he was terrified of what would happen to him if French sailors got their hands on him. So after brief consideration of an escape to the United States, Napoleon quickly surrendered to the British Captain Frederick Maitland and formally requested political asylum from him, on 15th July 1815.

Captain Maitland took Napoleon aboard the Bellerophon and the ship sailed home to Torbay on the Devon coast; there they were anchored off Brixham by the 24th July. Capt Maitland soon received orders from Admiral Lord Keith who demanded that no-one be allowed on board the ship, except the officers and men who composed her crew.

Napoleon aboard the Bellerophon, painted by Eastlake, 1815.

Displayed at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

In response to his orders, Captain Maitland refused to allow the usual visits of the boats with their fresh food traders. Nonetheless a sailor aboard signalled to the traders that Bonaparte, Europe’s bête noir, was aboard. The news quickly spread.

Soon Bellerophon received orders to proceed to Plymouth harbour where Lord Keith was aboard his flagship HMS Ville de Paris. Why did they choose Plymouth? Perhaps because the city was 310 km away from the excitable London crowds. Perhaps because the Navy's role during war against Napoleon's France had been pivotal; an extremely long breakwater had already been laid, to protect the Plymouth fleet, and a huge naval complex had been not long established.

Napoleon remained on board Bellerophon, and the ship was still kept isolated from the throngs of curious sightseers by two guardships anchored close at hand. But it didn’t help. Even in his short time in Plymouth, Napoleon held court on the ship's deck each evening at 6 PM, waving as adoring British crowds rushed to catch sight of him. This enabled Charles Eastlake to make rapid sketches from life for the portrait (above).

A letter, written by an eye witness in Plymouth, noted admiringly: "Our boat (a very handsome one and filled with Ladies and Officers) having attracted his attention, he came forward and looked at us occasionally with an opera glass, for the space of 5 minutes. He was dressed in a green coat with red collar and cuffs and gold epaulettes and he wore a Star. After staying good naturedly long enough to satisfy the curiosity of the ladies, he sat down to a writing table and we saw no more of him.

He is accompanied by Bertrand and three other superior officers and two ladies with their children and eight servants. Being desirous that the surgeon of the BELLEROPHON should also accompany him, and the surgeon also being willing to go, he was allowed to have him and has promised him 500 a year, in addition to his pay. He has taken with him about 20,000 pounds sterling in French coin. He constantly regretted that he was not allowed to remain in England and domiciliate here, but on taking leave of Lord Keith, he expressed himself satisfied and obliged by his Lordship's civility - and every person who has been near him is pleased with this manner and feels somewhat softened towards him. NORTHUMBERLAND and the squadron bid a final adieu to our coast this morning and sar far as regards Napoleon, Europe may be in peace. But the spirit still exists in France, and I do firmly believe the Bourbons will never reign in quiet."

Napoleon in Plymouth Sound 1815,
painted by Jules Girardet (1856-1938)
Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery

He seemed to receive the adoration normally reserved for a world class footballer or pop musician. Perhaps Napoleon forgot that he was a prisoner, saved by the reluctant hospitality of the British Navy. Perhaps the English population had forgotten, in just 6 weeks, the endless wars fought against Napoleon’s command. Girardet's painting made Plymouth Sound look like a celebrity party scene.

The Plymouth Dock newspaper was horrified: "On Sunday, we regret to say, a large proportion of spectators, not only took off their hats, but cheered him; apparently with a view of soothing his fallen fortunes, and treating him with respect and consideration. His linen sent ashore to be washed, has been held in much esteem, that many individuals have temporarily put on his shirts, waistcoats and neckcloths. Blind infatuation! Our correspondent, who was alongside the Bellerophon on Sunday last, says that the sympathy in his favour was astonishing, that he heard no cheering, but that the hats of the men, and the handkerchiefs of the ladies, were waving in every direction".

On 4th August 1815, Lord Keith ordered Bellerophon to go to sea and await the arrival of HMS Northumberland which had been designated to take Napoleon into exile on St Helena. On the 7th August, Napoleon left the Bellerophon where he had spent over three weeks without ever landing on English soil, and boarded Northumberland which then sailed for St Helena. The Northumberland arrived in St Helena on 15th October.

Let me repeat again - Napoleon Bonaparte’s domination of Europe ended when he was defeated decisively at Waterloo in June 1815. Years of dictatorial control and resentment against the Emperor came to an end. I am not surprised that he preferred to throw his lot in with the enemy British navy, rather than risk his life with his own French sailors. Nor I am surprised that the anxious British authorities hurried him into exile. Yet the British crowds dressed up and partied while he was in Devon!! And to this day, Napoleon remains a figure of huge global fascination.

I am delighted that the blog Reflections on A Journey to St Helena has at least a partial explanation.

Chung Ling Soo - magical history and real history

2011-10-18T15:58:00.096+11:00

I was watching the detective programme on tv called New Tricks where the team reopened an old case involving magic and murder. The detectives spent a session at the Magic Circle Museum in London that included a display of magic and a discussion about the museum's archives: stage props, posters and theatrical history. The museum guide focused on a famous Edwardian magician called Chung Ling Soo.

Chung Ling Soo was the stage name of the American magician William Ellsworth Robinson (1861–1918). I did try to find details of his early life, but the magician seemed to have secreted his privacy in a smoke screen. Nothing was known of his life until after he died, and even then the stories were vague. So I recommend readers find the book The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, written by Jim Steinmeyer and published by Carroll & Graf in 2005. The author discovered the New York origins of his protagonist. But Steinmeyer struggled to find the accurate details about Robinson’s wife Olive, his family life and his girlfriend. Apparently William Robinson kept a second family with a mistress in a classy outer suburb of London.

William Robinson's father, James, had himself been a versatile performer, known for magic, ventriloquism and music. When he was old enough, William Robinson worked on-stage in New York and built props for other magicians like Harry Kellar, Alexander Herrmann and Adelaide Herrmann.

Slowly William developed his own programme of magic tricks, styling himself the Man of Mystery. Only later, to increase his exoticism and Orientalist mystique, did he become a new persona, Chung Ling Soo. The timing was right - the West’s interest in discovering Oriental culture was at its peak.

Poster for Chung's theatrical programme

Chung Ling Soo moved his performance to Europe (in 1905?) where, it is said, that he scrupulously maintained his persona as a Chinese man. Noone ever heard him speak on stage during his act and he was always careful to use an interpreter when he spoke to the press. It would be interesting to know how many people stared at his European face and wondered how it was that he didn’t know a single word of English.

Chung's most famous stage trick occurred when his sidekicks, dressed as Boxers, took a gun on stage and fired it at Chung. The real Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 had taken place in China just a few years earlier; perhaps European theatre-goers knew that the Boxers were a secret society of Chinese who had suffered under colonial oppression, and who opposed both imperialism and Christianity. Appropriately for Chung, the real Boxers were very skilled in the martial arts.

I was delighted to read that Chung Ling Soo made his first appearance in Sydney in April 1909. He travelled to Australia accompanied by a multitude of assistants, including his wife and seventy-five tons of luggage. He was paid four hundred pounds a week for his tour of Australia - a larger salary than the Governor General received at the time. And there was no problem with audience numbers. Chung Ling Soo strolled around the streets of Sydney, casually performing miracles as he went by. It astounded the on-lookers and was so successful in advertising his show that the Tivoli was packed out each night.

Anyhow Chung’s magic involved the star catching the bullets from the air and dropping them on a plate he held up in front of his face. In fact fake bullets were loaded into the gun, then there was a loud gun shot sound and a cloud of gunpowder smoke filled the stage. Largely the trick was successful; only once did it fail!

The theatre called Wood Green Empire in North London was built for Oswald Stoll and designed by the well known theatre architect, Frank Matcham. The spacious theatre had opened just before WW1 (1912) with stalls, dress circle and upper circle. Vaudeville, music hall, music, dancing and magic were all exciting entertainments where people immersed themselves in the exotic and the strange. Harry Houdini (1874–1926) comes immediately to mind.

