Sir Francis Burdett, a much maligned politician (1770-1844).

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May 032013
 

An intriguing fellow, was Francis Burdett. Born on 25th January 1770 in Wiltshire, he was the  grandson of the Baronet of Foremark. He was educated at Westminster School and Oxford University and after completing his education, he did what was expected of him – he went off on his Grand Tour through Europe. Back he came in 1783 and soon married Sophia Coutts, the daughter of the banker, Thomas Coutts. Her dowry was a staggering £25,000, making young Francis a very rich man. In 1797 Coutts purchased the rotten borough of Boroughbridge from the Duke of Newcastle for £4,000; he gave the seat to his ambitious son-in-law and Francis became an independent MP.

He declined to join either the Whigs or the Tories and in his maiden speech on the thorny topic of Ireland he upset nearly all his parliamentary colleagues by declaring that that the government was guilty of the “oppression of an enslaved and impoverished people”.

In 1797 he became the Fifth Baron of Foremark following his grandfather’s death that year.

Burdett strongly opposed William Pitt’s suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus in 1796 and was highly critical of the government’s efforts to suppress the rights of the individual. As he himself later declared “The best part of my character is a strong feeling of indignation at injustice & oppression and a lively sympathy with the sufferings of my fellows.” A less endearing quality was his melancholia, pedantry, and quick temper. Also, despite fathering six children by his long suffering wife he appears to have had several more by his mistress Lady Oxford.

Burdett denounced Great Britain’s war with France, and was one of the few members of the House of Commons who supported the idea of parliamentary reform in the early years of the 19th Century.

In 1802 he was elected to Parliament as Member for Middlesex but later elections were rigged against him and Burdett spent a fortune (estimated at £100,000) successfully contesting the results. In 1807, following the death of Charles James Fox he stood for Westminster on a Reform ticket and was returned with a huge majority – gaining more votes than all the other candidates put together.

In 1810 he spoke in the House against the imprisonment of a radical by the name of John Gale Jones and then compounded his unpopularity with the government by “leaking” the entire speech to  William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register (a clear breach of Parliamentary privilege). The authorities were outraged. He was arrested, charged, and ordered to be imprisoned in the Tower of London. He responded by barricading himself in his home for two days. Soldiers forced their way in and carted him off to prison. Later (1820) he was charged with seditious libel, heavily fined and again imprisoned for criticising the government’s handling of the Peterloo Massacre (in which eleven people died and hundreds were injured when the army fired shots into a crowd of activists).

Burdett campaigned for parliamentary reform and in particular called for universal male suffrage. He wanted reform of the Parliament so that all constituencies had the same number of voters. He opposed corporal punishment in the army, sought strenuously to stamp out corruption and nepotism, and supported the abolition of the Slave Trade. He also supported Catholic Emancipation. But as he got older his enthusiasm for radical ideas started to fade, and he ended up representing the Tories as MP for North Wiltshire until his death.

His wife, Lady Burdett, to whom he had eventually become devoted, died on 13 January 1844. Sir Francis simply lost the will to live – gave up eating and drinking, and died ten days later just two days short of his 74th birthday. He and his wife were buried at the same time in the same vault at Ramsbury Church, Wiltshire.

The man was certainly a thorn in the side to the Government on many issues, and his opponents  did all they could to smear his name and ridicule his ideas. Take this caricature from 1810:

 

“A Rough Sketch of the Times as Deleniated by Sir Francis Burdett” appears courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library site and invites the viewer to decide whether the true character of Frances Burdett is the fine upstanding gentleman on the left, or the duplicitous rogue on the right. The figure on the left is described as The Genius of Honour and Integrity and sports such attributes as:

A sound mind, an eye ever watchful to the welfare of his fellow citizen, a tongue that never belied a good heart. He bends a knee to religion, is a staunch supporter of the Bill of Rights, an advocate of fair representation for the people [well, the males at any rate] and is a lover of peace.

Contrast that with his alter ego wearing the collar of corruption, with hands of extortion holding a bag containing Pensions Reversions and Perquisites of Office. He carries secret service money in his back pocket and has a cringing soul, while sitting for a rotten borough. He has an eye to interest and a pampered appetite, legs of luxury and goes under the heading The Monster of Corruption.

Take  your pick!

Teaching the Deaf in 18th century London: A tribute to Rev. John Townsend.

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Apr 172013
 

JaiI have long been fascinated by the question of how deaf people were treated by society in the 18th Century – just what would life hold for you if you were born deaf, or completely lost the use of hearing through illness? What education was there for you, if any, if you came from a poor family and could not benefit from a local school because there were no facilities for teaching you? So I was delighted when I stumbled across the blog page of Jaipreet Virdi entitled “From the Hands of Quacks”  (here) because it gives everything you ever wanted to know in terms of the history of deaf teaching, and much, much, more besides. Jai has the perspective of being deaf herself, having lost her hearing as a result of meningitis when she was four years old. She is doing a PhD at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto – her research broadly focuses on early nineteenth century developments in English medicine and biology.

JT portraitShe has kindly agreed to help me write this as a blog about education for deaf people, in particular about the work of a remarkable English clergyman called the Reverend John Townsend (1757-1826), who is pictured above. He is known for his establishment of the Asylum for the Support and Education of Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor, or more informally, the ‘Bermondsey Asylum.’ Later (in 1792) he was co-founder of the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (now the Royal School for Deaf Children, Margate). The institution provided education, training, and shelter to poor parish deaf children and heavily relied on subscriptions and donations to manage its affairs. It transformed the way deaf people were taught in Britain.

londonasylum

The man had an indefatigable appetite for work – barely had he finished setting up one institution that he would form a committee to raise funds to purchase premises so that some other institute could be established. Thus he was also was instrumental in setting up the London Missionary Society in 1794, and the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1802. In 1807 he also helped initiate the London Female Penitentiary, which housed and rehabilitated repentant prostitutes.

