The Dulwich Society Journal for Summer 2018.
Lorraine Wilson was the son of Lorraine and Margaret Wilson, both Scots.. His father had been the owner of the Port Eglington Spinning Company, the oldest and largest carpet mill in Glasgow before moving to Manchester where Lorraine was born in 1865. After his father’s death in 1876 the family moved to Dulwich, where his mother had relatives. They moved in to Lynton Lodge in Alleyn Road where they had a cook and a housemaid and which had just been refurbished following a fire which gutted the house. In 1879 Lorraine went to Dulwich College with his cousins Harold and Reginald Jellicorse. He enjoyed his time at school, winning prizes for his German and French and doing well in maths. He left Dulwich College in 1883 and studied under a private tutor in Lausanne for a year before returning to Dulwich and becoming a chartered accountant.
While at Dulwich College he was not involved in any team sports but, like many Victorians, his Christian faith and social conscience led him to see games as a force for good, especially for less privileged young people. He became an active supporter (and later trustee) of the Dulwich College Mission in Walworth, a highly deprived area which had been founded by A H Gilkes, Master of the College during Wilson’s time at the school. At first it mainly focussed on boxing, gymnastics, cricket and football, so chiming with Wilson’s own aims to help young people through sport. Later it branched out into performing arts and other leisure activities and still exists today as the Hollington Club.
Wilson was very much involved in Dulwich sporting affairs and gave his hobby as ‘working for the boys of Dulwich Hamlet’. He helped set up a cricket team and gymnastics classes at Dulwich Hamlet School and regularly used the St Barnabas parish magazine to appeal for sports equipment and clothing. In 1893 he founded Dulwich Hamlet Football Club. There are two stories as to how this came about. In one, he was treasurer of the Dulwich Hamlet School old boys’ cricket club when he was approached by James Ross Williamson and Teddy Booker, two young cricketers, who asked him to start a football team. They even had their inaugural subs ready: one shilling and eightpence.
In the other version, given in an interview to the Sporting Life in 1911, Wilson confesses to having been a rugby man all his life and knowing nothing about the ‘dribbling code’ as he called association football.. In the absence of any rugby Wilson says he was ‘driven to the Association code’ and set up a football team, learning on the job and broadening his own interests at the same time. In the interview Wilson articulates his belief that sport should be educational as well as physically beneficial and talks of asking his players for ‘strict adherence to truth’ and ‘the cultivation of high ideals’. He came to believe that football provided the best way of instilling these ideals as he said the London FA was ‘democratic’ and catered for all classes of player ‘in every possible way’.
However it started, Wilson agreed to take on the job of setting up Dulwich Hamlet Football Club and also became its treasurer, in which post he often had recourse to his own funds to keep the newly-founded club afloat. Such was his inclusive spirit that not only old boys but current pupils and Dulwich College boys who played for the club and after three seasons the club was opened to anyone who wanted to play. He gave his footballers a motto “Stick to your club”. As well as being founder and treasurer, he and George Wheeler, assistant head of Dulwich Hamlet School, virtually ran the club in its early years.
After Wheeler’s death in 1921 Wilson proudly became president of the club too. On top of this he was a founder of the Southern Suburban Football League, a member of the Surrey FA and treasurer of the London FA for 25 years where he started midweek competitions for shop assistants and others unable to play on Saturdays. Right from the start he was valued, praised in the national press for his ‘whole-souled’ work, his ‘temperate and thoughtful’ contributions and his ‘eminently practical’ suggestions. It is unclear when he got his nickname of ‘Pa’ but from 1898 the paternal concern he took in his players was obvious even to outsiders. The South London Press reported that ‘he must have been a proud man to witness the success of his boys, as he takes an almost fatherly interest in their weekly triumphs’. As Wilson was also treasurer of the Working Men’s Reading Room housed in the Old Grammar School on the corner of Burbage Road and Gallery Road he arranged for the ‘bemudded footballers’ to use it as a changing room in the early years since their Woodwarde Road pitch (near the junction with Calton Avenue) had no facilities.. After a couple of years they moved to a pitch in Sunray Avenue, described as “part swamp, part jungle” and also played for a season at what is now Dulwich Sports Club, alongside the viaduct on Giant Arches Road, off Burbage Road, before settling in their current incarnation on Champion Hill in 1902
By 1907 they had done their founder proud by reaching the Isthmian League where they are still play and are now the longest serving member. Wilson used the club’s success to invest in facilities on Champion Hill for both players and spectators. No doubt his financial acumen as an accountant stood the club in good stead during these times, enabling them to match their success on the pitch with a well-appointed club off the pitch. During World War One he edited the Pink & Blue, a quarterly magazine sent to the 60 or so club members on active service, 22 of whom gave their lives for their country - Pa Wilson placed a plaque in their memory above the players’ tunnel. In 1915 he told the Daily Express that the club was proud to say it had no players left to form a team but that its ground was available for military and naval personnel: ‘No charge whatever will be made for ground and dressing rooms and the ball will also be provided’. He also used the club facilities to entertain troops and those waiting to be called up. After the war the club raised funds to sponsor a hospital bed in Lonsdale Ward at Kings College Hospital.
Wilson was a member the congregation of Christ’s Chapel where due to his position of treasurer and his deafness he was known as the ‘deaf adder’; his very loud ‘Amen’ being heard halfway through the next prayer. He was a longstanding member of the chapel committee and great friends with the College chaplain, Canon George Daniell who, Wilson said, taught him ‘the mainspring of right action’. Daniell became the first president of the football club. Lorraine Wilson was also an active public servant, serving as a Moderate (conservative) councillor for the new borough of Camberwell between 1900 and 1906. In 1906 he was appointed a school governor for Goodrich, Heber, Friern and Dulwich Hamlet schools,
Wilson never married and lived with his mother and his older sister, Annette, at Lynton Lodge in Alleyn Road until his mother’s death in 1903 and then with Annette at Birchwood in Alleyn Park. He and Annette were the only family members who seemed to stay put - the other siblings roamed the world, living in India, New Zealand and South Africa. He retired in 1922 at the age of 56 and in December 1923 he fell and was badly injured. By the following March he required the attentions of a nurse and died on 29th April 1924 at the age of 58. A Lorraine Wilson Memorial Scholarship was established at Dulwich College which now funds several places at the school.