Wood Green Empire theatre, 1918

Towards the end of a truly horrible war in March 1918, Chung was performing in the Wood Green Empire London, to a jam-packed and very appreciative audience. The bullet was fired in the normal way, hitting Chung in the chest. But this time the bullet was real! Chung apparently had not unloaded the gun properly.

Chung was taken to a nearby hospital, but he died the next day, aged 57. Noone could understand how a skilful, experienced magician could have made such an appalling mistake. In the event, the circumstances of the accident were verified by a noted gun expert and despite conspiracy theories, the coroner was confident in his ruling that Chung had met Accidental Death. The magician was buried in the East Sheen Cemetery in Richmond (London).

Jim Steinmeyer’s book showed how real history and William Robinson’s stage-version of history intersected time and time again.

A musical drama called The Original Chinese Conjuror opened at Southwold Pier in 2006 then went on to the Almeida in London. Created by Raymond Yiu with a libretto by Lee Warren, the story followed Chung Ling Soo from his early career in New York to his tragic death in London.

Chung Ling Soo memorabilia, Magic Circle Museum, London

Wagner's home: Wahnfried Haus

2011-10-15T00:33:00.001+11:00

I knew that King Ludwig II of Bavaria largely bankrolled the Fest-spielhaus in Bayreuth, an opera house dedicated to the performance of Richard Wagner (1813–1883)'s works. But he also paid for the construction of Haus Wahnfried, in the same town, for the Wagner family.

The name of the villa is interesting. Wahnen means endless striving of an artist for the fulfilment of his aspirations and the triumph of his art. So Wahnfried (Wahnen free) was the name chosen and even today we can see Wagner's motto on the front: "Here where my delusions have found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried."

Wahnfried, front entrance, with King Ludwig's bust

Above the door is a giant mural, depicting Wotan, King of the Gods and the philandering wanderer, being welcomed by classical women. We should also note that Wotan was the name of Wagner’s beloved St Bernard dog.

The villa was built in 1872-74, based on architectural plans from Berlin architect Wilhelm Neumann. Once completed, Wagner lived here with his wife, children and step children until his death in 1883. Then several later generations of Wagners continued to live in the house until 1966.

After the house had been seriously damaged in a bombing raid in 1945, grandson Wieland Wagner decided to rebuild the villa in a more modern manner. Fortunately for history, these alterations were later removed when the house was restored to its original appearance.

Wahnfried has been a museum since 1976, displaying with a wide range of Wagner memorabilia, including manuscripts, pianos, furnishings, artefacts and set designs. The Richard Wagner Museum is going to celebrate Wagner’s 200th birthday in 2013 so the timing is perfect for refurbishing Wahnfried Haus in general and for extending the Richard Wagner Museum in particular.

What does the interior look like? The whole house was a place where Wagner could compose, raise his family and entertain guests. The Grand Hall is a two-storey space with a gallery around the second floor and a skylight in the ceiling. Furnishings include two of Wagner's pianos and numerous busts. The specially designed Bechstein piano was the piano Wagner used when he was composing Meistersinger, part of Siegfried and Parsifal. It was a present from the endlessly patient, endlessly generous King Ludwig II for Wagner's birthday in 1864.

To the right is the dining room and to the left the Purple Drawing Room, where Wagner's wife Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner received visitors. Both are exhibition rooms now, the dining room focusing on Wahnfried's history.

Wagner's original study (top photo). His study, today a space for small concerts (second photo)

Wagner's richly decorated study was a gathering place for family, as well as a music room and library. The semi-circular bay looks out onto the back garden. Now it is used as a concert space where visitors can hear Wagner’s music.

The mezzanine level was where the family had their dressing rooms. The one to the right showcases Wagner's life in the 1840s, while the one to the left covers the 1850s and early 1860s. Today the dressing rooms have exhibits on the post-war Bayreuth Festivals.

The second floor was where the bedroom of Wagner’s son Siegfried had been, directly over the vestibule. Now it displays artefacts from Richard Wagner's early life. To the east are the three bedrooms of Wagner's two daughters and two step-daughters. They contain exhibitions from Wagner's later life.

Grand Hall with the two pianos

Some of the rooms are dedicated specifically to the Bayreuth Festival. The large room over the study was the nursery; now it focuses on the first thirty years of the Festival. The displays in Cosima's old bedroom cover the Festival from 1908 to 1930, while materials in the master bedroom deal with the 1930s. Wagner's private study concentrates on the post WW2 Festivals. The basement level has displays of Bayreuth Festival stage designs.

Richard Wagner did not die in his home. Rather he died in Venice while visiting in 1883, but his family had his body brought to Bayreuth for burial. In 1886, the composer Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth while visiting his daughter Cosima Liszt, Wagner's widow. So Liszt was also buried in this smallish town.

Visit the garden behind the house. In a shady grove beyond the garden, surrounded with ivy, is the tomb of Richard and Cosima Wagner. The stone is unmarked, because as Wagner insisted, as long as it remained, everyone would know who was buried there. From there, visitors can go on a walk in the remote Hofgarten, the baroque park of Bayreuth's New Castle, via a direct path from the house.

Back of Wahnfried Haus. Ivy-covered tomb of Richard and Cosima

I recommend Paul Doolan's journal article called "Wagner & Mathilde" in History Today, November 2011. The story of their relationship and its impact on Wagner's life started long before Wahnfried Haus was built in 1872-74, but the disruptions and frustrations Wagner suffered in the early decades predicted the man he became in his later decades.

Tasmania's West Coast Wilderness Railway, restored

2011-10-10T14:29:00.000+11:00

In this blog, I've been fascinated with the explosion of top quality, long distance public transport systems in the later Victorian era eg The Cairns-Kuranda Railway in tropical Queensland.

In Tasmania, the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company also knew that a reliable, efficient transport system was crucial for large-scale, economic mining. Without a railway to cart in heavy mining equipment and to get its ore out to the seaboard for access to markets, the fledgling Mt Lyell mine would fail. The company clearly knew about the shortcomings of trails in the rugged landscape that had tested gold prospectors, surveyors and packhorse teams as far back as the early 1880s.

The West Coast Wilderness Railway today

In 1892 the company posted a public notice, flagging its intention to build some sort of railway. But all attempts to secure investors to finance the company seemed to fail. British investors were the most probable investors, but they were wary in the face of the collapse of Australian banks in the mid 1890s and a downturn in the mining industry. And the situation didn’t change until the Company made an unexpected discovery of high grade silver. This seam yielded both sufficient silver and the necessary publicity to spark the revival of the Company's fortunes.

The contractors began recruiting labourers in late 1894. Locals, aware of the conditions and the harsh climate, wouldn’t touch the work with a barge pole. Instead outsiders were hired, but unfortunately the men who surveyed and built the railway risked their health and lives in the difficult, isolated conditions. Earthworks for the many deep cuttings were largely carried out by hand, with labourers moving thousands of cubic metres of rock and soil. The largest cuttings were very deep.

The climb to the summit was far steeper than any railway in Australia had tackled. Considering the impenetrable and unmapped territory, the harsh climate, the remote location and the need for a huge budget, no-one expected the service to get going. And indeed there were construction crises, scandals, rivalry and more financial problems. Yet first locomotive steamed into Queenstown for the railway's official opening in March 1897.

With the final link officially opened at the new Regatta Point station in 1899, the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Co Ltd went on over the next decade to become Australia's largest mine. The railway, built against the odds, was earning its keep. And the original railway continued to operate for 67 years, despite natural disasters such as bushfires, catastrophic floods, broken bridges and a world flu epidemic. For those who lived in scattered bush settlements along its route and in Queenstown, the railway was a communication lifeline.

The popularity of the railway continued, even with the 1932 opening of the first road out of Queenstown that linked the Lyell community to Hobart. But by 1963 the railway closed and the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Co. Ltd became a company with a railway in name only.

Queenstown railway station

A private company eventually acquired the railway but when restoration work began in early 2000, supported by $20.45 million from the Federation Fund, little of the original railway remained. In three years the restoration team rebuilt original steam and diesel locomotives, completed 40 reconstructed bridges, made exact replicas of original carriages with hardwood panelling and clerestory roofs, and re-created stations. The West Coast Wilderness Railway's full service between Queenstown and Strahan opened in Dec 2002. They have since bought Strahan Village accommodation and Gordon River Cruises.