Caterham-school-front-entranceIn 1811 he started a Congregational School in Lewisham, to provide a boarding education for the sons of Congregational Ministers. It still exists, as Caterham School.

So, what of the man himself? John Townsend was born on 24 March 1757 in the impoverished parish of Whitechapel, whose narrow lanes, slums, and industries housed some of the city’s most destitute congregations. He was the son of Benjamin Townsend, who was a pewterer of Whitechapel. Father was a Calvinistic Methodist who was a follower of George Whitefield. John became an ordained minister in 1781  at Kingston, and then in 1784 moved to the Independent church in Jamaica Row, Bermondsey.

Jai sets the background to his pioneering efforts to help the deaf community: “Prior to 1750, when opportunities for deaf-mutes to be literate were becoming widespread, the situation of the deaf was a calamity: unable to acquire speech, the deaf were forced into a state of isolation and removed from the two-way communication prevalent in hearing society. Some even believed that the deaf were literally incapable of absorbing divine worlds, as they were metaphorically deaf to the Word of God. As Oliver Sacks describes the experiences, deaf-mutes were “confined to a few rudimentary signs and gestures; cut off, except in large cities, even from the community of their own kind; deprived of literacy and education, all knowledge of the world; forced to do the most menial work; living alone, often close to destitution; treated by the law and society as little better than imbeciles—the lot of the deaf was manifestly dreadful.”

While the poor deaf and dumb may have suffered uncomprehending brutality, this was scarcely the case of deaf children born to the wealthy and aristocratic who had the privilege of private instructors to teach variations of artificial speech, finger-spelling, signs, or lip-reading, skills that would enable them to enrich their social status through communication.”

Traditionally the Church had put forward the view that a child’s deafness was a result of God punishing the sins of the parents. Consequently deaf people were excluded from taking part in religious worship and they were given the status of imbeciles – incapable of education. Because of this prejudiced view, for many years ‘deaf and dumb’ people were considered incapable of making a will or of inheriting property from their families.

Holder-DeafIn the seventeenth century books started to appear on the topic of deafness, and various different types of sign language were introduced. The first formal schools for the deaf started to appear in Northern Europe in the eighteenth century.

In France, the Abbé de L’Épée (1712-1789) had opened a school for deaf children from all backgrounds. At first he taught speech with hand gestures and by writing, later developing a less time-consuming system of signs. Essentially, he developed Signed French which became known as the ‘silent education’ of deaf children.

In Germany, L’Épée ‘s methods were heavily criticized. The so-called German method put forward by  Samuel Heinicke (1729-90) was based on the insistence that speech was the only thing that separated human beings from animals. Sign language was discouraged, and everything was based upon oral learning. In Britain, there was a less dogmatic, more shared, approach. Five years after L’Épée had opened his school, the first deaf school was opened in Britain by Thomas Braidwood. The school was in Edinburgh and in 1760 initially accepted one deaf pupil. Braidwood’s success in teaching speech to this boy led to numbers increasing to twenty pupils by 1780. His approach, due to the use of natural gesture, was known as ‘combined’ – sign language was used as a gateway by which students could learn speech in order to communicate. His results were impressive and his reputation spread.

Silver ear trumpet from 1803

Silver ear trumpet from 1803

The Braidwood family in many ways represented deaf education for the last half of the 18th Century. The school in Edinburgh was eventually closed and Braidwood opened a new school in London in 1783. This became known as Old Kent Road Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, with Braidwood’s nephew, Watson becoming the new Head.

Jai continues: “Townsend became acquainted with the plight of the deaf child when one of his parishioners, a Mrs. Creasey, sent her son to the Thomas Braidwood’s academy for the deaf in Edinburgh. The boy’s ability and accuracy in mastering speech impressed Townsend, who then agreed with Mrs. Creasey on the necessity for a charitable institution that would counteract the privatization and expense characteristic of the Braidwood institutions.”

Sending her child to the academy in Edinburgh had cost Mrs Creasey £1500 over a ten year period – a vast sum, totally out of reach for anyone but the wealthy. What was remarkable, in an age of religious faction and bitter rivalry, was the way Townsend managed to draw together both the established church and the dissenters to unite in a single enterprise: the establishment of a deaf school for the “impotent poor”. On Thursday 30th August 1792 at 6.30 p.m. a meeting was held in the St Pauls Head Tavern in Bermondsey “ for the purpose of establishing in Bermondsey an Asylum for the Support and Education of the Deaf and Dumb children of the Poor.”

Jai continues “With the assistance of Henry Cox Mason, rector of Bermondsey, and of the philanthropist and banker Henry Thornton, Townsend established the Asylum. Admission to the school was through a public selection process voted by the Committee of Governors of the Asylum, usually reserved for a candidate between six to twelve years of age of “sound mind,” on the basis of their biographical sketch. Where six children were originally admitted in its founding year, at each yearly half-election, the governors of the Asylum accepted a few more; yet the number of children waiting to be admitted increased yearly, and by 1804, Townsend sought new dwellings for the growing institution. With the patronage from the Duke of Gloucester, the Asylum moved to Old Kent Road in London in 1807, and construction for the new institution completed in 1810. Braidwood’s dynasty in deaf education persisted as his nephew, Joseph Watson, served as the superintendent of the Asylum. Watson also published Instructions for the Deaf and Dumb (1809), which outlined the Asylum’s methods of education. Informally renamed the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, the institution eventually became an important national charity and its model of patronage and governing committee did much to transform the operating systems of charitable institutions in Britain.”

Townsend died in February 1826. Details of his life appear in the book ‘Memoirs of the Reverend John Townsend’, which was organized and published by his niece, Susan Warner, five years after his death.

jaipreetI am really grateful to Jai for her input on this post. Hopefully I will be able to persuade her to do another one, perhaps on Thomas Braidwood, in due course! Meanwhile, here is another picture of her, because let’s face it, she’s better looking than any of the other photographs I use!