Brian Green writes
Off the pitch today at Dulwich Hamlet FC it is a different story and Lorraine Wilson’s financial acumen could certainly be usefully employed. The great success of the club during the inter-war years continued into the !950’s but as the time passed the crowd dwindled and the stadium was in an increasingly bad shape The Sainsbury supermarket scheme of 1990 drawn up by the freeholders Kings College, London in partnership with Southwark Council and Sainsbury’s PLC, removed great stretches of playing fields on Dog Kennel Hill, covering it with acres of tarmac for the giant supermarket’s car park. As a carrot to placate the locals, the scheme created a new small urban park, now in a somewhat neglected condition, and built a spectacular new stadium with a three tier main stand which was leased by Kings to Dulwich Hamlet FC to replace the dilapidated one which existed and upon which footprint the actual supermarket was built. In an almost theatrical reversal of policy, Kings then acquired the lease on the Griffin Sports Ground in Dulwich Village from Sainsbury’s who had used it as a staff sports ground for many years.
The new stadium, was too extravagant for a non-league side to run, costing huge sums in business rates and maintenance and the club began to run up a large debt, something which Lorraine Wilson would certainly have avoided, It is now 2007 and Southwark Council, perhaps to forestall the ground being developed for housing schedule it as ‘Other Open Space’ thus giving it some protection. However in the following year the lease was sold by Kings to a private development company who already had a track record of taking over another South London football club with a view to redeveloping its ground. The picture then gets muddier as that company then went into administration. The lease was then purchased from the administrators in 2014 by another property development company, Hadley Property. By this time the club itself had also entered administration. Miraculously, or so it appeared to the fans, the new owners paid off the debts and outstanding rent to bring the Club out of administration and bankrolled it for the next four years, they claim, to the tune of £750,000. Incredibly, some of the supporters thought this was just being done out of philanthropy.
Hadley Property Group, latterly named Meadow Residential, briefly the saviour of Dulwich Hamlet FC always said that they intended to redevelop the ground . They submitted several schemes, the last of which envisaged building a scaled down version of the stadium on the nearby Astro-turf pitch of the club and encroaching on Greendale Playing fields then leased by Southwark Council to Dulwich Hamlet FC, and redeveloping the existing stadium for 155 dwellings. The entire scheme thus hinged on the replacement stadium being built on part of the Greendale playing fields, which are designated Metropolitan Open Land, owned by Southwark Council and which have a long history of neglect.
Growing opposition to this proposal by local people and environmentalists alike, led to formation of the Friends of Greendale. The proposed development was turned down by Southwark Council in 2017. It was further rejected on appeal in March of this year. Into the fray then stepped Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, lending Southwark Council leader, Peter John his support. The Council’s rejection was based was on the matter of MOL status of Greendale Playing Fields, The lease on Greendale Playing Fields to Dulwich Hamlet FC also ended in March 2018 and the Council declined to renew it.
In a huff, Meadow Residential promptly sent the club a letter announcing that the club no longer had the legal right to use the names Dulwich Hamlet FC, the Hamlet or DHFC which had been registered by Meadow Property nor access to the ground itself. They also erected a large hoarding around the ground thus locking out the club. The now-groundless Dulwich Hamlet, leaders in the Isthmian League appealed for help with a ground-share for the rest of the season and Tooting & Mitcham FC have obliged by allowing the Hamlet to play on their ground. In March over 1200 Hamlet supporters held a protest march to the Champion Hill ground from Goose Green at being locked out. All this must have had some effect because the banning of the supporters use of Dulwich Hamlet FC, the Hamlet or DHFC names was speedily withdrawn by Meadow Residential. The lock-out, however, remains.
To add to the brew, South London football legend, Rio Ferdinand had apparently earlier volunteered to lead a consortium to rescue the club by offering Meadow Residential £10 million for the ground in a plan to keep the stadium and build houses on the car park alone; an offer Meadow Residential turned down. It is not known if the Rio Ferdinand scheme would have council planning approval.
So what are the likely options? 1. Meadow Residential reconsiders the Rio Ferdinand offer, pockets £9million profit and walks away; 2, continues to wait for Southwark to change its mind on its planning decision while at the same time paying out considerable sums in business rates and security ; 3. Leases the ground to a supporters’ trust as well as (presumably, still attempting to claw back the £120,000 rent it says the club owes for the earlier use of the ground. 4. Anticipates that Southwark Council will compulsorily purchase the ground and awaits compensation.
And what would ‘Pa’ Wilson have proposed? In all likelihood, despite his love of Dulwich Hamlet FC he would probably have accepted that the club would have to ground-share elsewhere and as a borough councillor would probably have thought it outrageous that Council tax payers should foot the bill for a compulsory purchase of the ground, He would have been at the forefront of a campaign to put Greendale Playing Fields to good use by leasing them to the new Charter School now being built a half-mile distant at the Dulwich Hospital site. in East Dulwich Grove which will no doubt be anxious for a ground for sports.
When the public first visited the ‘Bourgeois Gallery’ Soane designed for Dulwich College in 1815 what they saw was the collection Sir Francis Bourgeois left to ‘the Master, Warden and Fellows of Dulwich College and their successors for ever’. Pictures from the great Bequest were hung - and no others - in the enfilade of five rooms. What with Margaret Desenfans’ choice pieces of furniture they might have been pacing the gallery of some great mansion; they might also have felt something of a Gothic Romantic frisson: in the adjacent Mausoleum three coffins above ground held the mortal remains of the former owners, the childless Founders. Soane’s fancy was for visitors to be conscious of magnanimous donors to the Gallery, even to be as it were in ‘communion’ with his three friends, asleep ‘in their silent tombs’.
The select, and now world-famous Dulwich Old Masters from continental Europe were of course among the 371 pictures of the Bequest. Making a geographical (indeed, temperamental) division of the collection into two groups: among the southern masterpieces one could point to the sacred names of Poussin, Watteau, Veronese, and Murillo; and among the northern to Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, and the Dutch landscape-painters. Until 1880 Dulwich College’s earlier collections, the Alleyn and Cartwright bequests, were housed in the school buildings (such as the Master’s living quarters): interesting and unique, but perhaps a touch frump once received in high society on the Gallery walls.
The Bourgeois Bequest, essentially a continental European Union of fine art, was to be joined and enriched by two benefactions of British art, featuring portraiture. In 1835 the musical family of Ozias Linley, Junior Fellow and Organist at the College, gave nine pictures of themselves, by Gainsborough, Lawrence and others. In 1911 ¬¬- surely for the centenary of the Gallery’s Foundation - Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), artist, connoisseur, dealer and benefactor of art galleries, presented 38 portraits, adding four more during the Great War. In the course of the same years he also gave minor Old Masters: two Italian, one French, and Peter Lely’s Nymphs at a Fountain. Murray gave all on condition of strict anonymity, observed until his death. The Bourgeois Gallery had been criticised originally for having so few British or contemporary paintings, when its professed purpose was to inspire and educate young artists. There was Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and a few other works by Reynolds (including the self-portrait), together with twenty-odd second-rate paintings by the Academician Bourgeois himself, and something of a Founders’ ‘facebook’ - portraits of themselves and their circle of friends, one a Gainsborough. While splendid British portraits now hang in the Gallery as a result of these two bequests, there are no early nineteenth-century British historical and genre paintings (no Wilkie); and by worse luck, not one ‘modern’ British landscape-painting (no Turner, and of Constable only the Ruisdael copy) apart from Richard Wilson’s Tivoli of 1752 - early, and Italian.