From the glassed-in rear doors with balcony, the view is spectacular as the train passes over bridges high above the rivers below, through massive hand-hewed rock cuttings, under the canopies of ancient rain forests and along the edge of plunging gorges. Clearly the West Coast Wilderness Railway continues to memorialise the resourcefulness, endurance and frontier spirit that developed Tasmanian’s west coast. Visitors can see the impact of early pioneers who tamed this very wild country.

Galley Museum, Queenstown

The round trip leaves Strahan at 10.15 am every day, arriving in Queenstown at 2.30pm; at 3.00pm the coach leaves Queenstown, arriving back in Strahan at 4.00pm. A lunch stop in the heart of the dense forest at Dubbil Barril allows passengers to wander along forest paths and discover remote creeks running down to the King River and see first hand the beauty of the majestic Tasmanian wilderness rainforest. At Lower Landing, passengers can taste Tasmania's special leatherwood honey, from the rainforest hives of the Tasmanian Honey Company. Fettlers' lunches and afternoon teas are available on board the train.

The rebuilt Queenstown Station is modelled on the original building with its high, curved roof. It features a café, retail store and information centre resembling a railway carriage. The Eric Thomas Galley Museum in Queenstown features memorabilia and extensive photographic displays of West Coast history and a range of interesting literature about those famous decades.

A very useful book by Lou Rae is called The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Co, a pictorial history 1893-1993, Ulverstone, 1993. The author concluded that restoring the railway showed long forgotten aspects of our mining and railway heritage, along with the lifestyles of the isolated West Coast mining communities. Australians are now gradually beginning to realise that there is far more to national heritage than convicts and sandstone buildings.

Note Strahan and Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania

Bristol, Brunel and British Empire history

2011-10-08T02:18:00.007+11:00

Bristol Temple Meads railway station was the oldest and largest railway station in Bristol. The neo-Gothic building opened in 1840 as the western terminus of the Great Western Railway from Paddington station in London. The whole railway including Temple Meads was the first one designed by the most loved British engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Soon the station was also used by the Bristol and Exeter Railway, the Bristol and Gloucester Railway, the Bristol Harbour Railway and the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway.

Bristol Temple Meads railway station, built by Brunel in 1840

The terminus included the passenger shed and the adjoining engine and carriage shed. It was 67 m long with timber and iron roof spans of 22 m. Even so, it had to accommodate an increasing number of trains, so the station was expanded firstly in the 1870s and again in the 1930s.

Sadly Brunel's terminus is no longer part of the operational station, closing in 1965. The architectural and historical significance of the station has been Grade 1 protected. Fortunately The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum opened in the old railway station in 2002, following expensive and extensive renovation (£8 million).

Its role was to explore the history of the British Empire and the effect of British colonial rule on the rest of the world. It aimed at presenting an even-handed version of imperial history, rather than automatically condemning or automatically glorifying the empire. This was probably an impossible goal, but it was always good to see left wing and right wing historians equally offended.

Exhibition space

Some 20 galleries packed with interactive exhibits told the story of the biggest empire the world has ever known. The museum had a good publications department, producing books on colonial life, and a register of titles of the regiments of the Honourable East India Company and East Indian Armies. And there was a collection of artefacts of the Commonwealth Institute; extensive archives for photographs, works on paper and historical films, and a costume collection.

The museum was also the home of an epic tapestry. The New World Tapestry was the largest stitched embroidery in the world, larger than the Bayeux Tapestry. It depicted English colonisation projects in Newfoundland, North America, the Guyanas and Bermuda between 1583-1642, when the English Civil War began. The 24 panels of the tapestry extended for 81.3 m in length and were 1.2 m high. It took from 1980 to 2000 to be completed.

Displays

The exhibition started with John Cabot’s first expedition in 1497 and continued until modern times. My favourite section was, naturally enough for an Australian, The Rise of Victoria's Empire (1800-1900). These galleries focused on the story of the Victorian empire, asking how Britain expanded and controlled its empire, how did Britain's empire work during the 19th century, who benefited from it, who left Britain to live or work abroad, and what did it feel like to live under British rule? Regarding Australia, for example, there were individual accounts of convicts transported to Australian penal settlements. And there was an attempt at measuring the impact of colonisation on Australia’s original inhabitants.

On the day I visited the Bristol Museum, our group included colleagues from Canada, New Zealand and South Africa who enjoyed the quality of the historical material, but we did not have any historians from the sub-continent, Singapore, Hong Kong or the West Indies. I wonder if the two groups would have reacted differently.

The passenger shed, mentioned above as being right next to the railway station, was not wasted. It was one of the largest performance venues in the South West.

Sadly for historically minded visitors, the museum announced it would be closing up and moving to London in 2008. What a shame. Bristol was a great site for the museum, given its key role as a major port in centuries past. Bristol was a transit point for international trade, including the transatlantic slave trade which was abolished in 1807. And the old Brunel railway station provided a perfect exhibition space.

Bristol railways, old passenger shed

But the move did not take place as planned and it has since been announced that the planned move to London will not be completed until 2012. What has happened to all the displays, loaned objects and visitors? Can’t another site be used, until the final installation in London has been completed?

In the meantime, The M Shed is a different Bristol museum that opened in July 2011. Bristol museums seem to be a movable feast. The new project is located in a dockside transit shed that was previously occupied by the Bristol Industrial Museum. It is chockablock full of Bristol artefacts and images, showing Bristol's role in the slave trade and exhibits on transport, the arts and local citizens. And outside the shed, moored in the docks, is a collection of historic vessels. The conversion will eventually cost a cool £27 million.

The M Shed, Bristol. Opened July 2011

The National Maritime Museum of Cornwall in Falmouth has collections that consist of objects, boats, art, books and archives, all promoting the history of Cornwall, its maritime heritage and small boats. Much of the collection came from the former Cornwall Maritime Museum in Falmouth. The Small Boat Collection, which was orginally developed by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, is also housed in Cornwall where it has been extended by the addition of other British and international boats. Finally The National Maritime Museum Cornwall is the home to the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

I wouldn’t have added the Cornwall Maritime Museum into a discussion of Bristol, Brunel and and British Empire history, except for one link. The Falmouth museum put on lectures about Brunel the great engineer and the construction of his important ships and their legacy.

Cafe Scheherazade: remembering refugees' stories

2011-10-04T15:19:00.002+11:00

I have ranted and raved about asylum seekers and refugees who desperately try to escape the death and destruction in their own countries by coming on small boats to Australia. It strikes me as barbaric to allow the boats to sink, send the refugees back to the hell holes they escaped from or imprison them on small Pacific islands.

Australia’s current policy became even more embarrassing when looking at the play Café Scheherazade, adapted by Therese Radic from the novel by Arnold Zable. The play is showing at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne and although there aren’t too many Holocaust survivors still alive, there are plenty of their children and grandchildren who were born from 1946 on. fortyfivedownstairs was packed.

Cafe Scheherazade, Acland St StKilda, 1950. (Photo: Jewish Museum of Australia)

After the war, a young couple called Avram and Masha Zeleznikow returned to Poland, found each other, got married and agreed to meet up in Paris. They chose to meet in a Parisian café named after the storyteller Queen Scheherazade who apparently told stories for 1001 nights to save her life. The name seemed appropriate since the Paris café was filled with refugees from Eastern Europe, sharing the stories, looking for any distant cousin who might have survived the Holocaust and eating cheesecake.

When they arrived in Australia in the 1950s, the Zeleznikows opened their own cafe in 1958 and of course they called it Café Scheherazade. They and their Eastern European patrons spent endless hours in Acland Street St.Kilda, recounting their own experiences as hunted enemy aliens in Poland and as refugees in the new country.