 

Post script: I am embarrassed to see that I failed to give credit to myk briggs for the picture of the silver ear trumpet, shown above. He has a site at http://www.eartrumpets.co.uk/ dedicated to ear trumpets (yes, he has a collection of dozens and dozens, of all shapes and sizes, and of all ages!). Thanks myk!

 

The remarkable tale of Ignatius Sancho (1729 – 1780)

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Apr 052013
 

Ignatius Sancho, by Thomas Gainsborough

Today’s post is about a slave turned shopkeeper called Ignatius Sancho. Born in the same year as my ancestor Richard Hall (1729) it is interesting to see how different their lives were, and yet how close their lives came to converging. The story goes that Ignatius was born on a slave ship crossing to the West Indies from Guinea, in West Africa. There is no proof of this, but what is known is that as a young child he was brought to England and became a houseboy in Greenwich in the employment of three unmarried sisters. They added “Sancho” to his name, kept him uneducated as a way of keeping control over him, and treated him harshly. Domestic servants had few rights – he was a household drudge, but one who was expected to be smart in appearance and act as an adornment to the household at all times.

Eventually he grew tired of the arrangement and ran away from the sisters. He persuaded the Duke of Montagu to employ him as his butler, which gave him the opportunity to learn how to read and write. The Duke encouraged him in his studies, and helped him become a popular figure in London Society. He was a novelty – a charming, well-versed African who wrote eloquently and vividly to his acquaintances about his life and times. He counted the actor and theatre manager David Garrick among his friends. He accompanied the Duke on one of his visits to Bath where he had his portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough – a hurried portrait which was apparently completed in 90 minutes from start to finish!

When the Duke died he bequeathed money to Sancho in his will, enabling him to open grocery shop premises at 19 Charles Street in Westminster. Ironically, for a man with such a fundamental horror of slavery, he was trading in all the goods which benefited from plantation workers’ misery – sugar, tobacco rum etc. He married and had six children and appears to have become one of a very rare and unusual group – an African who was a property owner and as such was entitled to vote in elections (a right which he exercised on more than one occasion). He was a staunch monarchist and he loved playing and composing music. He wrote a Theory of Music (no copies survive) and composed a number of songs, dances etc which were later published in four volumes. He was a prodigious letter writer and was the first Black African to have a letter to the Press published, the first to have an obituary published when he died, and the first to have his collection of letters published.

The collection was a best seller when it came out in 1782, two years after his death which occurred on 14th December 1780. He was a remarkable man, who lived a remarkable life and who spoke persuasively and effectively against the inhumanity of the Slave Trade. For that reason he was featured in a UK series of postage stamps commemorating the abolition of slavery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His portrait on the stamp, clearly based on the Gainsborough portrait, appears against a background detail taken from his trade card. The original is shown courtesy of the British Museum:

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

More can be found on the intriguing website of Brycchan Carey  as this contains extracts from many of his letters including fascinating first-hand descriptions of the Gordon Riots.

And to end with: the commemorative plaque put up on the site of his grocer’s shop.

The New Steam Carriage, operating ‘twixt London and Bath, 1829…

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Mar 292013
 

I came across this lithograph at the Museum of London site, showing the steam-propelled carriage being driven sedately on its way between London and Bath in 1829. I rather assumed that this indicated a regular service: far from it, because the service was plagued with difficulties which eventually forced one Mr Goldsworthy Gurney into bankruptcy with debts of well over two hundred thousand pounds. Behind his fall from grace lies a story of  under-hand dealings, shenanigans in the House, and corruption among the rural gentry.

Goldsworthy  (later Sir Goldsworthy) was born on Valentine’s Day 1793 near Padstow in Cornwall. He went on to become a scientist, inventor, surgeon, chemist and lecturer. In other words he was a thoroughly good egg who was rather clever at a lot of things.

In 1820 he moved up to London from Cornwall in order to further his career as a surgeon, and settled at 7 Argyle Street near Hanover Square. Curiously, he decided to expand his influence by lecturing …  on the merits of steam locomotion.

 

Earlier, he had met fellow Cornishman Richard Trevithick who was one of the pioneers of steam-powered engines.

Trevithicks London Steam Carriage, 1803

Trevithick had produced a steam carriage in 1803 and many of Gurney’s ideas were derived from this. In 1825 Gurney rented workshop premises just off Oxford Street and started tinkering with steam engine parts, particularly the blast pipe needed to increase the power-to-weight ratio of the steam engine .  He soon took out a patent for  “An apparatus for propelling carriages on common roads or railways – without the aid of horses, with sufficient speed for the carriage of passengers and goods”. Goldsworthy Gurney decided to move into the manufacture of steam carriages, and uprooted his family to go nearer Regents Park, where he took over an existing factory and  made a number of important technical improvements to his original design. It must have caused a sensation when he took his vehicles out for a spin on the normal roads - a carriage moving without horses!

It was not always free from risk – in May 1828  a Gurney carriage climbed Highgate Old Hill (no mean achievement). On the return journey the workmen, ever so proud of their success, forgot to lock the drive-shaft to  the rear wheels, and the contraption careered out of control down to the bottom of the hill. Fortunately for Gurney, who was steering the thing, neither he nor anyone else was injured, but a wheel fell off.

A similar problem with keeping the wheels on happened a while later, in thick fog, when a Gurney carriage had to swerve to avoid an oncoming mail-coach which suddenly emerged out of the  gloom. The carriage crashed into a pile of bricks, damaging the drive mechanism, but it is reported that the carriage still managed to continue on its journey, with power to only one wheel, and overtook at least fifty horse drawn vehicles along the way. Let’s all have a quick rendition of “One wheel on my carriage, but I’m still rolling along…”

Eventually he decided to do a there-and-back journey to Bath, a feat accomplished at an average speed of 14 miles per hour (including stops for re-fuelling, taking on water etc.). This was twice as fast as a horse-drawn carriage. It was not entirely without incident, as his daughter remarked in a letter to The Times some years later “I never heard of any accident or injury to anyone with it, except in the fray at Melksham on the noted journey to Bath, when the fair people set upon it, burnt their fingers, threw stones, and wounded poor Martyn the stoker”. Well that says all you need to know about the good burghers of Melksham… but they were apparently mostly unemployed mill-workers so perhaps their luddism can be excused. The vehicle had to be escorted under guard to Bath to prevent further vandalism.

