The Dulwich Society Journal for Summer 2016.
This Eucalyptus, or Cider Gum, is an attractive tree which is non- native, originating in Tasmania. Of the over 700 species of Eucalyptus worldwide, Gunnii, being hardy, is the most popular type in this country - unfortunately, as it is very fast growing, and extremely dangerous to building foundations: it grows in only around 10-20 years to the height of some 14 metres (45 ft.11 ins.) or more, with a canopy of around 10 metres (32ft), and a root spread of 1.5 times its height. Other hardy varieties include E. dalrympleana ( Mountain Gum), E. pauciflora (Snow Gum), but all need space to themselves. At Kew in 1774 the first introduction of E. obliqua (Stringy Bark) took place from seed collected on Captain Cook’s antipodean explorations.
Due to its rampant growth and invasiveness, Eucalyptus has become the subject of many an acrimonious law suit between neighbours, subsidence being commonly caused by this tree, which is unsuitable within 18 metres (59ft) of any building, and especially drains, where legal liability for damage rests with the tree owners. Sadly many urban nurseries sell these trees without any warnings that they are only suitably propagated in very large open spaces. In their native habitats, Eucalypts have often been used as a way to drain swamps.
Surprisingly Eucalypts belong to the wonderful Myrtle family, and are therefore evergreen, with beautiful round young blue-green leaves, very dear to flower arrangers, which mature into lovely sickle-shaped more grey-green, leaves, which tend to hang down, thus designed to withstand scorching sun. Curiously the juvenile leaves are opposite, whereas the mature leaves are alternate. The bark sometimes resembles a stunning abstract painting, with its peeling cream and brown bark.
Eucalypts take their name from the Greek ‘Eu’ meaning ‘well’ and ‘calypt’ meaning ‘hidden’, the latter referring to the nature of the flower which first forms hidden in the operculum, or cap on the flower bud. Over the years the Eucalyptus citronellal oil has been used for its seeming beneficial qualities, such as in inhalations, though it is also capable of serious toxicity and even death. Interestingly the tree itself, has the effect of repelling some insects and certain wild life, and little will grow beneath them.
This tree can be pruned regularly and even kept as a relatively low bush, with very keen maintenance, but pruning stimulates growth, and thus can make the tree thirstier and therefore even more invasive.
Eucalyptus is thus wholly unsuitable for small gardens anywhere, but its beauty is clear, so one hopes that the message of caution will spread that they should really only be for forests, deserts, mountains, swamps, and some large parks!
Mary Poole-Wilson Trees Committee
By Bjorn Blanchard
On a cold morning walk through the Upper Dulwich Wood in early April, with branches still dripping with the previous night’s rainfall (what a wet winter!), I noticed a coin lying exposed on a shallow slope. I picked it up and wiped it clean: a 1970 five ‘new pence’ piece. At home I compared its size to the modern ten pence. They made coins bigger then: it was nearly as large, and certainly twice the size of today’s five pence. It tells a story about the shrinking effect of inflation on coinage over the past forty-five years!
Inflation is an immutable law of economics and is linked to the abundance of money and the things that money buys. Economics also explains why common things attract a lower price than the scarce, a phenomenon that has its analogue in our appreciation of nature: as creatures become more plentiful we take them for granted, consider them two-a-penny, whilst caring more for those that are scarcer. The point is well illustrated by the contrasting fortunes of the Wood Pigeon - a common bird in Upper Dulwich Wood, and a species that we pay little attention to (the British Trust for Ornithology says that remarkably little is know of its ecology, probably because it is a hum-drum, everyday sort of animal) - and the Turtle Dove, which is red-listed as a bird of conservation concern.
Over the last 45 years - when that five pence coin was minted - the population of the Woodpigeon has almost doubled according to the BTO’s 2007-11 Bird Atlas. By contrast its close cousin, the Turtle Dove, has declined by nearly three quarters between 1970 and today. The bird is now confined to a few areas in the UK, its decline has been so dramatic; sadly, there were no confirmed breeding pairs of Turtle Dove in London and the Home Counties in the 2007-11 BTO counts.
So, what explains the rise in numbers of the Woodpigeon and the decline of the Turtle Dove? The Woodpigeon sticks close to home and feeds opportunistically. Its sedentary habits protect it from indiscriminate killing each spring and autumn that the Turtle Dove face as it migrates across Mediterranean countries from Africa to Europe and back again.
Nor is the Woodpigeon subject to the pressures on its habitat that affect the Turtle Dove in its African wintering grounds. Woodpigeons benefit from year round supplies of food, including the early winter-planted oil seed rape which farmers started sowing as a commercial crop in the 1970s. Woodpigeon have also taken advantage of the rise, over the same period, of households feeding seeds and nuts to garden birds, at least judging by the number of Woodpigeons that congregate at the bottom of my squirrel-proof bird feeders, picking the crumbs that drop from above.
The Upper Dulwich Wood is a favoured roost for the Woodpigeon through all four seasons, and I regularly count birds into double figures during autumn and winter; in spring several pairs nest in the Woods. Whilst it is right to be concerned at the decline of the Turtle Dove, we might also celebrate the abundance of the Woodpigeon. At the very least we should not be complacent: the Passenger Pigeon was one of the world’s most numerous bird but hunted to extinction within one hundred years, the last dying in 1900.
Switching to another member of the dove family: the very common and much overlooked feral pigeon, this from Philip Larkin, writing in 1955:
On shallow slates the pigeons shift together,
Backing against a thin rain from the west
Blown across each sunk head and settled feather.
Huddling round the warm stack suits them best,
Till winter daylight weakens, and they grow
Hardly defined against the brickwork. Soon,
Light from a small intense lopsided moon
Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.