Murray was an elusive, rather secretive man, said to ‘make himself happy in the background’. His name occurs often, however, in the literature about fine art and museums after 1867. Who was the eighteen-year-old John Ruskin sent to Rome to make copies for him and for the Arundel Society, and some years later, with Ruskin in Venice - his ‘heaven-born copyist’ - was set to work on Carpaccio? Whom did William Morris take to Bruges in 1870 for a first trip abroad on his twenty-first birthday? Who painted Romantic panels for ‘art furniture’, and carried out Burne-Jones’s zodiac designs on the walls of the Green Dining Room at the V & A (now part of that café)? Who painted church glass for William Morris’s firm? Who was Rossetti’s salaried factotum, and Burne-Jones’s first studio assistant? Who was the editor Rossetti and Morris trusted with their poems? Who amassed an extraordinary collection of Pre-Raphaelite personal papers and drawings, greatly helped their biographers, and jealously guarded their reputation? How did two of the many panels that originally formed Duccio’s Maestà at Siena come to be at our National Gallery, along with many of the really important early pictures? Whom did Burne-Jones recommend for Director of the National Gallery in 1894 - though unsuccessfully? Who made the princely gift of Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia to the Fitzwilliam? Who sold over a thousand Pre-Raphaelite works on paper to Birmingham for much less than their market value? Why is Turner’s Devonport and Dockyard in the Fogg Museum at Harvard? At the Kelmscott Press, whom did Morris first approach to design and engrave on wood illustrations for The Well at the World’s End? Who designed and illustrated the only Kelmscott book not chosen by Morris, Savanarola’s Epistola de Contemptu Mundi, the autograph manuscript of which he owned himself? Who helped Morris with his illuminated manuscripts: A Book of Verse (including a miniature portrait of the author), his Aeneid and Odes of Horace? Who sold Pierpont Morgan 1,400 Old Master drawings? Who, indeed, but Charles Fairfax Murray.
The son of a linen draper at Bow, Murray used to sleep under the counter. His Times obituary said that he was ‘pugnacious’ because he had to make his own way. He was perhaps lucky to escape conventional education: sent to Sudbury to escape cholera, he studied with local painters before becoming a drawing assistant or ‘shop boy’ in Morton Peto’s engineering office at Westminster. At seventeen he sent some drawings to Ruskin, who recommended him to Burne-Jones. Murray declared that his real ‘trade’ was painting portraits and romantic scenes, but a rheumatic hand made him give up in 1903. His portraits of his close friends Morris and that quite wonderful architect, Philip Webb, are famous, as are the pencil sketches of Morris on his deathbed (one now at Kelmscott). By thirty he was one of the most erudite of connoisseurs and dealers, who would advise famous collectors and museums. At various times he worked for Agnew and Colnaghi.
Murray sounds rather unworldly. His large head (some called it noble) carried a snub nose, and stiff curly hair, above a dwarfish bandy-legged body. Not all responded to his charm and enthusiasm: Jane Morris wrote from Florence in 1880 that he was ‘more conceited than ever’ and ‘insufferably dirty’. In youth Murray knew the Dulwich Gallery well, where he sat next to his friend William Spanton, a Suffolk painter and copyist, who was making a version of the Veronese St. Jerome; together they copied at the Venetian Room in the National Gallery. Spanton, in later prosperity, lived at the Paragon at Blackheath; his daughter Margaret painted a Nude now with the Gallery (DPG 641); in 1934 she gave three late seventeenth-century portraits (609-611), a Shipwreck (613) - and also a small oil painting by Murray, her father’s friend.
Murray’s youthful The King’s Garden of c.1875 (612) pictures a hortus conclusus with three girls chilling out à la Giorgione. Essentially a literary illustration, the painting is hyper-Pre-Raphaelite: it alludes to a text, makes pastiche of medieval past, and the girls are dressed in prismatic colours. It is like a template, in composition and mood, for Kelmscott Press illustrations by Burne-Jones and others; also absurdly derivative, in both image and text. To begin with, it is plainly distilled from Burne-Jones’s gouache Green Summer of 1864. Murray is known to be illustrating a short ballad of Rossetti’s, ‘My Father’s Close’ (subtitled ‘from Old French’, but actually elaborated from the ‘Au jardin de mon père’ which Gérard de Nerval, the Symbolist, published in 1847). At so many removes from spontaneous observation, the picture retains some shred of sincerity. It is certainly a delicious male fantasy of utter female devotion, an irrecoverable dream from a patriarchal era. Murray dresses the trio of royal princesses in Poussin frocks; in the apple-orchard a symbolic fountain. Each princess in Rossetti’s poem has one verse. To the refrain of ‘Fly away, O my heart, fly away’, they declare the pleasures of their senses and the sweet morning, and dream of elsewhere and of lovers. (Oh, for a smartphone). One hears a drum; the youngest declares it is her true love off to fight:
“I keep my love for him,
So sweet:
Oh! let him lose or win,
He hath it still complete.”
Murray could identify the artists of unsigned oil paintings and drawings as no-one else in his day, though a century later at least eleven of his attributions of the painters (or portrait sitters) in his Dulwich Gift have been re-assigned. Ruskin declared in Fors Clavigera for 1877 that Murray knew ‘more in many ways of Italian painting than I do myself: every picture he buys for you is a good one’. (The best he sold Ruskin was the Verrocchio Madonna for £100, now at Edinburgh). His knowledge of Italian, German, Dutch, Flemish and German art was equally encyclopaedic. He was the sort of authority who could say right away that a portrait was definitely by Allan Ramsay, and was painted in 1797: “he used a particular blue in that year, which he discontinued later, thinking it would not last. But you see how well it stands the test of time”. He lived on well into the Arts and Crafts movement; his sympathies were deep and loyal - impressionism was a ‘post-prandial disturbance’.