Unfortunately the general public were not convinced that it was a terribly good idea to sit atop a carriage next to a pressurised steam engine, particularly one which belched burning cinders out of every aperture. Our intrepid hero therefore developed what you might call ‘a Gurney gurney’ – an articulated trolley towed by the steam engine, on which the paying public might sit. But no-one really wanted to be towed along in this fashion, and GG quickly started to run out of money.

It wasn’t helped when a boiler exploded on one occasion, killing two people. Not good for business, as a writer of the time pointed out, when you buy a ticket to London but end up going to heaven instead…

For a short while a service was successfully operated between Cheltenham and Gloucester, using three of Gurney’s steam carriages. The service was operated by Sir Charles Dance, and ran every four hours. In one four-month period of 1831, his vehicles carried nearly 3,000 passengers, “including many ladies,” and travelled over 4,000 miles.  But then an unholy alliance was entered into between the owners of the the horse-drawn coach businesses, the local magistrates and various  prominent land-owners. The latter persuaded “their” M.P.’s to push a series of Private Members Bills through Parliament raising the toll on steam carriages to two pounds per trip (as against a couple of shillings for the equivalent vehicle pulled by horses). In all over fifty such bills were passed. Talk about protectionism!

To make matters worse, landowners in Cheltenham took it upon themselves to  cover a long section of the road with a layer of loose gravel, about a foot deep,  in order to make the heavy horse-less carriage sink up to its axle. This, combined with the prohibitively high tolls, was the death knell of the venture, and GG quickly went bankrupt. (It appears that the landowners were far more interested in selling their land to the new railroad companies – carriages on existing roads brought them no profit at all).

Suffice to say he went on to invent all manner of useful and exciting things, but that was in the reign of Queen Victoria and, as anyone who knows this blog is aware, that is totally outside my area of interest!

John Joseph Merlin, Part Two

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Mar 132013
 

In yesterday’s post I dealt with some of Merlin’s musical instruments and handy inventions. But what of the other matters which mark him out as different from all the other roller-skating violinists? Today I give you a truly impressive list of other delights which he came up with:

A mechanical chariot equipped with a mechanical whip and an early form of odometer called a “way-wise.”  The distance covered was shown on a dial at the side of the vehicle. This picture of Merlin with his sedan-chair-on-wheels was produced in 1803. Apparently Merlin liked to advertise his chariot by riding it through Hyde Park on Sundays. The picture is shown courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

A Dutch oven or Rotisseur with a mechanical jack to turn meat (patented 1773).

A bell communication system to summon servants, with a list annexed to the bell push. Moving the pencil down the list led to a corresponding movement on the list in the servants’ quarters in the basement, so that the servant would know without ascending the stairs that his master required Chocolate, Tea or whatever.

A self-propelling wheel chair or ‘Gouty Chair’, propelled and steered by turning winches on the arms. These enabled the disabled user to control the mahogany wheels. This one appeared in Ackermann’s Repository in 1811.

A mechanical garden

A revolving tea table with a central samovar – so that the hostess could depress a foot pedal and turn the table, while another foot pedal operated the tilting of the urn so that it dispensed a set amount of tea into each of 12 cups.

A Hygeian pump to “expel foul air out of Ships Hospitals Bed clothes etc”

A mechanical carousel called “an Aerial Cavalcade” with 4 wooden horses on a structure supported by 6 pillars “on which the Ladies and Gentlemen may ride, perfectly safe, over the heads of the rest of the company”

A gambling machine which, once wound up, would play a game of ‘odd and even’ for up to four hours!

A set of whist cards for the blind (a sort of braille precursor).

A prosthetic device for a “Person born with Stumps only” which apparently enabled a person to use a knife and fork, hold a horse reins, “and even write with great freedom”

Also musical instruments: a pianoforte with a six octave span made for Dr Burney in 1775

A personal weighing machine in satinwood called Sanctorius’s Balance. This picture of one appears on the Apter-Fredericks site.

Pendulum of Merlin clock
(showing scale of adjustment).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Various exquisite clocks - this detail of the pendulum shown courtesy of Quality Antique Clocks.

A set of weighing scales with a built-in micrometer screw for measuring the size, thickness and weight of golden guineas (and their divisions, the half guinea and quarter guinea).

Pictured is a photograph of one of the scales which came up for auction a few years back when it was expected to make £1000 ($1500).

(In fact if you look closely at the Gainsborough portrait of Merlin it shows him holding on to one of these scales with his left hand).

A perpetual motion clock – a joint collaboration with James Cox. It wound itself up automatically. The change of pressure in the Earth’s atmosphere acted as an external energy source and caused the winding mechanism to move. This kept the mainspring coiled inside the barrel – with the winding of the mainspring via movement of the liquid in a mercury barometer. So as to provide the required amount of energy, a Fortin mercury barometer was used. It contained an astonishing 68 kilograms (150 pounds) of mercury! Somehow it failed to catch on…

 

 

Merlin died at Paddington in May 1803 at the age of 68. In his will he directed that his 30 year old horse should be shot. Having died unmarried, he left his property to two brothers and a sister.

Merlin you old wizard, we salute you!

John Joseph Merlin – Part One

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Mar 112013
 

Today’s post is intended to redress the dreadful slur against the Belgians, suggesting that the only memorable people to have emanated from that country were the (fictional) Hercule Poirot and the irritating Father Abraham of The Smurfs fame. Actually Father Abraham is the performing name of a Dutchman – Petrus Antonius Laurentius “Pierre” Kartner – and Smurf-fans (I assume there must be some somewhere) should be indebted to a man who styled himself ‘Peyo’ a.k.a. Pierre Culliford: he  actually was Belgian, and I am sure very proud of that fact (even if his father was English….).