The play Café Scheherazade uses the device of Eastern European migrants in Melbourne telling their stories to a young journalist. The journalist wants to get down the details for a book; the café patrons just want to remember their journeys and their experiences of displacement and survival. There is nothing unique about this – I am certain the Afghanastani and Iraqi refugees are in the same position in 2011 that the Jews were in 1951. Refugee lives face universal problems, whether they analyse the issues in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Arabic or Uzbek.

For people who love klezmer music, the music was evocative of a time well and truly gone. From the moment Ernie Gruner struck up his violin, Arnold Zable noted, the theatre audience was back in the café. Back in Acland Street. Back on the roads of Siberia, the forests of Lithuania, the crowded streets of war-torn Shanghai, the back alleys of Kazakhstan or the streets of Warsaw.

The original Café Scheherazade in St Kilda was indeed an Acland Street icon. Throughout the 1958-70 era, my family joined thousands of others on Sunday afternoons enjoying beetroot borscht with sour cream, potato latkes with sour cream, cheese cake with sour cream, and black tea with lemon slices. Then we would walk to the beach (4 minutes away) for some vigorous exercise.

the play Cafe Scheherazade, remembering stories and drinking lemon tea

But not just an icon - I should call Cafe Scheherazade a haven. The play reminds us to celebrate and embrace those refugees who continue to arrive in Australia, because they are the future of this nation. They provide workers for our industries, chefs, artists and musicians, teachers and historians, as well as contributing to the rich diversity of this culture.

Visit King Ludwig II's castles in Bavaria

2011-10-01T09:17:00.003+10:00

From May-October 2011, the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte and the Bavarian Department of State-owned Palaces, Gardens and Lakes have established an exhibition that follows in the footsteps of King Ludwig II and his Bavaria. The event marks the 125th anniversary of the death of Bavaria’s most famous monarch. Herrenchiemsee New Palace, open to the public for the first time, will host the exhibition.

Born in Nymphenburg Castle Munich, Ludwig (1845-1886) was a member of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Ludwig’s mother Queen Marie enjoyed taking her two sons on vigorous rural hikes and this was where Ludwig developed his love of the peaceful Schwangau mountains.

He became king of Bavaria in 1864 at 18, but alas for the Bavarians, Ludwig had no interest in politics. Despite being a handsome teenager with a trim body that made women breathe heavily, he became a lonely, isolated man, with no wife and no friends. Ludwig II and his fiancee, Duchess Sophie were engaged throughout most of 1867, but Ludwig cancelled the engagement as soon as he decently could, and never married. Studies of his diaries suggest the King, a devout Roman Catholic, struggled with his sexual orientation throughout his adult life.

Ludwig had only two great manias in life: castle building and Richard Wagner's (1813-83) music. He did more than just listen to Wagner's music. He financed almost all the older composer's projects, had Wagner stay in his castles and bailed Wagner out when he was in debt. Wagner was fortunate and he knew it. Especially when Ludwig requested the presence of the conductor and piano virtuoso Hans von Bülow and his wife Cosima, who was in fact Franz Liszt's illegitimate daughter born to the Countess mistress of Liszt. The idea was that the pair would help Wagner in all his musical activities. Both were keen admirers of Wagner's music, but alas Cosima and Wagner fell in love. Wagner and Cosima’s relationship caused much hostility in court circles.

Wagner was soon forced to leave Munich for Switzerland, to a house rented by Ludwig for him. Ludwig retired to the castle Hohenschwangau. The one thing that was giving the king happiness, Wagner’s music, had been taken from him. He was inconsolable.

Neuschwanstein

Note that Ludwig visited Versailles in 1867 and was bowled over. This was before he started his building programme, but the influence remained in Ludwig's mind for 20 years.

Originally Ludwig had intended to surround his kingdom with five castles, although only 3 of them got started. In the south of the country is the castle Neuschwanstein, started in 1869 on top of a craggy, isolated mountain. This was the last castle Ludwig tried to build, but when he died in 1886 all construction stopped with most of the rooms unfinished. This was his fantasy castle, including with white towers, grey turrets and pinnacles.

Inside the bedroom is neo-gothic timber carving, completed by 14 sculptors in four years. Tristan and Isolde scenes dominate the walls. The rooms that were finished had a common theme in their decoration, Wagner’s operas, with scenes in sequence around the walls.

The great Singer's Hall on an upper floor has walls covered with heroic scenes from Lohengrin and Parsifal; internal halls are lined with fine oak timber and added marble. This isolated king arranged private performances in his castles or in Munich at fabulous cost, and appointed an official poet to his household.

The huge Throne Room of Neuschwanstein resembled a Byzantine church. Ludwig’s instructions were that it was to be based on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Ludwig saw his throne room as a holy of holies, where he could realise his fantasies. The balcony, which is accessible from the Throne Room, has a magnificent view of the surroundings.

Linderhof Castle, just a few ks west of Oberammergau, was one of Ludwig's rococo palaces that was completed. It was built in the early 1870s, and had exquisitely decorated rooms that specifically tried to rival Versailles. As did a number of his buildings.

Built for a king who preferred not to meet people, the palace and its lovely grounds were isolated among the quiet hills and valleys several ks from town. Linderhof palace only contains ten rooms, and of the ten, four of them were waiting-rooms for the servants. Of course because of the King's reclusiveness, most of the amenities were designed to be enjoyed by the King alone. The dining room table is built for only one person and was lowered into the kitchen to be set so no servant had to enter the dining room. The gardens and pavilions were even more amazing.

Schloss Herrenchiemsee Hall of Mirrors, looking remarkably like Versailles

Moving further to the east and set against the Alps is the largest Bavarian lake of all, Chiemsee. As I mentioned, Ludwig was besotted with Louis XIV of France, considering him the absolute embodiment of monarchy. So when Ludwig bought the entire island in 1878, he had a new Schloss Herrenchiemsee 1878-86 built in direct imitation of Versailles. See the vertical axis of the estate run straight into the fine lake, modelled directly on Versailles. See the fountains and the statues. Nothing is quite as regal and as splendid as these frescoed ceilings, sculpture, chandeliers and gilt decoration.

By 1885, it was clear to the Bavarian Cabinet that Ludwig's building programme was not going to stop. By then the King had 3 building projects well under way, and was spending huge amounts of money. Although Ludwig paid for the castles and private performances out of his own pocket, it was still diverting his focus away from the affairs of state. So his grandiose building scheme, combined with Ludwig's disinterest in the Affairs of State, and his refusing to see his ministers, lead to a fraught situation.

In 1886, Ludwig began investigating the possibility of replacing his Cabinet. Cabinet got wind of his plan, and in order to protect the government, they had to get in first and get rid of their King. Speed and secrecy were important. If Ludwig heard of their scheme, he would have dissolved the Cabinet immediately. As it happened, three eminent psychiatrists (who had never met the king face to face) ruled that the king was permanently insane, so Ludwig could be safely declared unfit to rule.

In June 1886, it was officially announced that Prince Otto was to rule as permanent Regent in place of the ill King. Ludwig was imprisoned in a palace near Munich. Soon after, the body of this devout Catholic was mysteriously found in the lake. He drowned but was it suicide, murder or accident? He was only 41.

King Ludwig II

As part of this anniversary year, The Munich Residenz will show the exhibition "Ludwig II’s Conservatory in the Munich Residenz". Ludwig had a conservatory built on the roof of the Residenz where he had created a dream world of plants, animals and oriental buildings. This was his retreat when he visited Munich only once a year, to sign legislation. He did not like leaving his isolated mountain retreat and travelling to the city.

For fantastic photos of Ludwig's Bavaria, including the building and decorating of the castles, go to In Focus with Alan Taylor.

Maharaja splendour in Canada

2011-09-27T16:46:00.008+10:00

In conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of Ontario hosted an extraordinary exhibition in 2010-2011. The exhibition explored in depth the opulent world of the maharajas, from early 18th century until Indian independence in 1947. Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts allowed Canadians to see for the first time 200+ spectacular works of art created for India’s great kings — including paintings, furniture, decorative arts and jewellery. These magnificent objects chronicled the many aspects of royal life and celebrated a legacy of cultural patronage by generations of maharajas, both in India and in Europe.