By Jim Hammer
Alastair Hanton’s delightfully comprehensive article on ‘Fifty Years of Change in Dulwich’ in the Spring Journal provoked me to think about the perhaps even greater changes in life here from the thirties, the very different world before the war, although I can necessarily only offer rather fragmentary glimpses.
This was a time when three different milkmen made daily deliveries in our road, the United Dairy and the Express already mechanised, but the third was an independent, flicking his reins from a platform between the churns at the rear, who as a bonus left the occasional offering of fresh horse manure. A butcher called for custom at least once a week and there was a busy fishmonger in the Village. Payment was made to a (to me) venerable lady seemingly incarcerated in an elegant mahogany and glass cabin at the rear of the shop dispensing uncontaminated change.
The grocer at Price’s Stores, (now Gail’s bakery) still cut butter to order from an enormous slab of it, patting the purchase into a rectangle with the traditional grooved bats, and cheddar was sliced with a wooden handled draw wire from a large chunk. Biscuits nestled in transparent lidded tins set at an angle in front of the counter.
The Bartley brothers owned rival greengrocers, one occupying the site of the optician’s and Howard’s where the family still sells flowers. The two very ladylike proprietors of the ‘Village Tucke Shoppe’ next to Howard’s, did brisk business dispensing sweets (4oz at a time) from large jars and later Cadbury’s filled blocks, including Caramello all at 2d, about 1/5 of 1p today, but still quite a bit of pocket money then. Next along the Fordham family were contractors for and purveyors and repairers of all things electrical. In the days before the throw-away society our irons and kettles and toasters were regularly restored to working order in the den behind their shop.
Mr Rumsey was a lovely chubby Mr Pickwick of a man with oval owlish spectacles and rosy cheeks. Next door was Gibbards the shoe shop (now the hairdresser), where unwary mothers were persuaded to let their darlings’ feet be X-rayed to convince them and their offspring that the fit was correct; (in practice of course entirely useless as all one could see were the bones and the nails.) Although disapproved of, as children we always wanted a longer look to wiggle our toes - fascinating but a piece of new technology now thankfully consigned to history.
From time to time my mother would tell me to get my hair cut, the signal to jump on my bike for a ’short back and sides’ where Café Rouge now serves ‘steak and chips’. More importantly it freed me to go down afterwards to Mr Salkeld’s wonderfully fusty little antique bookshop (now the Beauty Salon) which was crammed floor to ceiling with book stacks. Somehow I always managed to come across some source of esoteric information or obscure reminiscence to read, sitting on the floor, knees cramped up between the presses . From time to time I felt obliged to make a purchase and indeed still have ‘Secret Remedies - what they cost and what they contain’ price one shilling (but still priced at 1 shilling 6 pence) - being a denunciation by the BMA of the overcharging and spurious claims of sellers of patent medicines. For instance the cost of the constituents (namely aloes, powdered ginger and powdered soap) of 56 “Worth a Guinea a Box” Beecham’s Pills, sold for 1s 1/2d was about half a farthing (a mark-up of X 108). They were said to cure (inter alia) constipation, headaches, insomnia, indigestion, all nervous affections, pimples, ulcers, maladies of indiscretion and other more embarrassingly intimate conditions. On a later occasion Rasputin’s biography provided a rather prematurely mysterious insight into the preoccupations of the adult world.
But the childhood idyll of the thirties came to an end on 3rd September 1939 as we listened to the now oft repeated sombre tones of Chamberlain “to-day the British ambassador in Berlin ….no such reply has been received. We are therefore at war with Germany”. This was followed almost immediately by the siren’s Warning wail followed later by the All Clear. That afternoon I was ‘evacuated’ to the front line in Kent.
By Sharon O’Connor
Fergusson Ward
Sir William Fergusson. Source: Royal College of Surgeons
Sir William Fergusson (1808-1877) was a brilliant surgeon whose fame and ability brought many patients to King’s. He was remarkably fast (removing a bladder stone in 30 seconds), a huge benefit in the days before anaesthetic, and crowds flocked to watch him operate. Even once anaesthesia was widely practised he was still extremely quick. He was a pioneer of ‘conservative surgery’, preserving parts and tissue that would otherwise have been sacrificed; he was called ‘the greatest practical surgeon of our time’. He became professor of surgery at King’s at just 32, having left Edinburgh for London when he was arrested following a quarrel with a colleague whom he had threatened to horsewhip. He was surgeon to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He was also an expert carpenter, violinist and fly-fisherman. He travelled around London in a bright yellow carriage, known to his students as the mustard pot, attended by two specially trained greyhounds. He worked at King’s for 37 years.
Fisk Ward
Reverend J Hammond Fisk of Norwich (1792-1886) donated £1,000 to the hospital in 1839. The College made him a vice-president and in turn the Church of England praised King’s as an institution conducted on ‘sound and religious principles’. He left a further £4,000 in his will. There has been a Fisk ward in both hospitals on the Portugal Street site and also at Denmark Hill.
Frank Cooksey Rehabilitation Unit
Frank Sebastian Cooksey, CBE (1906-1989) trained and practised at King’s. He pioneered rehabilitation for disabled servicemen during WW2 and was a leading advocate of care for the disabled which actively harnessed the patient’s own efforts in rehabilitation. He was director of the physical medicine department at King’s from 1947-1972 and influenced rehabilitation units all over the world. He realised rehabilitation needed to be community based rather than purely hospital-related and was one of the founders of Cheshire homes, helping to select residents. Leonard Cheshire said of him ‘He was a great medical innovator and was crucial to our Dulwich home, the first of its kind’. Cooksey’s wife, Molly, was very much involved in fundraising for King’s and chaired the Friends of King’s for many years.
Frank Stansil Critical Care Unit
Frank Stansil (1934-) was an insolvency partner with UHY Hacker Young and was deputy chairman of King’s NHS Healthcare Trust.