I therefore give you – Mr John Joseph Merlin, a splendid fellow and a credit to the nation of his birth. This is his portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. He was born at Huys, near Maastricht, in Belgium on 17 Sept 1735. Google his name and the chances are that it will simply tell you that he invented a form of roller skate and crashed into a mirror when making a spectacular appearance at a soiree, while playing the violin and wearing his skates…(as one does).

The earliest mention of this Grand Entrance appears to come from a work entitled “Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes”written by Thomas Busby in 1805. He relates:

“One of his ingenious novelties was a pair of skaites contrived to run on wheels. Supplied with these and a violin, he mixed in the motley group of one of Mrs Cowley’s masquerades at Carlisle House; when not having provided the means of retarding his velocity, or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces and wounded himself most severely”

There was however rather more to Mr Merlin than inventing skates-without-brakes. Indeed he is one of my heroes of the century – a man whose accomplishments fitted perfectly into the Georgian era. He was an inventor, a showman, a fine musician, a clock maker and much more besides.

It appears that he studied for six years as a maker of clocks, automata and mathematical and musical instruments at the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He came to the notice of the Court and arrived in England in May 1760, aged twenty-five, as part of the entourage of the ambassador Conde de Fuentes. His connections stood him in good stead. He became a friend of Johann Christian Bach (son of Johann Sebastian Bach). He was a favourite of Thomas Gainsborough. Indeed there is every indication that the portrait shown earlier was executed by the artist in payment for a musical instrument made for him by Merlin – Gainsborough’s papers include an invoice for ten guineas from Merlin dated at around the time the painting was completed.

Charles Burney
by Sir Joshua Reynolds

He was also a popular visitor at the household of the musicologist Charles Burney. In the words of (daughter) Fanny Burney: “He is a great favourite in our house…He is very diverting also in conversation. There is a singular simplicity in his manners. He speaks his opinion upon all subjects and about all persons with the most undisguised freedom. He does not, though a foreigner, want words; but he arranges and pronounces them very comically. He is humbly grateful for all civilities that are shown him; but is warmly and honestly resentful for the least slight.”

He set to and developed many refinements to existing musical instruments – to the harp, the harpsichord, the new-fangled pianoforte and so on. He  invented and patented a harpsichord with pianoforte action. By 1763 he appears to have been involved in the preparation and finishing of a large barrel organ for the Princess of Wales (Augusta of Saxe Gotha, widow of Frederick Prince of Wales and mother of George III).

The trade card of James Cox,
copyright, British Museum

By 1766 he had started working with James Cox, the brilliant showman/jeweller/goldsmith. Merlin became Cox’s “chief mechanic” developing  the mechanism for the famous Silver Swan, now the deserved star of the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle.

The Bowes Museum Silver Swan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click here to see the brilliant action as the swan appears to turn its head from side to side before lowering it into the water and swallowing a fish! Obviously no-one told Merlin that swans are vegetarian…

Cox had premises at Spring Gardens near Charing Cross and my ancestor Richard Hall was a frequent visitor. I still have his catalogue, which alone cost half a guinea, on top of the same fee as an admission charge.

Thomas Johann Christian Fischer,
painted by Thomas Gainsborough, 1780

Cox got into financial difficulties and Merlin decided to set up on his own. To begin with he made  automata as well as musical instruments. When the musician Fischer chose to have his portrait painted by Gainsborough he elected to do so leaning against one of Merlin’s pianos. Full size, you can just make out his name on the plate: MERLIN LONDINI FECIT.

 

 

 

 

He also made clocks and possibly some watches – very few survive.  English Heritage show one of his skeleton clocks at their site. It formed part of the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood House and I am grateful to them for the image, which is their copyright.

He acquired premises at 11 Princes Street off Hanover Square (just South of Oxford Street). The area is indicated by highlighting on Horwood’s map shown here.

The year was 1783 and he called the place Merlin’s Mechanical Museum. Here he offered refreshments to visitors, with an advertisement stating that ”Ladies and Gentlemen who honour Mr Merlin with their Company may be accommodated with TEA and COFFEE at one Shilling each.” It cost two shillings and sixpence to go in during the morning session (11 until 3) and three shillings per evening session (7 until 9).

What they saw was an impressive array of automata and various inventions made by Merlin. Some I will detail in tomorrow’s post.  ‘At Merlin’s you meet with delight’, ran a contemporary ballad. Suffice to say that one of the people attending the exhibition was a young schoolboy from Devon called Charles Babbage. The story goes that Merlin took Charles upstairs to see his workshop and to show some more exotic automata. Burbage later recalled: ‘There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high’. The first automaton was fairly ordinary, though ‘singularly graceful’, one of Merlin’s well-known stock of figures ‘in brass and clockwork, so as to perform almost every motion and inclination of the human body, viz. the head, the breasts, the neck, the arms, the fingers, the legs etcetera even to the motion of the eyelids, and the lifting up of the hands and fingers to the face’.

Babbage recalled that ‘she used an eye-glass occasionally and bowed frequently as if recognizing her acquaintances’. But it was the other automaton which most impressed Babbage ”an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings and opened its beak’. Babbage was completely gob-smacked. ‘The lady attitudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’.

Fired up by this visit, Babbage was later to go on and invent the forerunner of the modern computer. Indeed in 1834 he actually managed to buy the two exhibits which had so profoundly affected him.

Sarah Guppy, 18th Century inventor, successful business woman, and cougar!

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Dec 132012
 

I used to live in Richmond Hill in Bristol and was aware of the green plaque a few doors down advising the world that it used to be the home of Sarah Guppy, an English inventor who lived between 1770 and 1852. Indeed I always parked my car in the tree-filled garden opposite her home at 7 Richmond Hill, unaware that she had bequeathed it to the city on condition that it was not built upon. It remains as a delightful, quiet, enclave right in a busy part of the city.