Murray was restless, getting rid of collections and acquiring others. His very many illuminated manuscripts, early printed books and autograph letters were as extraordinary as the Old Master and Pre-Raphaelite drawings; and there were Tanagra figures, Chinese vases, majolica, bronzes and prints. He made benefactions, for one reason, because he did not believe in incurring death duties; determined not to draw attention to himself by being named, his generosity seems truly altruistic. The Dulwich collection of signed English portraits he was assembling over twenty years was, we learn, initially intended for the Fitzwilliam or somewhere in Cambridge, but came to us because of his friendship with Henry Yates Thompson (1838-1928), son of a banking family and owner of the liberal Pall Mall Gazette. Thompson, a Dulwich College Governor, was the Gallery Committee Chairman and effectively its director from 1908-19. He and Murray were passionately interested in illuminated manuscripts. Yates Thomson built a complete new wing onto the Gallery (now the entrance elevation) of four rooms for his anonymous friend’s Gift. Energetic, generous and notoriously rude, Thompson gave Newnham College a library, built an Art School for Harrow where he had been Head Boy, and planned another for Dulwich College; he gave the Gallery the portrait of King James I in 1898 and Canaletto’s Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day in 1915.
Murray kept his own life as discreet as he could. He was bigamous in all but law. At twenty-six he married a young beauty of seventeen from Volterra called Angelica; they had six (surviving) children, in Siena and later in Florence, where he bought a large villa and was well known in the fascinating expatriate artistic community that included many cultivated Americans. Jane Morris wrote to Rossetti saying the pair were rotten parents who let babies die: “I think it is a great charm in Murray’s eyes, this entire ignorance and total incapacity on the part of his wife, she loves him, and that is all he cares about, and they can make more babies”. Living mostly in London from 1887, he met a model, Blanche Richmond, who sat to him and with whom he had another family of six at Chiswick. Such arrangements were not uncommon among nineteenth-century artists. Murray made enough money for them all to live well and indeed in some style, the boys attending private schools and Cambridge; meanwhile he partly lived at the Grange, the large romantic former house and studio of Burne-Jones at Fulham (earlier Samuel Richardson’s house) cramming it with treasures, room after room - a splendid Poussin, an autumn landscape by Millais, a great Turner. There he said to A. C. Benson, “some people wonder how it comes about that a man like myself who started without a sixpence, should have got together so big a collection, but the fact is that I have got a natural instinct for detecting artistic quality. I recognise a particular touch and method, and don’t often make bad mistakes. And if you attend a great many sales, as I do, you get wonderful bargains”. Undoubtedly his own experience as a painter improved his eye, just as it did for other painters who were also connoisseurs such as Lely, Reynolds, Lawrence and Eastlake.
As for the Gift itself, the most popular picture is probably the voluptuous Lely, the Arcadian Nymphs at a Fountain, which he bought in France. In 1927 Spanton wrote that he found this later on in a lumber room ‘for fear it should injure the morals of the boys at the College’. One might give many of the Fairfax Murray portraits a cursory look and think they were not really first-rate, noting few famous artists - even with a Gainsborough, two Hogarths, two Lelys, and a Romney; few people will have heard of a single sitter - though there is Sir Henry Vane, by Gerard Soest: Governor of Massachusetts (1636-7), Commonwealth Parliamentarian and mystical Christian, executed in 1661, a hero of the poet Milton. No catalogue entry for this painting mentions Milton’s sonnet declaring Vane a better statesman than any Roman senator, while at the same time the ‘eldest son’ of Religion.
Murray wrote to Spanton that the collection for Dulwich was not a portrait gallery - the point was not the sitters but ‘a series of pictures by artists, whether British or not, who have painted in England’. It was important to him, as he said, that ‘most are signed’. It was recognised at the time that this was a collection acquired by someone making a ‘practical study’ of English portraiture from the Stuarts up to the foundation of the Gallery, and that Murray was ‘a serious pioneer’ in his researches. Finding signatures among so many portrait painters is obviously an important first principle for making attributions about unsigned ones. The most recent portrait was by Benjamin West, painted in 1805 (and signed, in this case); as Murray would have been well aware, West was President of the Royal Academy while important and interesting regulations for the mutual benefit of the Academy and the Gallery were agreed at the time of its Foundation and then actively prospered. West died in 1820, five years into its career.
The Gift makes special demands on the visitor well repaid by subtleties. Obvious excitements are Knapton’s genial Lucy Ebberton of the early 1740s, said to herald a new style in portraiture; the man with a febrile face (569) said at first to be the mad poet Nathaniel Lee; the early Hogarth fishing conversation piece, and the early Gainsborough Suffolk couple beneath a blasted tree, the wife holding sketch-book and porte-crayon. The latter was bought perhaps at a Christie’s sale Murray talks about where a group of such early Gainsborough portraits “fell to me all about twenty pounds apiece”. From Strawberry Hill came Charles Jervas’s Dorothy, Lady Townshend, Horace Walpole’s aunt, in Turkish costume like her friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Murray’s two Lely portraits of women in blue are pretty pot-boilers, but Lely’s A Boy as a Shepherd, also from Strawberry Hill, was rightly prized by Walpole for its “impassioned glow of sentiment, the eyes swimming with youth and tenderness”. Murray’s last gift, in 1917/18, was the wonderfully informal animated portrait of the brilliant London sculptor Roubiliac by Andrea Soldi.
A C Benson described Murray as ‘kind, generous, eminently human’, saying that ‘instead of using his adroitness to despoil the world, he gratified his generosity by enriching it, and asked for no return’.
Further sources: the excellent biography by his grandson, David B. Elliott, 2000, Charles Fairfax Murray, the Unknown Pre-Raphaelite. The Walpole Society volume for 2017, a meticulous and absorbing edition of letters between Murray and museum directors. A chapter in A.C. Benson, Memories and Friends, 1914; W. S. Spanton, An Art Teacher and his Teachers in the Sixties, 1927.
By Sharon O’Connor
The Parkhall Business Centre in Martell Road today is a busy hub for creative companies from coffee roasters to jewellery makers, artisan food start-ups to tech recruiters; it even has its own café. But the buildings used by these modern companies originally began life a century ago as the factory of the Telephone Manufacturing Company (TMC), the brainchild of Frederick Thomas Jackson. TMC became an internationally famous manufacturing company producing equipment such as telephones, switchboards, telegraph lines, electric clocks and ship’s telephones, all from a factory on this long, thin site tucked up against the eastern boundary of the West Norwood Cemetery and hidden from sight for the most part by the Victorian houses of Martell Rd.
FT, as Frederick Thomas Jackson was known to everyone, was born in 1881 into a Methodist farming family in Worcestershire, the eldest of three children. He left Bewdley Grammar School in 1896, aged fifteen, to begin work for his father, making cider and generally helping out. In 1902, after six years hard saving (and presumably a helping hand from his father), he had £40, enabling him to head for the bright lights of London. After several dead-end jobs he became a clerk at The Private Telephone Company. This was the start he needed and within four years he was Company Secretary, giving him an overview of the telephony business. Jackson spotted a solution to the problem of the high purchase cost of telephone equipment by offering it for rent. This made it viable for businesses to transfer from their outdated speaking tubes to modern telephones. In 1906 he married Mary Henrietta Parkes who had been born in Canton, China, where her father had been a Wesleyan minister. By 1911 Jackson was describing himself as an import/export agent working on his own account. The Jacksons set up home in Calton Avenue and had a son, Charles Hollingsworth Jackson and a daughter, Dorothy Gertrude.