Frederic Still Unit
Sir George Frederic Still (1868-1941) was a classical scholar who then studied medicine. He was physician for the diseases of children at King’s from 1899 to 1933, creating the first paediatric department in a teaching hospital. A shy and retiring man, he nevertheless stressed the importance of treating children separately and considered childhood extended well into adolescence. He was the first to describe ADHD and was a great influence on the nascent speciality of paediatrics and in a career spanning 50 years he published 108 papers and five books. He book Common Disorders and Diseases of Childhood was the standard textbook for nearly 20 years.
Guthrie Wing
When it opened in 1937 it was known as the Stock Exchange Wing because the Stock Exchange dramatic and operatic society had donated £40,000. The tower over the entrance was funded by Sir Connop Guthrie to commemorate the successful flight of his son, Giles Connop McEachern Guthrie (1916-1979) when he won the 1936 Portsmouth-Johannesburg air race. Later the whole building was named after him.
Hambleden Wing
William Henry Smith (1825-1891), a member of the WH Smith family, was a great supporter of the hospital, both in time, as an auditor and member of the management committee, and in money. He would have been made Viscount Hambleden had he not died, so Queen Victoria made his widow a Viscountess. His son, the second Viscount Hambleden (1868-1928) was equally involved at King’s, becoming treasurer and rescuing the hospital from bankruptcy in 1898 with a large donation and a reorganisation of its finances. In 1903 he bought 12 acres of land in Denmark Hill and presented it to the hospital together with the sports ground on Dog Kennel Hill (now Sainsbury’s, who made the Griffin club in Dulwich Village available to King’s in return) and a large cash sum, thus making it possible to move from Portugal Street to the present site. Over his life he donated over £200,000 to King’s as well as his time, energy and business experience. His wife, Lady Hambleden, was involved in fundraising, collecting nearly £2,000 for ‘patient comforts’ in 1918. The third Lord Hambleden (1903-1948) continued the work of his father and grandfather and was Chairman from 1936 until the year of his death. He was solicitous of staff wellbeing, arranging concerts during the Blitz when staff had to stay within the hospital and whenever an employee of WH Smiths was a patient he visited them, bringing, of course, books and magazines.
Harris Birthright Centre
Philip Charles Harris, Baron Harris of Peckham (1942-) is a successful businessman, entrepreneur and a highly generous benefactor of education; he was one of the first philanthropists to set up academies and free schools and now chairs 36 within the Harris Federation. With the charity Birthright he set up the centre for foetal medicine at King’s in 1984 and it is now a leading clinical unit and research centre.
Hasker Ward Block
Miss Marianne Frances Hasker (1819-1903), a vicar’s daughter, lived with her cook, parlourmaid, housemaid and kitchenmaid in Hastings. She donated large sums of money to educational institutions and hospitals. She left King’s £20,000 to name a ward block after her.
Howard Ward
Edward (Ted) Howard (1936- ) trained at King’s, qualifying in 1960. He also taught and practised here, becoming a consultant surgeon in 1973. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to train in paediatric surgery in the USA before returning to King’s as both an adult and paediatric surgeon. He played a key role in the development of liver surgery including paediatric liver transplants, earning the hospital worldwide recognition. He retired in 1998 and in 2014 had a ward named after him as part of the centenary celebrations.
Jack Steinberg Critical Care Unit
Jack Steinberg (1913-1991) was a successful businessman and trustee of the King's Appeal and a chairman of King's Medical Research Trust.
James Black Centre
Sir James Whyte Black, OM (1924-2010) won a scholarship at the age of 15 to study medicine at St Andrews University and his later stellar contributions to medicine stemmed from his proficiency as both a physician and a scientist. He was appointed professor of pharmacology at King’s in 1984, having arrived with funding for staff and equipment from Wellcome in Beckenham. He established his unit in buildings owned by King’s College on Half Moon Lane (now the Judith Kerr Free School). In 1988 he won the Nobel prize for the development of the first beta-blockers for heart conditions and anti-ulcer drugs. They became the best-selling drugs in the world. He prized his time at King’s as ‘intellectually the most productive of my life…I feel I have found my niche at last’.
Jennie Lee House
Jennie Lee (1904-1988) was an MP and played a major role in the founding of the Open University. She was married to Aneurin Bevan who helped create the NHS.
Katherine Monk Ward
Katherine Henrietta Monk (1855-1915) started nursing in 1874 before joining King’s in 1883. Following the retirement of the St John’s sisterhood she organised the changeover to a secular nursing service. She was involved in the training and management of nurses and kept meticulous, if sometimes subjective records on her nurses (‘rather loud’, ‘un-nurselike’) including analysis of their managerial skills. She was Sister-Matron for 21 years and involved in the move to South London where she secured vast improvements in nursing accommodation. She vetoed a proposed swimming pool for nurses though, because she wanted them to take a full part in the local community by using local facilities.
Kinnier Wilson Ward
Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson (1874-1937) was born in the US but brought up in Scotland and trained in Edinburgh and Paris. During WW1 King’s was requisitioned as a military hospital and with the Maudsley became a joint centre of neurology for wounded soldiers. In 1919 Kinnier Wilson became King’s junior neurologist, the first such post in the UK. He was the first to describe Wilson’s disease, a genetic disorder where copper accumulates in tissue causing neurological symptoms. He wrote the standard textbook on neurology and became King's first professor of neurology. In 1924 he made one of the first known films of patients with movement disorders, including Wilson’s disease (available on YouTube). The film is of high quality for the period and it is possible that Charlie Chaplin helped with its recording as they were friends; Kinnier Wilson had stayed with Chaplin in California earlier that year. It is believed that they got to know one another when Chaplin’s mother was one of Kinnier Wilson’s patients and it has been suggested that Chaplin based the walk of his tramp on Kinnier Wilson’s patients.