But what of Sarah Guppy the inventor? It is fair to say that female inventors are few and far between in the Georgian and Victorian era, for one very good reason. If a woman was married she could not own property in her own name – and as a patent was intellectual property this meant that a woman could not apply for a patent in her own name and had to do so via her husband.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Nevertheless Mrs Guppy can lay claim to an extraordinarily eclectic mix of inventions. Where for instance would we be without a device to prevent barnacles forming on boat hulls? She earned a contract with the British Navy worth £40,000 for that one. Or even more usefully, for the safe piling of bridge foundations (patented in 1811 and used free of charge by Thomas Telford when building his bridge over the Menai straits, and by Isambard Kingdom Brunel with the Clifton Suspension bridge some ten years later). She never sought to charge a licence fee for her pile-driving ideas because she regarded them as being for the public benefit.

She also put forward a scheme to prevent soil erosion on railway embankments by planting willow and poplar trees, while my favourite invention was one which modified a samovar-type of tea urn to enable you to boil an egg in the steam while at the same time keeping the toast warm on a steam-heated metal plate. An ideal breakfast maker in fact!

Sarah’s exercise bed

In between time Sarah invented a way of keeping fit in the bedroom – patenting a sort of hybrid bed-come-gym, with drawers beneath the bed forming steps for exercise, and with bars suspended from the ceiling for developing upper-body strength.

Other patents covered a type of fire hood for the kitchen. She also devised a modified candle holder which would enable candles to burn for longer, and a method of caulking wooden boats so that they were more sea-worthy.

In all Sarah took out ten patents in the late Georgian and early Victorian period – a remarkable achievement.

She had been born Sarah Beech in Birmingham into a wealthy family with trading links to the West Indies (in particular with the sugar trade) and had married Bristol trader Samuel Guppy. At first they lived in Queen Square and later in Prince Street and quickly became the focus of Bristol society. They were a glittering and successful couple, well connected with leading figures of the age especially Brunel. She had six children including Thomas Richard, who went on to become one of Brunel’s assistants. Together the pair formulated the idea of a rail link from London to Bristol, combining it with the notion of a ship travelling to New York. This led to the Great Western Railway and the launch of the Great Western steamship. Indeed Thomas Richard Guppy was Directing Engineer of the Great Western Steamship Company, of which Mr. Brunel was the Consulting Engineer.

When her first husband died the 67 year old Sarah made an unfortunate decision to re-marry. She took as her spouse one Richard Eyre-Coote who was still in his late thirties.

Arnos Court, Brislington (now a hotel)

For Richard, his wife’s money meant a life of profligacy and gambling, particularly on the horses, and before long Sarah moved out of their home at Arnos Court Brislington and bought 7 Richmond Hill where she remained until her death at the age of 82. By then all her money had gone, squandered by her second husband. There’s a lesson there for all cougars….

 

 

Remembering Maurice Greene, composer, who died 1st December 1755

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Dec 012012
 

Today I am delighted to offer a guest blog-spot to Luke Green:

“Greene’s figure was below the common size, and he had the misfortune to be very much deformed; yet his address and exterior manners were those of a man of the world, mild, attentive, and well-bred.”

Maurice Greene, by Francis Hayman

This comment by Charles Burney, the later eighteenth century musical historian, tells a story about an important musical figure in early- to mid-eighteenth century London: – Maurice Greene (died 1st December 1755). I see Greene as the musical equivalent of Alexander Pope – a brilliant mind, much fêted and stimulated by contact with great men (such as Dryden, or, for Greene, Croft and Handel) in their prodigious youth, but trapped in a body which left them in pain and at a disadvantage in a world for the able-bodied. This could be the reason why Greene was one of the first organists of the Chapel Royal who did not undertake a rôle in the education of the children of that choral foundation, left as it was to Bernard Gates. Quite possibly someone with deformities from childhood rickets, or Potts Syndrome (tuberculosis of the bone, as Pope had) might not have been physically able to keep up with the boys.

Why am I interested in Greene? It began as a simple childhood interest in a composer who shared my surname. I have come to value his sure melodic gift and way with the English language. His music is not ‘big boned’ like Handel’s. He sometimes gets into tight corners when experimenting with a new musical language (having been raised on the Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire, as well as the Restoration music of Humphrey, Purcell, Wise, Jeremiah Clarke and Croft, Greene chose to embrace the music of Italy and the melody-driven music of opera), he gets up and dusts himself off, and writes again. He mixes these many layers of musical language into something beguiling and rich in his church music (try some of his ‘Forty Select Anthems’, published in 1740). And there are a few important areas that we must be thankful for his influence. This deep delving into Italian music, both the ancients (for Greene these were Cavalli, Cesti and Carissimi) and moderns (Handel, Bononcini, Lotti, Caldara and Porpora) show a composer who was trying to write effectively for the human voice. I was amazed to find his rather good experiments at setting the Italian language pre-empt Britten’s later Italian, French and Russian experiments. But there is still an as yet untapped vein of solo and part song in English by Greene, which Ben Hulett and my recording on Naxos attempts to redress.

Greene, as Master of the King’s Music, was frequently snubbed by Handel and the Hanoverians – with Handel it was personal. Several writers refer to a falling out between the great man and Greene. However it was not Handel who is singled out by the German writer Mattheson as the greatest organist in Britain, but Greene at St Paul’s Cathedral. His posthumously published Voluntaries don’t give a deep picture of his skill as an organist, but their melodic drive is ever-present. Perhaps he was a brilliant improviser. Finally, Greene’s interest in the music of his great forerunners stimulated a race to collect and protect as much cathedral music as could be gathered from various sources, sometimes involving detective work following the destruction and disorder of the Civil War. Suffering from ill health in his later years, Greene passed the musical materials over before his death to his talented student, William Boyce, who published the great collection Cathedral Music. For these efforts we have as much to be grateful to Greene as other endeavours of the Augustan Age, such as Theobald’s Shakespeare Edition or Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

Maurice Greene, attributed to Joseph Highmore

The Public Advertiser of Wednesday, 3rd December, 1755 contained the following announcement: “Monday night died, at his house in Beaufort Buildings, Dr. Maurice Greene, Organist and Composer to his Majesty, Master of his Majesty’s Band of Musick, Organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge.”