In 1914 Jackson, joined forces with a solicitor from Glasgow called Campbell Cochran, whom he had met in the course of his business, to raise the capital to start their own company. Jackson was an energetic man ‘a great believer in optimism, system and organisation’. He started work at 8.20am, believing ‘the early hours [are] the most valuable in the business day’. He was described as silent, kind and shrewd.
At first TMC’s phones were supplied by a German company called Fuld, but following the outbreak of World War One, TMC could no longer import phones from Germany, hence the establishment of the Dulwich factory in Martell Road in 1915. Jackson named it the Hollingsworth Works after his paternal grandmother’s maiden name. At first TMC took over the premises of Offset Litho Limited, lithographic printers, at 42a Martell Road in what were four bays on the left of what is now the main block. In 1919 they took over the site of St Mary’s Industrial Home (where young girls had been trained for domestic service for the previous twenty years) at 40 Martell Road to build the main block; this is the part of the site visible from Martell Rd. They also built yards and buildings towards the south of the main block. TMC supplied other British companies such as New System whose slogan was ‘a penny per day per instrument’ and went from strength to strength. In 1920 TMC went public, acquired other phone rental companies and expanding into Belgium, France and Australia. The freehold of TMC's premises at Dulwich, together with some adjoining land, was purchased and a modern building erected for manufacturing and experimental research. Dr Robert Edwin Witton Maddison (1901-1993), the notable industrial chemist and authority on Robert Boyle, worked here from 1925-1941 as a research and development chemist. By 1921 the Jacksons had moved from 59 Calton Avenue to 20 Herne Hill.
TMC began advertising cutting-edge products such as the Laryngaphone, a throat microphone ‘the size of a wristwatch’, designed for use in aircraft or onboard ships to enable the crew to communicate clearly despite background noise. They also specialised in synchronous electric clocks using the trademark Temco. Synchronous clocks do not need an oscillator (like a pendulum or balance wheel) so are very robust, though vulnerable to power outages.
Factory output doubled but as the post-WW1 boom came to an end the company started to lose money. Jackson was in no doubt where the blame for this lay: ‘When people are spending a very large portion of their income in paying taxes one cannot expect them to spend much on anything except bare necessities. Until taxation can be brought down I cannot see any great revival in…the country’. The company concentared on exporting, establishing presences in Spain, South Africa, Egypt, China and India and Jackson was bringing new products to the market too. In particular, the handsfree telephone and the automatic (i.e. no operator connecting the calls) phone. TMC also arranged with the South London Electricity Supply Corporation to lay mains electricity into the factory, to create an alternative supply to that from their own generators.
In December 1925 their large overdraft at the Midland Bank fell due. When the Midland refused to advance them a further £60,000, Jackson stormed round to the Westminster Bank, who allegedly immediately took over the overdraft without asking for any security. This kept the company afloat and bought Jackson the time he needed to bring the company back into profitability. In 1929 profits doubled and the business was split into manufacturing (TMC) and rentals (Telephone Rentals or TR), though both were under the same board of directors. The firm still did not pay a dividend due to the ‘grievous burden’ of income tax. In 1932 TMC extended the factory again, with new workshops and an improved new west elevation, buying land from the cemetery to do so.
The site now had offices, labs, assembly, wiring, stores and despatch in the main block with machine shops, bakelite moulding rooms, presses, plating and polishing shops flanking the main building. Further expansion to the north of the site in 1933 added inspection areas, a lathe shop, tool rooms with a 500-seater canteen on the top floor. By 1937 they were employing 1600 people.
When World War 11 broke out, production was controlled by the Ministry of Supply and non-military telephony was low on the priority list. However, TMC had highly-trained research and development staff able to design and produce almost custom-built items and now started to move into specialist markets. The Secrephone scrambler telephone was one example. A scrambler, or Green Telephone, is fitted with a device that allows the intended recipients to understand each other but making it unintelligible to anyone else ‘
TR made Tannoy public address systems for Air Raid Precaution (ARP) use within factories and included a ‘Music While You Work’ system as an anti-fatigue measure. Wartime conditions took their toll as a third of their staff were called up but eventually TMC was placed on the Ministry of Supply’s ‘Vital List’ so was able to retain essential staff. The employment of ‘intelligent girls, aged not less than 18 years, for training in simple electrical maintenance’ also helped make up the shortfall. Shifts were extended using overtime, and night shifts were introduced. During the war years huge amounts of equipment was made at Martell Road including 1,300,000 microphones and 1,200,000 receivers. The amount of wire used in the coils and condensers was about 12,500,000 miles - enough to go five hundred times around the earth.
TMC’s British and European entities managed to trade consistently and profitably throughout the war and FT Jackson was awarded the OBE in 1941. The Dulwich works had their own Home Guard unit at the Hollingsworth Works as it was an obvious target for enemy bombers and Robert Howlett, who went to Alleyn’s School and lived in Martell Road, remembered that: ‘when they had exercises in Chancellor Grove, which was all bombed out houses, my friends and I ‘helped’ by pointing out the ‘defenders’ to the ‘attackers’.’
Business declined post 1945 and TMC were forced to sell their Australian business though they also expanded into Canada. A highlight of the firm’s business in the 1950s was the production of speaking clocks in Britain and Australia. TMC’s expertise in precision radio technology crossed over into their telephony work and into the fast-expanding telex service, and later into modems. Their speciality items continued to be a major product and now included ships' phones and military field sets. The increase in production necessitated some rebuilding and in 1952 TMC bought a strip of land adjoining the west of the site, along the cemetery’s eastern boundary, from the South Metropolitan Cemetery Company to facilitate the reconstruction of the machine shop by the architects A C Fairlough & D L Morris of Long Acre.
In 1960 TMC was taken over by the Pye group, becoming Pye TMC. Today it is part of Dutch giant Phillips. The Hollingsworth site was used as a depot by Lambeth Borough Council. In 1999 Workspace took over the site. The large factory floors have been subdivided into units of variable size and are bright and attractive, awash with natural light with large, attractive windows and high ceilings. The workspaces vary in size from 600 sq. ft to over 6,000 sq. ft. Since they have owned the site, Workspace have seen their tenants move from light manufacturing use such as carpentry to people looking for flexible office space with good recycling facilities, showers and cycle storage. Nick Bright, the centre’s manager, encourages tenants to meet and share experiences and this has led to some beneficial joint ventures between tenants, adding synergy to their individual businesses. Meeting rooms are available both for tenants and for members of the public.