Leighton Ward
Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) was an English classical painter and sculptor, the son of a physician. He was the bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage ended with his death.
Lion Ward
Named after the film The Lion King, it specialises in neurosurgery.
Lister Ward
Lister School of Medicine and Dentistry
Joseph Lister, OM (1827-1912) was professor of clinical surgery at King's from 1877 to 1893 and did much to extend its fame. An inspirational surgeon, he pioneered the idea of sterile surgery to reduce infections; before the use of antiseptics a common post-operative report was ‘operation successful, patient died’. Lister’s principle that bacteria must never be allowed to infect an operation wound became the basis of modern surgery. While at King’s he also pioneered a method of repairing broken kneecaps using metal wire; before this innovation many surgeons had advised amputation for broken knees. He also introduced radical mastectomies for breast cancer. He left £65,000, the bulk of his fortune, to London medical institutions, including £10,000 to King’s.
Reverend John Lonsdale (1788-1867) was the third principal of King’s College, London, from 1839 to 1843 and helped to found the hospital. He later became bishop of Lichfield but remained involved with King’s all his life.
Mapother House
Edward Mapother. Source: US National Library of MedicinDuring WW1 Edward Mapother (1881-1940) ran a centre for the treatment of neurological conditions in soldiers. After the war he was the first medical superintendent at the Maudsley and then physician to the department of psychological medicine at King’s, where he helped create the Institute of Psychiatry, the first postgraduate school for psychiatry. He was an influential figure in clinical and academic psychiatry, though his ‘scathing criticisms’ and ‘caustic Irish wit’ made him a formidable figure to students on the wards at King’s. He was progressive about psychiatric care and thought the responsibility of a psychiatric unit was ‘to encourage an unprejudiced trial of every form of treatment offering a reasonable prospect of benefit rather than harm’. With Aubrey Lewis he made King’s a refuge for psychiatry scholars escaping from Nazi Germany. He died aged 59 of asthma and left a donation of £10,000 to fund two scholarships. His ashes were scattered in the grounds of the Maudsley.
Markos J Lyras Unit
Markos J Lyras (1906-1981) was a shipping magnate. His family charity donated £300,000 towards the Variety Club Children’s Hospital in the early 1980s.
Marjory Warren Ward
Marjory Winsome Warren, CBE, (1896-1960) was the eldest of five girls and trained at the Royal London Hospital, qualifying in 1923. She fought sexism in her career, being told openly by one boss ‘I in no way approved of your appointment’. She pioneered specialist healthcare for elderly patients and patients with dementia and was known as the mother of British geriatric medicine. Initially a general surgeon, she became interested in geriatrics when she was given the task of assessing the inmates of a workhouse, prior to its transfer into Isleworth Infirmary in 1935. She described the wards of the workhouse as ‘ill-assorted dumps…devoid of any signs of comfort’. Having moved the pregnant women and nursing mothers into the maternity ward, she then put together a team of nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and social workers and was able to rehabilitate over a third of the remaining so-called ‘incurable’ inmates.
Mary Ray Ward
Mary Elizabeth Ann Ray (1864-1933) trained at King’s under Katherine Monk and spent the majority of her career here. She was the first Sister-Matron after the hospital’s move to Denmark Hill and was an early patron of the Nurses' League which she had been about to form when WW1 broke out. It was said that this quiet Scots woman was ‘eminently just in her dealings with her fellow-men, whether equals or subordinates’.
Matthew Whiting Ward
Matthew Whiting (1818-1901) was a 19th century merchant, with business interests in sugar refining and insurance. He was a friend of a nursing sister, Clara Sibbald Peddie. In 1884 she told him of the hospital’s financial difficulties and he agreed to guarantee the hospital's overdraft as and when required (which was often). In 1901 he left the bulk of his estate, £120,000, to the twelve London hospitals, £10,000 each.
Mountbatten Ward
Mountbatten Blood Research Laboratory
Opened in 1985 by the Princess Royal and named for Louis Mountbatten (1854-1921), 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
Murray Falconer Ward
Murray Alexander Falconer (1910-1977) was a distinguished neurosurgeon. Born in New Zealand he trained there and in the US before coming to the UK; this geographical range gave him access to a wide network of neurosurgeons from which King’s benefitted greatly. He set up a joint neurosurgical unit at Guy’s and the Maudsley in 1949 that was joined by King’s in 1963. He pioneered the surgical treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy.
Nightingale Birth Centre
Nightingale School of Nursing
It is believed that in 1854 Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) accepted the post of head of nursing at King’s only to travel to the Crimea instead. In 1855 national fundraising to buy Miss Nightingale a gift to recognise her work in the Crimea was so successful that it raised £50,000, enough for her to start a school of nursing. She chose King’s, but the incumbent nursing corps, St John’s House, required all nurses to be communicants of the Church of England. Miss Nightingale was unhappy with this stipulation so her school was set up at St Thomas’s instead. However, there was much cross-fertilisation between the two hospitals and in 1919 they merged to be known as the Nightingale School of Nursing. The fund also equipped the first midwife training ward at King’s, called the Nightingale ward. It lost this name in 1868 but subsequently the Nightingale Birth Centre was named in its memory. See also Pantia Ralli ward.
I recently researched the history of my early Victorian house. Local maps from that era are fascinating. So was a report that, on the night of the 1841 Census, the number of residents in Dulwich was augmented (possibly doubled) by 100 hay-wains, assisting with the harvest. This fact was borne out by a writer in 1867, stating that: ". Dwellers in Thames-side houses, near St. Paul's, sometimes assert that from their house-tops they have perceptibly inhaled the agreeable odour of Dulwich hay-crops…".