Golden thrones

The jewellery was stunning. Just one example will do... very nicely indeed. The Maharaja of Patiala bought the most fabulous De Beers Diamond from Cartier of Paris who set it as the centre piece of a ceremonial necklace in 1928. The five rows of diamonds encrusted in a platinum chain became known as the Patiala Necklace, holding the seventh largest cut diamond in the world and the largest single commission in Cartier’s history. In recent years, Cartier re-found the necklace, bought it and spent four years restoring it.

2,930 brilliant diamonds in the Patiala Necklace.

Should the viewer be proud of the maharajas’ amazing patronage of all the arts? Or cringe at the outrageous distribution of scarce resources in India back then? I personally think I would be angry.

But the Ontario museum was very clear. It was the first exhibition to celebrate the opulent world of the maharajas and their unique culture of artistic patronage. The curators and interpreters did a wonderful job of presenting the treasures in a historical context, learning how the rulers lived, what they valued, the political role they played and how, ultimately, the forces of history circumscribed their powers. I suppose their influence partially depended on how many Princely States there were in India proper. Wiki estimates that the number ranged from 160 in 1872 to 202 in 1941.

One element of colonial history need not have worried the Canadians. When the V&A showed the same exhibition in London, they made a serious attempt to put the myth of the maharajas in its proper courtly context, to explore the visual and artistic expressions of Indian kingship before and after the maharajas' Victorian heyday. As a result, the V & A show was haunted by the sad story of the princes and the British, telling how the British first bullied the princes into submission, schooling them in western tastes, then both mocked and envied the monsters they had created. Finally, the British quit India, leaving the maharajas to be abolished. The Ontario exhibition was presumably not haunted by colonial guilt.

1934 Rolls Royce Phantom II, custom-built

Processions in India during the 1800s were complex events that celebrated various kinds of power and prestige. They revealed tensions in political authority, social hierarchy and religious tradition. And the British representatives had to assert their colonial role without appearing to endorse or participate in the worship of Hindu deities who formed the focus of much of the event. So company-paintings were produced by Indian artists, presumably for British buyers, many of whom would have been employed by the East India Company.

Mysore Scroll, mid 1800s, now 6 ms long

Paintings of Indian architecture, occupations, castes, rituals and festivals in India were fascinating eg The Mysore Scroll with its 1,250 individuals portraits in mid-1800s dress. The British often used company-paintings as illustrations for publications, or sent them home as souvenirs. This type of painting declined in popularity around the 1840s with the introduction of photography.

A less arty but perhaps more spectacular exhibit was Star of India, an amazing 1934 Rolls Royce Phantom II custom-built for His Highness Thakore Sahib of Rajkot. Built with a polished aluminum hood and wing panels, the Star of India was expected to fetch a mind-boggling £8 million when it went on the open market in 2009! Even a German museum page that is normally blase about the top end of the Rolls Royce range became a drooling mess when examining the Star of India. It was not just a car; rather it was a symbol of a bygone era, when the maharajahs reigned in India and displayed their unfathomable wealth in the shape of fanciful and ever more lavishly designed cars. Unfathomable seems to be an appropriate word.

For those who couldn’t get to the exhibition, I have three recommendations. See the stunning images in Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts at The Victoria & Albert Museum, in Alain Truong's blog.

Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts, 2009

Or read Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts (2009) by Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer. Their goal was to examine the real and perceived worlds of the maharaja from the early 18th century to 1947, when the Indian Princes finally ceded their territories into the modern states of India and Pakistan. Or read Maharaja: The Spectacular Heritage of Princely India (1988, 2009) by Andrew Robinson and Sumio Uchiyama. Both books show that the Maharajas spent their lives in extravagant expenditure and unparalleled splendour. The authors created quite a picture, full of throne rooms, gilded ceilings, crystal fountains, gardens with strutting peacocks, treasures made of precious metals, bejewelled elephants, weddings, celebrations and festivals.

See a splendid film on the Maharaja Collection, recorded while the treasures were still in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Anti-Fascist Art Exhibition, Melbourne 1942

2011-09-24T11:01:00.001+10:00

When he opened the new Victorian Artists’ Society exhibition in 1937, Robert Menzies (Australian prime minister from 1939-41 and 1949-66) said: “Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand, the people who call themselves modernists today talk a different language”. The metaphor that Menzies chose to protest about the incomprehensible visual coincided with the complaint by Anglophone Australians thatthe “Refujews jabbered away to each other in their own tongues, plotting sabotage for all one could tell”.

In response to Menzies and his conservative supporters, modernist artists formed the Contemporary Art Society in Melbourne in July 1938.

Bergner, Pumpkins, 1942, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1939, a Melbourne newspaper sponsored a show of the very best of modern European art. Called The Herald Exhibition of Modern French and English Painting, the works were exhibited in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. It gave Australian audiences the opportunity to view original and modern works by Cezanne, Picasso, Seurat, Van Gogh, Vuillard, Gaugin, Matisse, Dali, Ernst, Leger and others. Modern yes, but it was politically neutral and not really radical in artistic terms.

However just one year later, in 1940, an exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society evoked a virulent attack upon foreign artists via a letter from Sir Lionel Lindsay to the Sydney Morning Herald. And it was reiterated in Lionel Lindsay’s book Addled Art. The art Establishment could be very vicious indeed to Jews, foreigners and refuges, even in the middle of a hideous world war.

I read about the 1942 Anti-Fascist Exhibition, held in Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery, in two separate sources. The first was Melbourne Art & Culture Critic. This source provoked a question - why did this exhibition move on to Adelaide and not, for example, Sydney or Brisbane? Perhaps because the Angry Penguins (a group of modern literary scholars) were founded in Adelaide in 1940. Or perhaps it was because Lionel Lindsay had become a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and was soon knighted for his services to Australian art. He may have been influential enough to ruin the Anti-Fascist Exhibition, had it attempted to open in Sydney.

The second source was Painting the Town: A Film About Yosl Bergner 1987. Bergner, a Polish Jew, arrived in Australia in 1937. Bergner had grown up in Warsaw where he took painting lessons and was inspired by European modernism. In Melbourne, he sought out and befriended painters like Albert Tucker, Jim Wigley, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Danila Vassilieff. He continued his studies at the National Art School in Melbourne and joined the new Contemporary Art Society.

Counihan, The New Order, 1942

Presumably, by 1942, influential figures in the social realism movement were horrified by the hardship caused by the Depression and the war. Bergner and his fellow artists were determined to paint the life of cities and the ordinary people around them, which brought them into opposition with both the art and political establishments of the day. They were painters with a message who wanted to deal with the injustices of the world in their work. But more than that. By 1942, information of the mass slaughter of Jews, gypsies and communists in Europe was becoming readily available in the West.

In his paintings, Bergner used his memories of Warsaw and observations and experiences of Australia. His depiction of refugees, ghettos and the destruction of Europe were exceptional, but most extraordinary were those of urban Aboriginal people. When the Contemporary Art Society of Australia mounted the anti-fascist exhibition in Melbourne and Adelaide, Bergner drew parallels between the dispossession of urban Aboriginal people and that of the Jews in Eastern Europe.

Finding details about the Anti Fascist Exhibition has been difficult. I have included paragraphs from each artist’s biography, if he/she participated in the exhibition, but I would love to have seen a contemporary, published catalogue.

Sidney Nolan, Going to School, 1942

The first 3 publicly exhibited paintings by John Perceval were shown at Melbourne's Contemporary Art Society in 1942. John Reed loved the 19-year-old's audacious work and published them in the Angry Penguins magazine . Perceval's work was included in the Anti-Fascist Exhibition in Melbourne later that year, helping to establish the young man's reputation in the national art scene!

The exhibition had pieces from other artists who saw their work as having an important social and political role in documenting the suffering of the oppressed. James Wigley (1918–99) participated in the exhibition after he became friends with Noel Counihan and other social realist painters and writers. Noel Counihan and James Wigley clearly shared Bergner’s social conscience.