To mark the anniversary of the death of this fine composer there is a concert on the 7th of December (7pm)  at St George’s Hanover Square. It will involve a complete performance of Greene’s settings from Spenser’s Amoretti of 1738, and full booking details can be found here.

(Thanks, Luke; and perhaps I might add that as you are the harpsichord player at the  concert in question I think the rest of us can say that you are  superbly qualified to have done this post! Many thanks indeed.)

Lady Archer, definitely NOT winning ‘Mother of the Year’ Award

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Nov 212012
 

In my previous post I explained that Lady Sarah Archer was widowed at the age of 37 when her husband Andrew, 2nd Lord Archer, Baron of Umberslade, died on 18th April 1778 . She was left to bring up three (possibly four) teenage daughters, She had no inclination to re-marry (why would she: if she remained a widow she kept her late husband’s money; if she re-married all control would pass to her new husband).

She had expensive tastes – she was a keen horsewoman, she ran a fine carriage and set of matching greys, and as I showed previously, she had a gambling habit to make the eyes water. Her daughters simply could not wait to escape her clutches, and her sixteen year old daughter the Honourable Sarah Archer (born 19 July 1762) wasted no time in becoming the wife of the 5th Earl of Plymouth. He rejoiced under the name of none other than Other Hickman Windsor. Their marriage took place on  20 May 1778 (one month after her father died)and gave rise to this fascinating trio of cartoons, shown on the British Museum site.

In the first, entitled ‘The Happy Escape or Arch-runaways’, Lady Archer is shown whip in hand driving her high phaeton, but drawn not by the four greys but by her four daughters. Three have slipped their reins and are running off, leaving one in harness. The Museum description gives us “Lady Archer, an angry harridan, slashes her whip at the runaways. On the side of the gig is an ‘A’ in an escutcheon surmounted by three crossed arrows and a baron’s coronet. On the extreme right is a signpost, one arm of which points ‘To Longsl . . . .’ The other, in the direction which the daughters are taking, ”To Bruton St.’ All the ladies wear the broad-brimmed hats with high circular crowns which had just become fashionable. Lady Archer wears a driving-dress with a triple cape and a large shirt-frill. It is dated 19 March 1788.”

According to the Museum the daughter still in bondage is Harriet. The leader of the pack of runaways (shown in back view) is Maria, the next Anne, and the last is Sarah Archer.

The second in the series of etchings is entitled ‘The Vain Pursuit’

It shows Lady Archer riding astride one of her daughters, using her whip to lash her backside, while her rather stoutly-built sister Miss West accompanies her, holding a poodle and riding a greyhound. The abandoned high phaeton appears in the background, while on the roadside, behind the hedge three fugitive daughters are in hiding. The front one says “Just & steady to our purpose”. The sign post points towards Plymouth (as in the Earl) and to Dis(s)ipation. The print appeared ten days after the first one was published.

The third in the trilogy is dated 1st May 1788 and is entitled ‘So, so, the Race was for a Husband.’ It shows a somewhat obese Earl Plymouth escorting  Hon. Sarah Archer with his arm in hers as they walk along a path towards a country church.  In the porch are the vicar and his clerk. Plymouth says:
‘See the Vicar waits to Join

Plymouth to Archer all Divine’
She replies:
‘Let us now to Church repair

Hymens bonds I had rather bear

Than a Mothers surly care’
Her two sisters walk immediately behind them, hand in hand.   On the extreme right Lady Archer,  walks off saying:
‘You may go if you will

For I shall have my fill

Of Mirth & of Pleasure

Without End or Measure

So take your own way’

The trio of prints clearly show disapproval of Lady Archer’s maternal skills – someone who had tyrannized her daughters and was largely indifferent to anyone’s happiness other than her own. In fact her daughter Sarah had three children by Plymouth, and following his death she married William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst of Arracan, and had four more children by him. She died in 1838

Her sister the Hon.Maria Archer married Henry Howard , on 4 November 1788. She died exactly one year later. The other sister Harriet married Edward Bolton Clive in 1790.

In my next post I will revert to the mother’s gambling addiction, and to her connection with the death of poor Mr Weston…

Lady Sarah Archer, facing the Press…

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Nov 192012
 

This is the first part of a trilogy of posts linked to one of the 18th Century’s most flamboyant (one might say fragrant…) women, Lady Sarah Archer. Boy, was she loved/hated by cartoonists of the day! You cannot get much more vicious than this  splendid caricature by the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, (1756-1827) dating from 1792 (when the subject was just over fifty years old).

It is entitled “Six Stages of Mending a Face” and is ‘dedicated with Respect to the Rt Hon Lady Archer’. Huh, if that is respectful….! It shows her as a bald- headed old crone, putting in a glass eye, inserting a set of dentures, applying make-up and then appearing (bottom left) as a somewhat younger woman. What had she done to deserve such treatment?

Another  rather kinder portrait was  done in 1781 when she was forty. It was by Charles Bretherton and appears on the British Museum site.

Kinder maybe, but it reminds me rather of Maggie Thatcher caricatures: she is shown with a distinctively hooked nose – and with far too much make-up. It is unclear why the likes of Rowlandson,  Cruikshank and Gillray so hated women wearing rouge – to modern eyes why shouldn’t she, perhaps a plain Jane, make the most of herself? But over and over again she is ridiculed for her reliance on cosmetics.

The Morning Post at the end of 1788 announced, incorrectly, that Lady Sarah had died. The edition of January 5th 1789 contained an apology saying “The Lady Archer whose death  was announced in this paper of Saturday, is not the celebrated character whose cosmetic powers have long been held in public estimation”

Three days later it reported: “It is said that the dealers in Carmine and Dead White as well as perfumers in general have it in contemplation to present AN ADDRESS to Lady Archer in gratitude for her not having DIED according to a late alarming report.”