I tried to picture Dulwich Village in the mid-1860s. How would it differ from today? Travel back in time with me, just for a moment. You can be Scrooge to my Ghost of Dulwich Past. (Charles Dickens' character, Mr. Pickwick, retires to Dulwich - "one of the most pleasant spots near London" - so I don't think he would object to this liberty. I think he'd allow me some "poetic licence".)
From North Dulwich railway station…
Let's walk, together, on an imaginary route through the Village a century and a half ago, in 1866. On a bright, summer morning, with sunlight glinting over the trees on our left, let's start at North Dulwich railway station (built by Charles Barry, Jr. in 1866) and walk to Dulwich Picture Gallery. We will be accompanied by birdsong and the rustle of leaves underfoot, for our walk to the Village in the mid-19th century is, essentially, along a tree-lined lane.
As we walk towards the Village, we will, of course, see houses - but, in 1866, they are few. The splendid Georgian houses on the corner, "Lyndenhurst" and, lower down, "Pond House" will be standing (where the traffic lights are now, at the junction of Red Post Hill and East Dulwich Grove). A large house named "The White House" stood on the corner of what is now Village Way. Further ahead, as we walk along, we will see a house called "Warrigul"' on the right hand side of the Village and "Fairfield", on the left (though an earlier incarnation of the present house). There is also a large house, with extensive grounds, called "Lake House" (next to a lake). Later, that house will be demolished; the lake filled in. The "Lake Building" of Dulwich infant school now stands in its place.
However, everything else is missing. No houses to our right, along Village Way. Nor to our left, along East Dulwich Grove. None straight ahead, as we walk along what is now called Dulwich Village, other than those already mentioned.
No other houses, in fact, until we approach the corner. Let's pause and look around. To our immediate left, we will find the (then) recently-created Elms Road (which now forms part of Gilkes Crescent), curving round. It will contain a few recently-built Victorian houses - amongst them, "Rydal Cottage" and "Grasmere Cottage", built in 1863 (see Spring 2015 edition). Soon (very soon - over the next year or so, in fact) the distinctive Victorian buildings where you now find the parade of shops (such as Green's Art and Toy Shop ) will start to appear, but, in 1866, they are not yet formed. To our immediate right? The "Francis Building" for Dulwich Infant School, built in 1864, and the neighbouring Dulwich Hamlet School, which records indicate was built for James Allen’s Girls’ School in 1866. Stretching behind them, into the distance, as we look to our left and right, are just fields and countryside.
The rest of the Village is similarly sparse in the 1860s. At the crossroads, right on the corner of what is now Calton Avenue, a forge (or "smithy") will be there (where "Harold George" and "Au Ciel" now sit) and, further round, the charming "Ash Cottage" will be on our left. We will also find the small graveyard, consecrated in 1616, straight ahead. But, again, very little else. The village "stocks" and "cage" and a cattle "pound" would once have stood there, too, on the edge of the Village, opposite the burial-ground. However, I understand that they would already have been re-located elsewhere by the mid-1860s.
What about the roads which now "fan out" from the crossroads? Turney Road? Empty. Looking up what is now Calton Avenue? No other houses or shops. Woodwarde Road? Nothing there, either. Court Lane? Merely a lane, with a farm called "Court Lane Farm".
From the Calton Avenue crossroads, continuing into the Village and towards Dulwich Picture Gallery, we encounter a few, beautiful Georgian houses on the corner, plus some (rather more imposing) Georgian houses further along, plus a few shops, a terrace of smaller houses in Boxall Road (then called Boxall or Boxhill Row, depending on the map). There are also the (then separate) hostelries of "The Crown" and "The Greyhound", which, reputedly our mutual friend, Charles Dickens, used to frequent. However, the houses which now line the rest of Dulwich Village are yet to be built and there's no sign yet of any of Aysgarth, Pickwick or Burbage Roads.
To Dulwich Picture Gallery
As we approach the end of our stroll towards the Picture Gallery (built by Sir John Soane in 1811-14), we find some characterful structures: the tiny and distinctive white Grammar School building is there, having been built in 1841 (this time, by Charles Barry, Sr) and the striking Almshouses, adjoining Christ's Chapel, next to the Gallery, also exist.
As we stand at the Gallery, ahead, and slightly to our right, we might just be able to see "Belair" in the distance, another very grand dwelling, dating from the 1780s. Now a restaurant and wedding venue, during the era of our Dickensian walk, it houses a family with 10 children - and even more servants. Further away, the new building for Dulwich College (designed by Charles Barry, Jr) will be under construction, but will not yet be complete in 1866.
Moreover, in 1866 there is no Dulwich Park. It is still an area known as "the Five Fields", surrounded by trees. To our left, across the land which will form Dulwich Park - in what is now known as East Dulwich - the story is largely same. On an 1868 map, East Dulwich is, similarly, bereft of housing. It comprises fields, a few large houses and a market garden.
After 1866, more buildings will gradually start to appear in Dulwich Village. Development will be very slow, however - despite the arrival of the railway. In fact, little changes over the next decade or so. By 1881, for example, there will only be a few extra houses on the outskirts, both in and opposite Elms Road - that is, some elegant Victorian houses in Elms Road (of which, two pairs still remain standing today) and the pretty cottages at the bottom of Calton Avenue, which will appear in the late 1870s. Even some 15 years hence, Dulwich Village will be largely unchanged from our imaginary Dickensian walk.
Try to picture it next time you visit Dulwich Village, Picture Gallery or Park!
Dulwich Picture Gallery will present the first major retrospective of work by Winifred Knights (1899-1947), an award-winning Slade School artist and the first British woman to win the Prix de Rome. The exhibition will establish Knights as one of the most original women artists of the first half of the 20th century, bringing together her most ambitious works and preparatory studies for the first time since they were created, including the apocalyptic The Deluge, 1920, which attracted critical acclaim as ‘the work of a genius’.