A founder-member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, Noel Counihan (1913–86) initiated its 1942 anti-Fascist exhibition. The New Order, one of the few paintings that he preserved from the show (and perhaps the best of them), was influenced by one of William Gropper's paintings also entitled The New Order and also painted in 1942. Later Counihan helped organise an Artists' Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the Australia at War exhibition in 1945.

Other young contemporaries in Melbourne had already asserted the intellectual and imaginative freedom of the artist and his/her independence from political doctrines. But we can say that matters came to a head with the Anti-Fascist Exhibition produced by the Contemporary Art Society.

Reason in Revolt noted that Albert Tucker had been called up in April 1942. It was a critical time for him since he held deeply anti-war sentiments. It was the Communist Party's shift to an all-out support of the war effort after the invasion of Russia that placed him at greater odds with the party. Yet four months after the invasion, he still cited himself as a member of a neo-realist group that included Bergner and Counihan. Although he was doubtful about the wisdom of the Anti-Fascist Exhibition when it was first mooted, he did contribute 6 paintings and several drawings to the show. He was in fact, with Counihan and O'Connor, one of the three major contributors to the exhibition.

The Herald Sun said Sidney Nolan's reputation rests on a handful of masterpieces, including the famous Going to School 1942, shown at the anti-Fascist exhibition.

Once embarked on her art course, Ailsa O'Connor became involved in all the highly charged meetings of the period. She identified with the radical forces supporting modern art against Menzies' push for a traditionalist Art Academy and joined the Contemporary Art Society at its first meeting in 1938. She became increasingly politicised and was the only woman to exhibit in the 1942 Melbourne Anti-Fascist Exhibition, where she showed crayon drawings.

Tucker, Death of an Aviator, 1942

June Tuck and Dorrit Black certainly participated in the same exhibition the next year when it moved to the RSASA Gallery in Adelaide. And one of Jacqueline Hick’s paintings from this period, Landscape, 1943, was exhibited at this exhibition in Adelaide, and subsequently purchased by the National Gallery of SA.

I wonder if the Australian artists had seen a 1942 poster painted by Ben Shahn and printed by the USA Government Office of War Information. Shahn was referring to Lidice, a Czech mining village that was obliterated by the Nazis in retaliation for the June 1942 shooting of a Nazi official by two Czechs. All men of the village were killed in a 10-hour massacre; the women and children were sent to death camps. The destruction of Lidice became an anti-fascist symbol everywhere.

Shahn, This is Nazi brutality, 1942, poster

After all this time, I cannot be sure if the Australian Anti-Fascist Exhibition was directed to the fascists plundering their way across Europe, Africa and Asia OR to the right wing artists, thinkers and publishers in Australia. Clearly the Contemporary Art Society had been created by young radical artists to loosen the grip of the conservatives who dominated the Australian art establishment of the time. To me, these artists were stating that art had an important role in expressing political and social criticism at a time when the conservatives HERE bitterly opposed the exhibiting of art inspired by social concerns. Yet Reason in Revolt thought differently. They said that most of the paintings exhibited in the Anti-Fascist exhibition of 1942 had been urgent responses to events in Europe, grounded in feelings of political outrage.

Inter-war landscapes: amazing international comparisons

2011-09-20T16:56:00.015+10:00

"The South Downs stand like a line of gigantic beached whales guarding the southern foreshore of England. Rounded and rolling, they merge into each other to create a series of graceful forms. Modest in height yet possessing an undeniable grandeur, the Downs can be bleak. But even when the prevailing wind blows sudden storms across the summits, they are never forbidding. The Downs were never a frontier, but a pastoral range and crossing place, their easy gradients, dry tracks and firm grasslands making them a natural highway for Man and his herds".

Nash, Wood on the Downs, 1929, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 72 x 92 cm

How did artists depict the South Downs during the inter-war era? Examine Paul Nash’s painting Wood on the Downs, 1929, Aberdeen Art Gallery. Paul Nash (1889-1946) was trained at the Slade School before serving in the First World War with the Artists' Rifles at Ypres on the Western Front. He was invalided home in 1917 and appointed as a war artist for the last two years of the war. This painting, from the inter-war years, had cool yet strong colours that were replicated just a few years later by Ravilius. The trees added a geometric boldness and exaggerated perspective that made the work somewhat mysterious.

Ravilius, Chalk Paths 1935, Pallant House Gallery Bookshop

And think about Chalk Paths, done by Eric Ravilius (1903-42) a London artist, designer and illustrator. Ravilius' artist friend Peggy Angus (1904–93) lived in a house near Firle on the Sussex Downs, just outside Brighton - it was here that Ravilious painted Chalk Paths and John Piper painted as well. Ravilius' South Downs landscapes were almost always of the land having been well used: the paths had been regularly stamped down by people, the fences zigzaged their way across the canvas. The springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky!

Ravilious was an official war artist in World War II and received a commission as a Captain in the Royal Marines. Tragically he was killed in 1942 while accompanying a Royal Air Force air sea rescue mission off Iceland. Ravilius was still in his 30s.

As I examined rounded and rolling forms with firm grass lands, other landscapes started to emerge in the inter-war era, landscapes that had nothing to do with South Downs.

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958) was born in Sheffield in the UK and did his art studies at the Sheffield Technical School of Art. In 1915 Allen enlisted in the British Army and soon after was posted to France where he sketched troops and equipment in the battlefields. After WW1, he painted with a number of art societies, including the Sheffield Society of Artists. His name may not be very well known to most art historians but he exhibited at the Royal Academy over 23 years from 1933, and he had dozens of paintings accepted by those scholarly academicians. Fortunately Allen created many fine landscapes which survive till now, in public and private collections.

Allen, Crowlink Sussex, 37 x 55 cm, date?

Allen, Haddon Hall Derbyshire, date?

Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) was born in Romania into dire poverty. In 1912, still in his teens, he travelled to Palestine to study art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Since Paris was the centre of the art world, Rubin took himself to France in 1913 to pursue his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

In 1921, this well travelled young man went to the USA and met the well known and well connected artist Alfred Stieglitz, who played an important role in organising Rubin’s first art exhibition in the USA. In 1923, Rubin finally emigrated to Palestine, permanently. There his paintings often depicted the biblical and modern landscape, dotted with agricultural workers on kibbutzim and Arab fishermen. Many of his paintings were sun-bathed, parched depictions of Jerusalem and the Galilee.

Rubin, Jerusalem, 1925

Rubin, Safed in Galillee, 1927

Another painter of the interwar era was Dorrit Black. Dorothea Foster Black (1891-1951) was born and raised in Adelaide, daughter of an engineer/architect and an artist. From 1909 she studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts and painted landscapes in watercolours. After spending two years (1911-12) in Britain and the Continent, Dorrit returned to Australia and continued studying at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School. By the middle of the war, she adopted oils as her main medium.

In mid-1927 Dorrit Black went to London and spent three months at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where she liked colour linocut printing as an original art form. Next year she studied at André Lhote's academy in Paris and at his summer school, and worked briefly with Albert Gleizes in 1929. Now a disciple of Cubism, she returned to Sydney late that year, held the first of her six one-woman shows in 1930. Dorrit exhibited with some of Australians finest inter-war painters, Roy de Maistre, Roland Wakelin and Grace Crowley. In the 1930s she ran the Modern Art Centre, Margaret Street and produced most of her linocuts in the 1930s. In 1934-35 she settled in Adelaide and painted landscapes of the Adelaide hills and the south coast.

Black, Coast Road 1942, Art Gallery of South Australia

Black, In the Foothills 1942, Queensland Art Gallery

In all these landscapes, the boldly presented hills and roads emphasised their treatment as mass and form. And like cubist painting decades earlier, the mountains became interconnecting planes of varying depth. In fact I would say that the simple, strong and bold lines were quite cubist in feeling. Bright sunlight and cast shadows in all the landscapes add to the helped define the natural forms. And importantly, for all the artists, the springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky.

How did it happen that the landscapes of these artists started to feel like the South Downs and like each other? Sheffield, Jerusalem and Adelaide were certainly not the most important art centres in the world. So there seem to be several possibilities.

Firstly they might have seen each other’s work, in galleries or in reproductions.