Parkhall Business Centre now houses around 140 businesses ranging from Rococo, the noted chocolatier and cocoa grower, to wig-makers, electricians, design studios and online food supermarkets. Volcano Coffee Works has both its roastery and coffee house onsite and the popular cafe serves tenants and local residents alike.
With thanks to Bob’s Old Phones, Susie Schofield’s ‘Alleyn’s in the 1940’s and Nick Bright of Workspace.
Edward Bawden - A Retrospective (ends 9 September 2018)
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Dulwich Picture Gallery is presenting a major retrospective of work by the celebrated British artist and designer, Edward Bawden RA CBE (1903-89). This continues the trend begun with the E S Shepherd exhibition and followed by other successful shows by illustrators like Norman Rockwell, Escher and Eric Ravilious. There was a time, thankfully now past, when illustrators were not considered worthy enough to hang in the gallery alongside its permanent collection of Old Masters.
This is the first exhibition to look at every aspect of Bawden’s long career, showcasing a number of previously unseen works from his family’s private collection as well as 18 rarely seen war portraits, displayed together for the first time.
Widely respected as an innovative graphic designer, book illustrator and printmaker, Edward Bawden is best known today for his monumental linocuts and for the witty designs he made for companies like Shell and Fortnum & Mason. Meanwhile his achievements as a fine artist have been largely forgotten. Along with Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious, Bawden reinvented watercolour for the 20th century, and a central aim of this exhibition is to bring this work back into public view.
Bawden was a creator of imaginary worlds, inspired by stories, travels abroad and by the everyday world. Featuring 170 works, half of them from private collections, the exhibition is arranged thematically to follow the evolution in his style and the constant creative dialogue between media and disciplines, with rooms dedicated to leisure, architecture, animals and fantasy, as well as the previously unexplored theme of gardens. Bawden took a tremendous delight in observing the world ‘off duty’, and the exhibition shows a wide-ranging display of works devoted to leisure and pleasure, with particular focus on Bawden’s talents in commercial design. Highlights include early designs for London Underground and Fortnum & Mason as well as book designs for companies such as Imperial Airways, and London and North Eastern Railway. This section also showcases earlier paintings, such as By the Sea, 1929-30, a humorous vision of the British on holiday.
Other rooms reflect Bawden’s fascination with places and architecture, with watercolours and linocuts depicting Essex churches and Ethiopian palaces. As an official war artist Bawden spent the years 1940-45 travelling around North Africa, and then Middle East and Europe, during which time he was on a ship that was torpedoed and survived for five days in an open boat, only to be rescued by Vichy France and briefly imprisoned. The exhibition culminates with an exploration of Bawden’s lifelong love of storytelling. One wall is covered in original drawings, almost all from private collections, that span every decade from the 1920s to the 1980s. Another features studies for some of Bawden’s best-loved murals, while the last works are among his most colourful and inventive, including several linocuts from his much-loved series, ‘Edward Bawden’ is curated by James Russell, who curated ‘Eric Ravilious’ - Dulwich Picture Gallery’s most visited exhibition, in 2015. He is the author of ‘The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden’ (Mainstone Press), a study of Bawden’s 1930s paintings, as well as titles devoted to Eric Ravilious and other artists of the period.
The Great Oaks
Defying expectations, One Tree Hill has many trees and is in a state of mixed oak, sycamore and ash woodland with a number of significant remnant boundary trees of oak, ornamental plane tree and poplar plantings. The secondary woodland of ash, oak and sycamore is ‘infill’, with standard trees, some of which have been present on the Hill for centuries, becoming swamped by new growth. There are more oaks to be found along the boundary with the One Tree Hill allotments at the entrance from Honor Oak Park. One of the oldest oaks is probably veteran and could be of ancient status, unlike the Oak of Honor which was planted in 1905 after the previous oak, reputedly planted by Queen Elizabeth 1 in 1602, was struck by lightning.
The first signs of managed woods in Britain were in the Anglo-Saxon times and One Tree Hill was managed for its stock of trees many centuries ago. The Great North Wood is and was a combination of oak and hornbeam with a hazel under storey. These are trees that were vital for the development of London and for the sustenance of local communities. The sessile oak trees that colonised of their own accord grow straight and tall, making excellent timber for housing and ship building.
Timber was too vital a resource to be cleared away. Oak was strong and its acorns provided a good food source for pigs, a grazing practice known as pannage. Hornbeam, another strong wood, made excellent, slow burning firewood, and is thought to have gradually established its dominance in London’s woods from the tenth century BC (Fritter 1990 p.24). When early peoples hacked their way through hazel they found that it did not disappear unless uprooted and when it grew back it provided beautifully glossy, straight, flexible poles. It also produced delicious nuts, something that would have been well known to Neolithic farmers. The hacking back of trees allowing them to regrow to be harvested again for their produce, is known as coppicing. Cutting a tree to its base was a well-managed, organised industry in the Great North Wood, including Honor Oak. The once rural nearby area that we now know as Norwood had eight coppices. They were fenced ‘to protect them from the depredations of men and beasts, and patrolled’ by servants (Fritter, 1990 p.24). The Great North Wood was renowned for its coppices not only of hazel but also of oak, whereas in nearby Kent, small-leaved lime coppices, cut by the Romans are still alive and sprouting to this day.
One Tree Hill was once managed oak woodland belonging to the monasteries that owned swathes of land in south London. This all changed with the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII followed by a series of acts of parliament between the 1720s and early 1800s legalising the enclosure of common land. Politicians used the Napoleonic War food shortages as a reason to encourage enclosure of the commons. The 500 acres of Sydenham or Westwood Common which covered modern day Forest Hill were enclosed in 1810, Dulwich Common was enclosed in 1805, and 3,000 acre Penge Common was enclosed in 1827. It was the beginning of the end for the commoners and for local people whose livelihood had depended on free access to lop and harvest from the Great North Wood.