Knights’ admiration for the Italian Quattrocento was the inspiration for a highly distinctive and painstakingly executed body of work. The smooth surface, contemplative mood and harmoniously restricted palette of her paintings consciously recall early Renaissance frescoes, adapted to everyday subjects from her own time. Knights’ works are deeply autobiographical: presenting herself as the central protagonist and selecting models from her inner circle, she consistently re-wrote and re-interpreted female figures of fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to create documents of her own lived experiences.
Arranged chronologically Winifred Knights (8 June - 18 September) will highlight the key periods in the artist’s career, beginning with the work she produced at the Slade School before charting her stylistic developments at the British School at Rome. The exhibition will also explore significant themes that run throughout Knights’ oeuvre including women’s independence, modernity and her experiences of wartime England. Over 70 preparatory studies will provide a true insight into Knights’ working process, displayed alongside her large-scale paintings to reveal an artist of supreme skill with meticulous attention to detail.
Sacha Llewellyn, curator of the exhibition, comments:
“Although never part of the modernist avant-garde, Knights engaged with modern-life subjects, breathing new life into figurative and narrative painting to produce an art that was inventive and technically outstanding. She explored form and colour to create a mood of calmness and reflection that impacts directly on our senses. Like so many women artists, heralded and appreciated in their own day, she has disappeared into near oblivion. This exhibition, in bringing together a lifetime of work, will create an irrefutable visual argument that she was one of the most talented and striking artists of her generation.”
Knights attended the Slade School from 1915-16 and 1918-20, four years that would prove definitive in terms of her artistic development. Under the rigorous tuition of Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, she learnt the importance of meticulous compositional discipline which included the use of scale drawings, full-size sketches and life studies, a large selection of which will be exhibited to highlight her early development as an artist and offer a fascinating account of art education at the Slade during this time.
Early works reflect Knights’ growing awareness of women’s rights, due in part to her close relationship with her aunt Millicent Murby who is sensitively portrayed in the pencil drawing Portrait of Millicent Murby, 1917. A prominent campaigner for women’s emancipation and the right for married women to work, Murby’s writings had a profound influence on Knights’ early compositional work. The seminal work, The Potato Harvest, 1918, is the first of Knights’ compositions to portray the harmonious interaction of male and female workers. Leaving the Munitions Works, 1919, records female munitions workers where, albeit momentarily, progress in the economic emancipation of women was evident. A Scene in a Village Street, with Mill-hands Conversing, 1919, shows a female trade unionist arguing for better conditions for women’s labour at Roydon Mill, Essex.
In 1920 Knights became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School at Rome with one of the most enduring images in the history of the competition, The Deluge, 1920. Chosen on the insistence of John Singer Sargent, Knights’ painting was seen to possess ‘a rare command of technique in hue, figure and composition, and a meticulous care in detail’.
This epic work will be displayed alongside the numerous studies Knights made in preparation including Compositional Study for the Deluge, 1920, which shows the initial ideas for the painting. The final composition brings together 21 figures who clamber towards and up a mountain, soon to be submerged by the flood. Among the present-day men and women in the scene, Knights appears as the central figure. While Knights avoided making any overt reference to the war, this painting is imbued with its presence. The disposition of the fleeing figures is likely to have drawn upon her first-hand experience of the zeppelin raids over Streatham and the sense of panic in the painting may have reflected this traumatic experience. The picture shows the influence of the war paintings of a previous generation of Slade students including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and C. R. W. Nevinson.
The impact of the five years Knights spent in Italy was the strongest unifying force in her work, fuelling her imagination in works such as Italian Landscape, 1921 and View to the East from the British School at Rome, 1921. She saw Italy as a living landscape that revitalised her creative spirit and as a result she produced some of the most evocative pictures to come out of the British School at Rome: The Marriage at Cana, 1923, Edge of Abruzzi; boat with three people on a lake, 1924-30, and The Santissima Trinita, 1924-30, all of which bridged Renaissance techniques with modernism to create the highly individual language that was her own. In The Marriage at Cana, Knights appears several times as one of the wedding guests, as does her future husband, Thomas Monnington. The meticulous planning of every scene is recorded in a large number of preparatory studies which will be on display including Study of Gigi il Moro, three- quarter rear view reclining, for The Marriage at Cana, 1922, a renowned model from the village of Anticoli Corrado.
Although she had previously outshone her male contemporaries at the Slade and the British School at Rome, when Knights returned to England in 1926 she struggled with the conventional chauvinism that then dominated the art world. In 1928 she was awarded a prestigious commission to design an altarpiece for the St. Martin’s chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, on which she worked for five years. The finished piece, Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours, 1928-33, is profoundly autobiographical, expressing Knights' anguish upon giving birth to a stillborn son in January 1928. Among the onlookers are Knights’ mother Mabel and Knights, with Monnington standing alongside. The fixed and melancholic gaze of the three figures records their shared sense of loss.
When World War II broke out, Knights became distraught and her only concern was for the safety of her son. This brought her already intermittent work to a standstill. She only began working again in 1946, a few months before she died of a brain tumour at the age of 48.
The exhibition is guest curated by Sacha Llewellyn, a freelance writer and curator, and Director at Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, specialising in figurative art between the wars.
‘Winifred Knights (1899-1947)’ is part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Modern British series, a programme of exhibitions devoted to critically neglected Modern British artists.