This is the background to a fine picture of the grande dame heading for her favourite cosmetic shop in Pall Mall.To give it its full title “The Portland Place a-r.  [archer] Driving without a beau to R-d’s perfume warehouse P-ll M-ll: 

Lady Sarah is, as always, shown driving a very high gig, poised on high springs, with four horses; she was famous for driving matching greys. She wears a feathered hat and a coat of masculine cut – hall-marks which were always picked on by cartoonists who hated her ‘unfeminine’ appearance. On the side of the gig is an “A” surmounted by a baron’s coronet. “A” also appears on the harness of the horses.

Behind the horses on the right is the large glass window of a shop, above which a sign reads ”PERFUME WAREHOUS[E]“. Over the door is written “Italian Washes, Ivory Teeth, Mouse Eye Brows, &c.”; and “The Best French Roush”. In the window various articles are exhibited: glass jars, one inscribed “Marsh”, switches of hair, a mask, and a fool’s cap, &c. Its date: 18 June 1782

Her main crime would therefore appear to be that she was a woman of independent means, out on the streets without a male companion, and handling her horses with considerable skill and dexterity. She had been born as Sarah West in 1741, the daughter of a Warwickshire landowner and Member of Parliament. When she was twenty she married Andrew Archer,  who a few years later became 2nd Lord Archer, Baron of Umberslade. Burke’s Peerage suggests that she bore him three daughters (Harriet, Maria and Sarah) while cartoonists refer to a fourth daughter (Anne) Her one son was born in 1781 but he died in infancy - certainly prior to the death of his father the Baron in 1788.

As a widow of 37, with teenage daughters of a rebellious nature, she cannot have had it easy. The story goes that she was so addicted to gambling that she started to raid the children’s inheritance to fund her gambling habit, and that as a result the daughters could not wait to get out from under her feet and escape from her household. This gave rise to a series of cartoons which will be featured in the next blog, but I haven’t finished with the mother and her gambling ways yet…

In this 1792 Gillray cartoon entitled ‘Modern Hospitality, or a Friendly Party in High Life’ the harridan is shown, in riding habit, next to the Prince Regent. She wins the trick with the Jack – the implication being that she has cheated, hence the sub- title “The Knave Wins All”. On the extreme right, the Whig Leader Charles James Fox shows his dismay, while underneath the caption reads:

“To those earthly Divinities who charmed 20 years ago….Woman! Woman! Everlasting is you power over us, for in youth you charm away our Hearts, and in your after-years you charm away our purses.”

The etching appears courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

By then Lady Archer was well-known as one of the Faro Ladies;  along with Lady Buckinghamshire and others she held soirees (sometimes disguised as theatrical evenings) taking it in turns to use each others houses. They were really no more than high-class gambling dens (illegal). Men had their clubs such as White’s, but women would not be allowed there, so they made their own arrangements…. and added to their pin money by ‘adjusting’ the odds in their favour. Their preferred game was Faro, a card game where punters gamble on the next card to be turned up. In theory at any rate it offered good odds to gamblers – but not if the order in which the cards were turned up could be manipulated in favour of the Faro Bank. The Faro Ladies seemed to be expert manipulators! On one occasion it was alleged that someone had stolen the bank, although this may have been an allegation made by Lady Buckinghamshire to elicit sympathy. It gave rise to this cartoon, shown courtesy of the British Museum:

It shows Lord Buckinghamshire rushing in to inform his wife that they were ruined because “the Bank’s stole” and offering to fetch a horse and saddle. Lady Buckinghamshire is aghast.

“The bank stole, my Lord – Why, I secur’d it in the housekeepers room myself! This is what comes of admitting Jacobins in the house! Ah the Cheats! Seven hundred gone smack – without a single Cock of the Cards!”

Over on the extreme right Lady Archer, clad as usual in red, remarks “Stole – Bless me, why a Lady had her Pocket picked at my house last Monday”

The excessive gambling did not go down well with the public – it seemed too much like the excesses across the Channel which gave rise to the Revolution in France. There was disquiet that the Faro Ladies were flouting the law and getting away with it because of their high status. Things reached a head with the death of a young man who attended  these Faro parties, by the name of Henry Weston (more of him in a later blog).

Lord Chief Justice Kenyon had got fed up with the antics of these ladies and their ‘Faro’s Bank’ and the ruination visited upon their followers, announcing:

“If any prosecutions are fairly brought before me, and the parties are justly convicted, whatever may be their rank or station in the country, though they should be the finest ladies in the land, they shall certainly exhibit themselves at the pillory.”

This gave rise to more cartoons, such as these:

In this caricature  she is literally ’being pilloried’ for her devotion to gaming at Faro (Lady Buckingham on the left, Lady Archer on the right). Entitled ‘Exaltation of Faro’s Daughters’ it shows a card reading “Cure for Gambling. Published by Lord Kenyon in the Court of Kings Bench May 9th 1796″. The cartoonist is of course James Gillray and appears courtesy of the the National Portrait Gallery.

Another Gillray features Lord Kenyon flogging Lady Buckinghamshire as she is tied to the back of a cart, while her friend Lady Sarah Archer languishes in the pillory.

Again, this picture comes courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Lady Archer  features in this spankingly good print entitled ”The Royal Joke, or Black Jacks Delight” from 1788 - she is the figure at the left in the red riding habit.

 

She appears to be featured in much the same outfit in this final (Gillray) tribute to her, from September 1791, entitled ”Finishing Touches”. It shows Lady Sarah at her Dressing Table applying rouge by the bucket-load, while she wears a smart if somewhat manly garb - the top hat softened by tall feathers, the cuffs on her tightly cut riding jacket fashionably buttoned à la marinière, the high collar and braided lapels all typical of the period. Outside through the window can be seen her high phaeton.

More of Lady Archer and her children in my next post…

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