Native and non-native species
Whilst the oak woodland remained, the ecology was probably similar to Dulwich Woods today with wildflowers consisting of wood anemone, English bluebell, dog violet, wild garlic, woodruff and possibly columbine, wild strawberry, wild daffodil, Solomon’s seal and rarer species like herb paris and helleborines - orchids that can still be found in remnant ancient woods of Croydon and even in nearby Lewisham. Once these separate woods and their species were connected by woodland cover, the sustained oak woods would have been rich in fungi, with species like oak bracket and beefsteak fungus commonly occurring; the latter is still present on One Tree Hill. Wood, including underwood and brash, was a valued asset to people in centuries past so very little would have been wasted. It was used for heating and cooking as well as making tools, utensils and furniture. Contemporary One Tree Hill with its standing deadwood and log piles may be more hospitable to deadwood invertebrates (known scientifically as saproxylic invertebrates) than during times of human dependence on local woodland resources. In 1990, local entomologist Richard Jones conducted a preliminary invertebrate survey that found four species of invertebrates which may have survived from the days of ancient woodland. One slightly more accessible indicator of ancient woodland lineage is the purple hairstreak butterfly, an insect that can only really be seen in the canopy level of oak trees, unless spotted when it comes down to feed on bramble honeydew in the summer. The first ecological record at One Tree Hill is of the purple hairstreak, published in 1766 in The Aurelian by Moses Harris. This overlooked butterfly was ‘commonly taken in plenty in Oak-of-Honour Wood, near Peckham, Surry’ (Frith and Lloyd 1995 p.3). There have been few sightings since, though this could be because it is a difficult butterfly to see. There are a number of other species that can be observed, however: red admiral, peacock, small white, large white, green-veined white, orange tip, holly blue, gate keeper, meadow brown, comma, speckled wood and small and large skippers have all been recorded in recent years. Moth data is poor for One Tree Hill but there are some historical records. The blotched emerald Comibaena bajularia was first named the Maid of Honour when it was recorded in 1836 at One Tree Hill by lepidopterists and named after the famous oak. Since its food plant is the oak and it prefers established woodland with mature oaks, it was well suited to the old Oak of Honour Wood.
When the oak woods of One Tree Hill were cleared in the early 19th century the landscape became favourable for grazing of livestock and for the growth of sun-loving plants and invertebrates. The change would have encouraged the spread of gorse, a prickly bush in the pea family which was often known as ‘furze’. On the old Sydenham Common (now the town centres of Forest Hill and Sydenham) the gorse was cut to encourage re-growth for the grazing of commoners’ livestock. There are still residual fungi growing on the Hill that are more representative of grassland than woodland.
One Tree Hill today shows evidence of mankind’s global influence over the natural world. There are a number of non-native species, some of which are invasive. The London planes which can be found across the hill on either side were planted in the early 20th century, as they were in many green spaces across London. Hyde Park, Green Park, Highbury Fields, Southwark Park and Peckham Rye Common all have a large number of planes. This is not an ideal situation for wildlife, or for people. In France, miles and miles of plane trees are being felled because of fungal infection. Since the end of the last glacial period nature has thrived on diversity, evolving to form dependency bonds between species, relationships termed ‘symbiotic’. The pollination of trees and wildflowers by insects, or the mycorrhizal relations of tree roots and fungi are good examples of this as is reliance on a range of bumblebees, solitary bees, wasps, flies, beetles, butterflies and moths that pollinates the crops on which society depends.
Nature’s response to the plane trees on One Tree Hill has been to kill them through competition for light, water and nutrients. The plane, a hybrid of American and oriental trees, is unable to reproduce nearly as vigorously as native oak or non-native sycamore. The plane tree’s leaf is so dense and takes such a long time to break down that on the Brenchley Gardens side of the Hill there is little soil-based fungi fruiting in autumn and winter because the plane leaves act as long-term mulch in a place that requires regeneration rather than repression. Oak and sycamore saplings can be seen growing up against the trunks of the planes, some already dead and standing to provide habitat for the important invertebrate recyclers woodland requires (Jones 1990). There is no doubt the planes are splendid trees but for too long the philosophy of councils and land managers in London has been to plant plane and plane only. The recent outbreaks of Massaria, a fungus that is found naturally on planes to control the number of branches and aid irrigation, has increased greatly in parks and green spaces in north London where many planes have been planted. In truth, One Tree Hill may need no planting at all, other than the occasional re-creation of lost hedgerows, although along the Honor Oak Park fence wych elm, ash and hawthorn have seeded themselves without human help. Arguably it is impossible to recreate the richness of natural woodland through tree planting.
Another undesirable non-native species is cherry laurel. Originating in the Balkans, cherry laurel is an evergreen shrub that can quickly establish as a sprawling tree, with large, dense limbs. For humans its leaves and seeds are poisonous because they contain cyanide. Ecologically, laurel shades out and outcompetes anything underneath so the biodiversity of a wood is reduced and its habitats degraded. In recent years the Friends have been acting to reduce the amount of laurel on the Hill and already the results are evident. The great benefit of the management of One Tree Hill’s old woods was that light would have come in when trees were felled, nourishing the wildflowers in the herb layer and providing a base layer for the wider woodland ecosystem. Another argument is that these processes of light and shade interchange naturally over longer periods of time (tree time is centuries, human time is decades). But the need for our green spaces to be managed is strong. Such is the pressure on green space that any place that is not used by people or properly designated risks being seen as dead space and vulnerable to development and to ecological degradation.
There are a few false acacia trees on the slopes close to St. Augustine’s Church, another invasive species which originates from overseas. Originally endorsed by William Cobbett for its value as firewood, false acacia is a highly invasive species in central and eastern Europe, where species-rich woods and grasslands have been overcome by this fast growing and dominant tree. Like the London plane, false acacia can be found planted as an ornamental tree for its spring blossoms in parks, Victorian gardens and even along London’s South Bank.
One non-native, naturalised species that causes less harm to British wildlife is the sycamore. Pilloried for decades because it is fast growing and its waxy leaf is the official ‘leaf on the line’, the sycamore has been enthusiastically ripped out of nature reserves across London by volunteers. At our winter tree walk in January 2014, we watched one attendee drop to his haunches, groaning as he attempted to pull a sapling from the ground. If sycamore is invasive, young trees growing now will never reach the canopy due to the damage caused by the, also invasive, grey squirrel. Ironically Jones argues that these damaged sycamores are excellent habitats for deadwood invertebrates.
One Tree Hill’s ever changing Wildlife
There has been recent evidence to show how important the sycamore is for nesting birds in the spring time, of which One Tree Hill supports many species: wren, robin, nuthatch, great tit, blue tit, long tailed tit, dunnock, chiffchaff and blackcap. The majority of birds are resident species found all year round but some travel long distances to visit the hill. Chiffchaff and blackcap are migrants, some of which will travel from Africa and southern Europe to nest at One Tree Hill, though some blackcaps visiting in the winter are likely to be central European birds fleeing cold snaps. Both species are thought to be overwintering in Britain due to milder winters. The garden warbler has been recorded on several occasions, often in May around the time of the annual Dawn Chorus walk. In April 2013 a garden warbler was feeding on blackthorn flowers atop the hill. Swifts, seen each year scything over the hilltop, are often mistaken for bats during public walks. But some migrants have been lost. The spotted flycatcher is a bird that suffered an 89% decline between 1967 and 2010. It was recorded as a breeding bird in the 1990s at One Tree Hill but this decline is not London specific; it is reflected nationally for many different reasons. The bullfinch, the male of which has a striking pink breast, is another species lost from One Tree Hill since the 1990s and from the local area, though there have been recent records along the River Pool in Lewisham and it still breeds in parts of Croydon. One reason why One Tree Hill is less suitable for certain birds than it was decades ago is that it has changed in structure from mostly scrub overtaking open land. For example, One Tree Hill could not have supported great spotted or green woodpeckers in 1905 whereas by 2015 its maturing woodland habitats and standard trees provided shelter and nesting space. The work of cavity creating woodpeckers also benefits bats, though currently the young woodland and lack of suitable mature trees across the woodland habitats of One Tree Hill means the variety of bat species is limited. Bat walks since 2011 have only recorded the soprano and common pipistrelles but a bat survey in 2015 on neighbouring Camberwell New Cemetery recorded leisler and noctule.