Winifred Margaret Knights was born in Streatham, London in 1899. From 1912 - she attended James Allen’s Girls School in Dulwich where she showed artistic talent. From October 1915 she studied at the Slade School of Art where she became a highly successful and favoured student of Henry Tonks. In 1919 she jointly won the Slade Summer Composition Competition with A Scene in a Village Street with Millhands Conversing (UCL Art Museum, University College London). In 1920, she became the first woman in England to win the prestigious Scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School at Rome. Her prize-winning entry The Deluge (Tate, London) received wide-spread critical acclaim (“the work of a genius”, Daily Graphic, 8/2/21). She remained in Italy until December 1925, marrying fellow Rome Scholar Thomas Monnington in April 1924. Her first major work in Rome, The Marriage at Cana (The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) was completed in 1923. Studies survive for a number of other compositions (Paradise, Jairus’s Daughter, Bathsheba) but it is unclear whether final versions of these paintings were ever completed. In 1924, Knights started work on Santissima Trinita (Private Collection) which was completed in 1930. In 1928 Knights received a commission to paint an altarpiece for the Milner Memorial Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral which she completed in 1933. She died at the age of 48 in 1947. The Flight into Egypt, a major commission for the Earl of Crawford, on which she had been working for 5 years, remained unconcluded at her death.
by Brunton, Marsh, McInnes and Walters.
Reviewed by Kenneth Wolfe
This superb history of the public houses in these two south London locations has come at the just the right moment: the ‘Crown and Greyhound’ in Dulwich Village remains a building site while the future of the Half Moon in Herne Hill has only recently been confirmed. It betokens a hope that before the Armageddon, they will both be open again in all their antique splendour. Meanwhile, this delightfully informative and illustrated recollection - assembled and written with care for detail and perspective - will whet the anticipation. Four authors have diligently researched the history of the public houses in these two London boroughs and unearthed both some splendid illustrations and remarkable facts about the areas, the people and the traditions focused in the architecture and decoration that has characterised these crucially significant meeting places over the centuries but particularly the nineteenth. As Bernard Nurse makes clear in his brief window into the development of social attitudes towards alehouses, the ‘public house’ was welcomed especially as the industrial revolution gathered pace in Victorian London and working men needed fellowship, conviviality and refreshment against the pressure and exhaustion of the daily working grind.
With the modernisation of transport and the railways, Dulwich and Herne Hill were increasingly populated and thus the need for meeting places - depending upon the class of people expected to be living there - attracted entrepreneurial initiatives that would invest in meeting venues for more or less each class of resident. As Nurse makes clear, initiatives began almost back in the dark ages of the thirteenth century for the very tiny population that was to grow and grow and which soon needed a communal meeting space that provided an alternative to the church. Traditions about behaviour in public were, of course, influenced and even regulated by the local leadership with powers to control consumption of alcohol and a good deal more where necessary!
This neat and modest document betokens a huge endeavour in the investigating of local archives and especially illustrations and photographs. It is a window into social change and the arguably cavalier attitude by planners, local architects and others who might have taken more care to protect the architectural traditions and styles that so many public houses embody but which were abused in the service of commerce and profit as the areas expanded. The cartoons and photographs, from yesteryear and at present, show so poignantly how crucially important these meeting places had become by the mid-eighteenth century. Some forty public houses are explored - alas, some no more and others doing well. Helpfully, there is a map showing the locations of each perhaps giving the impression that this corner of South East London indulged - or better - enjoyed prolific consumption of alcohol providing an enviable return for the landlords who in so many cases, attractively enhanced their premises.
These few pages are packed with intricate detail about the public houses and the people that frequented them; and those who overdid it and found themselves in trouble. We learn for example that beer consumption doubled between the 1850’s and 1870’s of course, resulting from increased efficiency in production, transport and distribution. Pubs reflected social mores, so dress codes were rigorously maintained even if they weren’t written down. These took their cue from the smarter London Clubs and their very well-established rules both written and assumed. Class and income were obvious indices to the development of styles of meeting places, in a similar fashion to the development of non-conformist church building; clientele and class were two sides of the same coin. This research is a tribute to the authors’ persistence and commitment in winkling out cartoons, illustrations and photographs of sites then and now so eliciting consternation that alterations and demolition were so aesthetically pitiless; tragedy in some cases when buildings were abused or demolished. WW2 took its toll as did the need for more housing; pubs in the wrong places were pulled down taking their secrets with them. But not all, as the Shakespeare Road ‘Criterion’ shows: demolished in 1936, it housed one of the most notorious cases of the century: its landlord tried to murder his barmaid and was eventually given ten years. It all makes riveting reading!
Altogether a fascinating journey through time and space. The authors have brilliantly amassed just over one hundred illustrations for their one hundred and twenty-eight pages. It is social history in great style: precise details with matching, mostly period photographs that together bring their text alive. Readers will be fascinated by what they might recognise in their neck of the woods, as present or sadly no longer. In Dulwich, the ‘Crown’ later united with the ‘Greyhound’ made sure that the right patrons would be supporting their ‘Select’ Garden Party in July 1884 at their ‘Sylvan Retreat’ no less! Thus we hope that when it opens after restoration, they will come from far and wide to retreat in a due Sylvan style; albeit the forest has somewhat retreated but the population expanded. The beer now arrives in aluminum rather than wood.
‘The Pubs of Dulwich and Herne Hill’ by Brunton, Marsh, McInnes and Walters. Published by The Dulwich & Herne Hill Societies, 2016. pp.128: 30 x Colour + 70 b/w prints. £9.50 (plus p&p). Online ordering: hernehillsociety.org.uk
The houses in Delawyk Crescent were built the early 1960s by Camberwell Council (now part of Southwark). Many of the houses are now privately owned through ‘right to buy’ legislation and, in July 2004, following concern over the management of the estate by the Council's Neighbourhood Housing Office, the Delawyk Residents Management Organisation Limited (DRMO) was set up to take over the role. It remains in control today.
The story starts in 1958 when Camberwell, who had been very active in building social housing post WW2, realised that it could never catch up with the growing demand in the area and started to panic over the likely negative impact of the aptly titled Requisition (Amendment) Act 1955 which gave Local Authorities until 1960 to hand back to their rightful owners those properties that had been requisitioned in WW2. In Camberwell a substantial number of these houses were still occupied by council tenants and there was nowhere else to house them.