Secondly they might have both been influenced by a third party from the past. If this is true, I would suggest Paul Cezanne as the most likely candidate.

Thirdly the artists were expressing a shared passion for clean living and fitness. Peyton Skipworth (Apollo Magazine May 2006) suggested that Modernism was strongly associated with the interwar cult of getting city dwellers out into the countryside, sunshine, fresh air, hiking, fitness and riding bikes.

Finally there is the possibility that the artists had nothing whatsoever in common; 80 years later, I am selecting out commonalities that didn’t really exist back then.

Art Inconnu has the finest collection of Harry Epworth Allen paintings. Art from Israel has an interesting selection of Reuven Rubin paintings. Landscape Painting References has a couple of Dorrit Black paintings. For Eric Ravilious paintings, go to That's How The Light Gets In or read Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs by James Russell (The Mainstone Press, 2009).
A Crisis of Brilliance by David Boyd Haycock traces the lives of five British artists of this era – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson.

This topic continues to surprise. Let me add Rita Angus (1908–70), a New Zealand painter born in Hastings but lived mostly in Christchurch. Her landscapes of Canterbury and Otago were somewhat cubist, clear, flat, simple and sharply-defined. It is said that Angus carefully considered every colour, line and shape, linking each detail in a design of graceful curves and interlocking forms

Angus didn't travel to England until 1958 but she could have easily seen paintings by John or Paul Nash, for example, during the 1930s and 40s.

Angus, Central Otago, 1940, Auckland Art Gallery.

Regency furniture: metamorphic, clever

2011-09-17T09:45:00.000+10:00

Rooms organised during the Regency (loosely defined as 1795-1837) as libraries often had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The upper shelves were difficult to reach, so movable library stairs were invaluable.

Enter the Regency era metamorphic library chair!

Clive Taylor has shown that the tables, chairs and stools containing library steps were patented in Great Britain by Robert Campbell in 1774 but this innovative chair-based design did not become immediately popular. Once the Regency was established, a neo-classical interpretation of Campbell’s Metamorphic Library Chair concept started to become popular in London. Any early attributions rely heavily on two contemporary sketches. The first image, by Rudolph Ackermann in 1811, showed a Morgan and Sanders chair, while the second was of a Gillows chair in 1834.

English library chair cum ladder, 1820

What does metamorphic mean, in this context? The word was used to describe a piece of furniture where the same structure could be reused in an alternative form. In the case of a small staircase, the library chair could be turned upside down and steps pulled out. In the case of the small writing desk, the library chair could be turned upside down and part of the chair would be reconfigured into its new role as a desk top.

And just as they were fascinated with mechanical curiosities and dual-purpose furniture during the Regency, so we are today. The design was clever, compact, saved space in the library and looked good.

Metamorphic/mechanical furniture had been used elsewhere. There was plenty of discussion in the antiques literature about clever cabinet makers who designed and made lovely objects for the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI in France.

Furthermore it was common for French, German and British military officers to order comfortable furniture while travelling behind their armies to battle fields. Sean Clarke has shown that at least for JW Allen Co and John Shepherd Co, campaign furniture it was a natural addition to their trunk making role. If this was true, the majority of makers of campaign furniture were to be found under trunk makers as opposed to cabinet makers in the trade directories. Ordinary cabinet makers, asked by army officers to adapt their standard work, would also make travel furniture as one-off bespoke pieces.

Of course the designs of these officers’ objects had to be light, easily packed and small enough to fit into military camps. As well as elegant! As you can see from the British Lieut General's example, he wanted portable trunks that could be reassembled into a beautiful mahogany and brass chest of drawers.

a Lieut General's brassed edged mahogany campaign chest, British army, c1840

Christie’s described their library chair as follows. A Regency mahogany metamorphic library open armchair, after a design by Morgan and Sanders, early C19th. Note the curved tablet toprail above a horizontal bar splat, the downswept reeded scrolled arms, the caned seat and reeded sabre legs, opening to form a four-tread set of library steps.

Kenneth Hutter Auctions’ Regency mahogany metamorphic library chair was similar. The hinged seat falls forward to form four steps, the highest being 28". Note the reeded frame with caned seat and scrolled arms. In chair form, the object is 36" high.

Antiques Now showed a similar Regency metamorphic library chair made in c1811 and attributed to Morgan and Sanders. As with the other neoclassical style Trafalgar chairs, this one could be converted into a small set of library steps. But here was something different. Apparently Morgan and Sanders offered upgrades to their standard design; this rare example included over-scrolled uprights and a caned back.

Antiques Atlas agreed that dual-purpose chairs and tables became fashionable as wealthy merchants and landowners revelled in the novelty and ingenuity of space-saving mechanical furniture. And they agreed that most metamorphic chairs of this type concealed library steps. What was exciting about the Antiques Atlas example was that the chair opened to reveal a small library table. It was presumably designed and built in France during the reign of Louis XVI or during the early years of the Napoleonic Empire (1790-1805). The chair was made of walnut with a carved, demi-lune or fan-shaped backrest.

French library chair cum table, 1790-1805

John Constable and his Suffolk landmarks

2011-09-13T15:52:00.011+10:00

In the immediate vicinity of Flatford Mill in Suffolk there were a few sites that John Constable (1776-1837) knew very well and painted often. The mill itself was owned by the artist’s father Golding Constable and was their first home, although the family soon moved to a bigger and better home in nearby East Bergholt. These were the places that were central to Constable’s concept of home. As he wrote in a letter to his friend Archdeacon Fisher in 1829 "painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. These scenes made me a painter and I am grateful.”

Flatford Mill, painted by Constable in 1816-7, Tate

Flatford Mill/Scene on a Navigable River 1816-7 was a rich evocation of his Suffolk boyhood and his father's professional interests, especially the navigation system of the river Stour. John was already 40 when he finished this substantial work (102 x 127cm). It displayed a pair of barges travelling upstream that were about to be disconnected from the towing-horse, so that they could be pushed by pole under Flatford footbridge. The viewer can easily detect Flatford Mill on the river, a facility that lay at the heart of the corn milling business run by Constable's dad. Today Flatford Mill is Grade I listed, as is the 17th century miller's cottage next door.

Flatford Mill today

Dedham Vale was at the centre of a successful wheat-growing region during John Constable’s time, so the more land dedicated to cultivation, the richer the growers and millers would be. As a result, Dedham Vale was a busy working area, lovely enough but not drop dead gorgeous.

John Constable’s painting of The Hay Wain 1821 is very well known, a work that was probably painted from Flatford Mill. The viewer can readily identify a hay wain on the River Stour. The house on the left side of the canvas belonged to the tenant farmer neighbour, Willy Lott, whose family had lived there for several generations. And in the centre we can see a harvest wagon crossing the shallow stream near Flatford Mill.

Willy Lott's Cottage, today

When The Hay Wain was first displayed at the Royal Academy in 1821, it wasn’t warmly received. It was actually better received in France where was exhibited with other works by Constable at the 1824 Paris Salon. In that exhibition, The Hay Wain was awarded a gold medal by King Charles X and praised by the most modern of the French painters, including Eugène Delacroix.

Sold at the Paris exhibition with three other Constables, the painting made its way back to England via a dealer and was sold on several times. It wasn’t until 1886 that The Hay Wain was given to the National Gallery in London, where it remains today. I have been on a tour of enchanting Constable Country and in my humble opinion, the painting is an interesting but not his best piece of art.

Nonetheless it was very important, according to Kevin Andrew. Although the lifestyle Constable depicted had already become out of date by 1821, our impression of this entire part of the English countryside is still informed by Constable. He has created it, and at the same time he was created by it. (Thank you Kevin. I stumbled around trying to express this thought and you put it very elegantly).

Did it matter that Constable tweaked the scenes he painted, making Flatford Mill bigger and the river Stour wider? Not at all, according to Art Finder; Constable was simply ensuring that his landscapes withstood comparison with those by old masters.

The Hay Wain 1821, Nat Gall London, Willy Lott's Cottage appearing on the left

But I must be the only art person in the entire Western World not to have realised that the lovely white house in East Bergholt is the very same 16th-century cottage from Constable’s painting. Renamed Willy Lott's Cottage to fit in with Constable’s label, this is real life copying art.