As a reserve which supports so many bird species, there is a plain attraction for birds of prey. Tawny owls breed in the nearby Sydenham Hill and Dulwich Woods complex, as well as at Nunhead Cemetery. Residents near One Tree Hill often hear them calling at night. Whether they are breeding or merely using One Tree Hill to hunt remains unknown, but the fact that their territories are a mere kilometre in size does give the sense that they are nesting nearby. Kestrels can be seen visiting St. Augustine’s Church, looking for a meal of wood mouse or other small mammals unknown to us. The kestrel’s cousin, the hobby, has been seen migrating over Forest Hill Road and bred in the Sydenham Hill and Dulwich Woods in 2015, so it is sure to pass through unseen. London’s peregrine falcon pairs numbered 27 in 2014 and they have been known to breed near Crystal Palace and to hunt around the Southwark and Lewisham border. Sparrowhawks are a common visitor, recently seen hunting ring-necked parakeets over the main glade of One Tree Hill. The splash of feathers often found on the grass and on the path is a sign of a sparrowhawk having surprised and devoured a grounded woodpigeon. The buzzard is now Britain’s most common raptor and is becoming a common visitor to the Dulwich Woods. There is also the outside chance that little owl, breeding in parks and playing fields around Dulwich Village, could find One Tree Hill suits its needs in decades to come if the mosaic of open grassland and mature oaks is maintained.
The Future of One Tree Hill’s Wildlife
As a Local Nature Reserve adored by many for its sudden shock of wildness and stunning, leaf-edged views of Central London, One Tree Hill is safe. Its topography is unsuitable for development and Southwark Council have never proposed this. Though clearing trees from old grasslands can be a worthwhile conservation project depending on the location and habitats, it would be pointless at One Tree Hill where oak is establishing new woodland. The open land would be of no greater value than the naturally occurring woodland ecosystem currently maturing on the hill. There have been wry suggestions of clear felling of trees to open up views or ‘see what a nice piece of land it is’. This is something that should be rejected on the grounds that the woods provide much greater benefit to people and wildlife. But there are still issues beyond the hands of authorities like the Friends or the Council which could threaten One Tree Hill’s wildlife and ecology. The spread of invasive species such as ash dieback disease, a non-native fungus that kills ash trees, is predicted to make an impact in the coming decades. This could change the appearance of One Tree Hill, especially on the northern slopes where ash has been one of the principal colonisers. One Tree Hill, the allotments and playing fields are part of a wider landscape, connected to Brenchley Gardens, Camberwell New Cemetery and then further by the railway sidings which are so wild and good for wildlife. Any wider landscape alterations outside One Tree Hill’s boundaries would impact on the species present. At the time of writing, plans to increase burial space along the boundary with Camberwell New Cemetery have led to a degree of unrest amongst local people. The same can be said for initial plans to return the Honor Oak Recreation Ground to its original plan of becoming an extension of Camberwell New Cemetery. But there lies the challenge for conservation in south London. The presence of a green space next door to One Tree Hill means that it is in better ecological health than if it were a car park, and cemeteries are often allowed to be a little more rough, ready and wild than manicured ‘green deserts’ that some parks can become. The key is for a landscape-scale vision for management and conservation as undertaken by London Wildlife Trust in nearby Dulwich. Likewise, the One Tree Hill allotments present a unique situation where a somewhat intensively managed area of food growing plots happens to support common lizard, a species that is uncommon in London, whilst One Tree Hill is now shorn of it. The Allotment Society deserve praise for allowing a buffer of woodland to remain between the two sites, and for showing an interest in wildlife, recognising the role the allotments can play in ensuring the wider landscape is rich and well managed.
From an ecological perspective, local tree planting should be reflective of the species which have been present in the area longest, namely: English oak (Quercus robur), sessile oak (Quercus patraea), field maple (Acer campestre), ash (Fraxinus excelsior), wild cherry (Prunus avium), hornbeam (Carpinus betulus), silver birch (Betula pendula), hazel (Corylus avellana), holly (Ilex bacciata), hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). The plans for replanting at Camberwell New Cemetery match these suggestions, the intention there is noted and welcomed. Native trees are important because over millions of years invertebrates have evolved preferences and dependences on certain plant species, and their predators have developed preferences based on those insects. For the benefit of One Tree Hill and other local wildlife, a plan should be put in place to ensure native tree species are planted which notionally will act to extend the boundaries of One Tree Hill. Such long-term joined up thinking requires investment and patience, but it can be done cost effectively so time and money need not be an excuse to ignore the opportunity. There are many local people willing to help and their enthusiasm should be encouraged. To the garden warbler, arriving at One Tree Hill in spring all the way from Africa, geographical boundaries do not register. Local residents can make a difference by managing their gardens in a way that is reflective of the flora and fauna of One Tree Hill.
Adapted for the stage by Philip Wilson with original music by Paul Grimwood & lyrics by Gill Daly
To be performed in the gardens of Bell House, 27 College Road, Dulwich, SE21 7BG
Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd June at 8pm Saturday 23rd June at 5pm and 8pm Sunday 24th June at 2pm and 5pm
Before Roald Dahl there were the Grimm Brothers! And now there is an opportunity to rediscover the magic and wonder of the original Grimm Tales, retold by the master-storyteller Philip Pullman. The audience will be taken on both a fictional and actual journal, meeting along the way some familiar some familiar characters such as Rapunzel, and some unexpected ones too, such as Hans-My-Hedgehog, Faithful Johannes and the remarkable Thousandfurs, each tale being full of delicious and unexpectedly dark twists and turns.
Recommended age 8+
This will be a promenade performance through the gardens of Bell House. Some seating will be available but audience are welcome to bring portable chairs and/or rugs. Sorry no dogs.
Tickets: £12 and £8 (under 16 years of age) Dulwich Players Box Office 07936 531356 or email :