During that summer the Council lobbied the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and suggested that it persuade the Dulwich Estate to lease it additional sites where they could build new council homes. Following a meeting in December the Estate agreed to look for suitable properties and Nos 52-60 Half Moon Lane was one of several options to be considered. The old 1870s houses were coming to the end of their leases, and all had long gardens going back to the railway line, most of which the mainly elderly occupants did not use - and several of the lessees had already indicated that they would be happy for the Estate to take the bottom part of these gardens for development.
After some discussion on money, the Estate agreed to lease Nos 52, 56, 58 and 60 Half Moon Lane to the Council for 200 years, but not at this stage, No 54, as it was in better condition, and the lessee was not, at that point, particularly keen to leave. The legal niceties were completed in the late summer of 1960. These permitted the redevelopment of the area for residential purposes only, in line with plans, elevations and sections to be approved by the Estate, and the Council was also required to erect an unclimbable fence on all the boundaries except that along the road.
Camberwell Council’s Chief Architect, F O Hayes, had insufficient staff to handle the project and he brought in a small Essex based practice, Jan Farber & Bartholomew, to design and manage the scheme. The initial layout was much as you see it today. It was sent to the Estate for comment in May 1962 and Russell Vernon, the Estate Architect, was very complimentary. His report described the perimeter service road circling the 5.9 acre site to serve the garages and parking spaces, and the consequent freeing up of the centre of the site from cars - so that the new houses had to be reached by footpaths. There were 80 three-bed roomed houses (two stories high) and 27 one-bedroomed bungalows. There was also provision for a laundry room (now the estate office). It was quite a dense scheme, at 70 persons to the acre, but he thought that the layout was ingenious and ‘refreshing’ and recommended approval, subject to the inclusion of No 54 - the purchase of this final part of the site was resolved early in 1966 when most of the rest of the estate was already finished.
In March 1963 Russell Vernon reported that he had recently driven past the site and noticed that construction had started. He contacted the Borough Architect and reminded him that he had not seen any details or working drawings. Someone had clearly forgotten the Estate’s processes and two sets of drawings were sent over very quickly. Unfortunately the half inch scale drawings provided did not show sufficient detail and he was initially concerned that the detail proposals fell far short of his initial hopes.
A month later, following a meeting with the Borough Architect, he was more positive, and was happy to report that he had seen a model and a coloured site plan - which showed the scheme more clearly. He had also been taken to look at some ongoing Council development sites which, he said, had given him a fair appreciation of what the houses would be like. He described them as being of simple design, brick-built (with brownish-red facing bricks), and flat roofs covered with mineral roofing felt (the pitched roofs date from the late 1980s). He also commended the landscaping and planting around the paved courtyards. The majority of the development was completed through 1965 but it was not until May 1966 that work started on the former site of No 54, the last 8 houses being finished early in 1967.
But what about the earlier houses on the site? When were they built and who lived in them? Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the area had been grazing land, and rather wet grazing land at that, as the River Effra and the Langbourne stream ran through part of it. The ground was improved after 1860, when the river was culverted, but any development potential was on hold while the railway embankment and viaduct were completed.
The first house, No 56, was built in 1871 for a Robert Peck, but he did not stay long. The 1881 census recorded the owner as Edward Yates, builder. At the same time No 52 was occupied by John Hewitt, civil engineer, and No 54 (built 1874), by Charles Miller, a wholesale gold jeweller. Samuel Fisher, paper manufacturer, lived at No 58 while No 60, set back behind the other houses, was local dairyman, John Hammond, operating the Half Moon Dairy Farm. His cows grazed on the fields beyond the railway embankment, where the velodrome is today.
The description of Edward Yates (1838-1907) as a builder is a massive understatement. In fact he was one of the most successful speculative house builders in south London. Though he never worked on the Dulwich Estate he built streets of houses in Kensington and later in Walworth and Camberwell. His reputation is known today because of the comprehensive business records he left after he died - showing that his companies constructed over 2500 units and his will gave his net worth as nearly £1m (in Edwardian money).
The Lambeth Local Studies Library has the 1883 auction particulars for the sale of No 52, ‘Howlettes’, the largest house in this part of Half Moon Lane. They say “Recently erected for his own occupation by the owner, a London architect of repute, in a modified form of Modern Queen Anne style of Architecture.” and goes on to enthuse over “its finely timbered and beautiful grounds with a vinery, greenhouse and forcing pits etc”. James P Thol was the purchaser, a colonial merchant, and the head of the British branch of a Hamburg based firm that imported cocoa from the Gold Coast.
The 1891 census showed that the Thol’s next door neighbour at No 54, the ‘Hawthornes’, was Mr Philip W Richardson, ship owner and insurance broker. In fact the two families were related as James P Thol was P W Richardson’s uncle - his sister Marian Henrietta had married Philip Richardson’s father, John W Richardson, in 1864.
The description of P W Richardson as a ship owner and insurance broker, while factually correct, does not really do the man justice. He was in fact Philip Wigham Richardson, son of the founder of the Tyne shipbuilder Wigham & Sons and it was he who was instrumental in merging his father’s firm with the C S Swan and Hunter yard to form Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson - with the specific intention of tendering to build the largest ship yet built in England in 1900, the Mauretania. Between 1906 and 1912, no other company in the world could match it in terms of the tonnage of ships built. In 1907, for example, 15% of the world's shipping, in tonnage terms, was built by this shipyard alone.
Richardson was elected MP for Chertsey at a by-election in March 1922, and held the seat until he retired from the House of Commons at the 1931 general election. In 1929 he was created Baron Richardson of Weybridge in the County of Surrey. He died in November 1953, aged 88.