Willy Lott's cottage has survived largely intact. It was restored but not altered in the 1920s after a revival of interest in John Constable's paintings. It is now Grade I listed and, appropriately, owned by The National Trust. As in the painting, the cottage is located near Flatford Mill which, along with neighbouring Valley Farm and Bridge Cottage, are now used as residential locations for arts-based courses. An art-led recovery!

***

By this stage I was right in the swing of real life properties and Constable landscapes. So imagine my surprise in finding a real estate ad for Glebe Farm in 2010. The farm house is in Langham near Dedham, on the Suffolk-Essex border.

When his good friend and patron, Bishop Fisher of Salisbury died in 1825, Constable painted an image of St Mary the Virgin Church at Langham, in the Bishop’s honour. This was where Fisher had been rector when Constable met him in 1798. To the right of the painting, the viewer can see the neighbouring farmhouse called The Glebe Farm. The image of Glebe Farm must have been a favourite with Constable since he painted four versions of it between 1826-30.

Constable, The Glebe Farm c1830, 60 x 78cm, Tate Gallery

St Mary the Virgin Church appeared on the right of the painting

Langham farmhouse today with the same church tower that Constable depicted in 1830.

Meissen vases with superb landscape paintings: 1870

2011-09-10T11:21:00.007+10:00

The Meissen Company, near Dresden, was the first European factory to discover the formula of hard paste porcelain, at a time when the Chinese had been making a fortune importing this very desirable product. But the discovery wasn’t easy. Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and Chinese porcelain fanatic, was desperate to crack the code. He imprisoned the chemist Johann Friedrich Boettger (1682-1719) at Albrechtsberg Castle and probably would have kept him there for life, in order to find the magical formula. Fortunately for Boettger, he found it!

The Meissen Company was founded in early C18th and delivered porcelain of the quality and purity that made that small town famous.

Dresden scenes on Leuteritz vases, 1870, Meissen (Country Life photo)

From 1720 on, the fame of Meissen depended largely on the painter Johann Gregorius Höroldt (1696-1775). It seems impossible to overstate Höroldt’s influence on much of Europe’s developing porcelain makers. He used Chinese exoticism, European landscapes and naturalistic birds and flowers, sublimely painted.

Meissen also had the sculptor Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-1775). Kändler was appointed court sculptor by Augustus II the Strong in 1731. He was responsible for the introduction of new forms for porcelain sets, including a wide range of figurines.

Wealthy families couldn’t buy up Meissen porcelain fast enough. And rival companies couldn’t get Meissen’s secrets fast enough, to develop their own porcelain lines. Naturally Meissen became a symbol of wealth and status, and in the 19th century the factory earned both Royal commissions and medals at the various World Exhibitions.

I have some good 19th century Meissen pieces in my own collection, which I thought were rather lovely. Then I saw a pair of Meissen vases, dating from about 1870, in David Brower Antiques. I am quoting them. Born in 1818, Ernst Leuteritz joined the factory in 1836 as an apprentice and by 1843 he was engaged as a modeller. This impressive pair of topographical vases was created by Leuteritz and are one of the most important and valuable works of 19th century Meissen porcelain available on the market today. Standing at 61cms high and produced in 1870, the vases show two different scenes of Dresden rendered in exquisite detail, a view of Pilnitz and a view of Schloss Weesenstein. Leuteritz first created the design for these vases in 1856, and in 1862 they were selected as one of the key pieces at the World Exhibition held in London.

Leuteritz vase, 1880, Meissen, based on a painting by Caspar Netscher. 69 cm high

Vases of this scale and detail are rare as they were only made for exhibition or special commission. One reason is because large objects of this nature (61 cm high) were very difficult to make and decorate. Minor imperfections in the structure of the piece or faults in the decoration and glaze were unforgiving, often causing failure during the firing processes. These monumental pieces are a testament to the experience and skills of the Meissen craftsmen.

Another lovely, tall Meissen vase was created by Ernst Leuteritz, this time exquisitely painted with Dutch-style images from the C17th. The 1880 vase was decorated on a cobalt blue ground, heightened by detailed gilded scroll work and embellishments. The panel on the front was based on a painting by Caspar Netscher (1639–1684) while the reverse was based on a painting by Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667) which depicts the artist with his wife Isabella DeWolff in a tavern.

Far easier, for both the porcelain maker and the artist, were smaller flat plates that rarely broke in the kiln. Christies had a reticulated Meissen plate from c1879, painted with a view of Wesenstein inside a gilt scroll cartouche. The dark-blue-ground well gilt had scrolls suspending swags of flowers and the border was pierced with trellis pattern sections between panels of flowers, moulded with flowerheads. The scene was beautifully painted, but I have to admit that the entire plate was only 25 cm wide.

Scene of Wesenstein, Meissen reticulated plate c1879

The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story is a super little book, written by Janet Gleeson and published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1999. It tells the convoluted story of the invention of European porcelain and the founding of the Meissen Porcelain Company.

Folies Bergere, naked dancers and boxing kangaroos

2011-09-05T22:00:00.001+10:00

The Folies Bergère began in 1869, opening as one of the first major music halls in Paris. Once a hall for operettas, ballets and pantomime, the Folies Bergère became the premier nightspot in Paris and had elaborate and colourful revues that featured dozens of sets and costumes. Montmartre was becoming a hopping and jumping suburb, except for the nightmare of the Franco-Prussian War period (1870-1).

Boxing Kangaroo poster

Then in the 1870s, after the war ended, the Folies Bergère staged vaudevillian acts, displaying varied and exotic talents including trained elephants, snake charmers and strange clowns. There were "unusual" performances put on by Miss Loie Fuller and Little Tich, very talented English music hall stars and comic dancers. The more exotic, the better! In fact the Folies Bergere shows actively played up the exoticness of persons and objects from other cultures, stretching the boundaries of good taste wherever necessary.

Acrobat crossing Niagra, poster

But most interesting of all, at least to an Australian, was the boxing kangaroo. See the poster Folies-Bergere/Le Plus Nouveau Spectacle /Le Kangourou Boxeur which appeared on Paris walls. It featured a kangaroo boxing with a man in blue tights, red boots, a red waist band and a striped shirt. Stupid.com told an amazing, if bizarre story. A man from Australia arrived in Paris with an adult kangaroo named Lester. When the Australian claimed Lester could out-box anyone in the ring, people packed into the Folies Bergere; they were keen to watch something so exotic that no-one in Paris had ever seen before. It may not have been High Culture, but it certainly was popular.

When did all this reach its peak? In 1886, the Folies Bergère went under new management which was responsible for staging the biggest revue-style music hall shows. Fortunately we can still read their programme: the Isola brothers (illusionists), Nala Damajenti (snake charmer), a troupe of real Zulus, our favourite boxing kangaroo, wrestlers, Ira Paine (American marksman), Sampson (a chain breaker!), Captain Costentenus (tattooed with 325 animals), the Scheffers (acrobats), Baggenssen (eccentric clown) and Little Tich (the famous English music hall star). Most of the stars of 'Car Conc' sang at the Folies, namely Paulus, Polin, Yves Guilbert, Polaire and Gaby Deslys.

That same year, 1886, new management introduced Place au Jeunes, a revue featuring chorus girls. It was a great success largely because the chorus girls wore little more than feathers and a smile. In Ambassadeurs Cabaret in Paris, one chorus girl didn't even have feathers. Just a big picture hat, as you can see in Belle Epoque Vintage Posters!

African animals poster, by Jules Cheret

The audience drank in the theatre’s indoor garden and the bar area, as we can see from the well known paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Manet. But even more importantly, the special nature of the performances was captured on posters that were pasted on the city walls. This exuberant image of the American dancer Loie Fuller captured the spirit of sensuality and excitement in the cabaret culture of fin-de-siècle Paris. Print-maker and poster designer Jules Chéret made Folies Bergere, and the delectable Loie Fuller, very inviting.

Poster for Folies Bergere, by Jules Cheret, 1893.