Harry Burrard Farnall (1802-83)

Harry Burrard Farnall (1802-83) was an example of that extraordinary Victorian ideal, the gentleman civil servant defending the patrician notion of a generous, caring state in the absence of any very firm evidence that the state was routinely either of those things. What made me interested in him this week was picking up the picture below - an undated, unsigned, pencil drawing marked, in a small neat hand on card below the drawing itself, as 'Water Mill near Lyme Regis, H.B. Farnall'.

It's a tidily produced, finely drawn if clearly amateur evocation of the Dorset countryside. The cows, placidly grouped at the bottom right of the picture, are the least satisfactory element but there are some keen touches to the execution - notably the shadow on the front of the cottage, beneath the eaves overhanging the watermill itself and on the gateway leading to the cottage. Great care has been taken, but there is no vestige of real country life in the drawing. It is devoid of any life, and certainly of any human society.

The artist was the son of Captain Harry Farnall RN, himself the son of a 60th Regiment of Foot Lieutenant. The notion of service must have been absorbed at the dinner table, and the family motto, 'Persevere', must have provided a stimulus to hard work. He was educated first in Bristol and then at Charterhouse, where contemporaries would have included the Secretary of State for War during the Crimean campaign (Maule-Ramsey) and the Chief Justice of New South Wales (Stephen). At Cambridge he attended the then very new Downing College from 1825, having come from Brasenose College Oxford at which he had matriculated in 1820 - but, in an age of almost notorious academical laxness, probably doing very little more than was required to remain in residence and keep terms before his departure for Cambridge. As a Fellow-Commoner in Downing he would have enjoyed the benefits of a status considerably above that of the pensioners and sizars at the common tables in hall, but some way still below that of the sons of the aristocracy - comfortable and richly provided for certainly, but with a sense of a long way to travel yet to achieve absolute distinction. A good marriage helped. In 1829, almost three years after graduating, he married Dorothea, the daughter of Alan Bellingham of Bellingham Castle, Louth and thus married into a rich and established family which was returning MPs to Westminster both before and after the Great Reform Act. 

His career as a civil servant was not without incident, and most notably included (in 1866 while acting as the Metropolitan Inspector of Poor Laws, a post he held for some years) a critical reception from liberal critics and the press alike for his apparent blindness to the conditions in workhouse infirmaries. On the other hand, he along with Florence Nightingale had instituted, voluntarily, the first enquiries into nursing quality in workhouse hospitals the previous year. Occasional blemishes in an otherwise clearly dutiful if not occasionally prejudiced career included his inability of tell truth from fiction in the notorious Bethnal Green Workhouse case of the devious Theobald Meyrick, the master of what was perhaps the most appalling of the Victorian workhouses in London at the time. Meyrick seems to have got away with a light inspection by Farnall - and eventually it was the Board of Guardians, and not the Inspector, who brought Meyrick to book, a man so clearly guilty of a litany of crimes against inmates as to make a mockery of the idea that those in public service were at all obliged to offer compassion and care. 

My drawing, bought in a fit of enthusiasm for the inevitable puzzle (who was the artist?) seems most likely to be the product of some time before the Bethnal Green scandal, and a sign of a more retired and bucolic nature. Farnall moved to Dorset but continued to live in Kent and London too (wealth had its advantages). He was able to play the role of Deputy Lieutenant for the County and be Mayor of Lyme Regis, so the eye that saw and the hand that drew the watermill were not unfamiliar with the environs of the town. 

Finally what impresses one about this very minor amateur drawing is the artfulness of it. Constructed so as to leave no hint of the reality of country life (watermills were hard, noisy, places to live and work in and a miller's life was tough throughout the year) it displays a conventional regard for the landscape as a part of the settled order of Victorian England. Perhaps, ultimately, a public servant brought up and trained in the way that had shaped Farnall would not have thought otherwise about the rural world.   

Mud and a love of the past: turning kids onto history with a shovel

How do you encourage your children to engage with the past? In a sense, it has never been easier: television, books, DVDs, radio have all probably never been so alive with history – even if, sometimes, it seems all rather flippant, sensational and (sadly) inaccurate, and social media breaks up the continuity and focus an understanding of the past deserves. Enthusiasm, though, is catching, and it’s easy for children to find a love of history creeping up on them. 

My way to cement that in my son was, perversely, to dig. I have not one shred of archaeological know-how (I’m a died-in-the-wool historian turned economic historian turned economist), but archaeology has this great advantage over history from books if your young – you get to dig big holes, get mucky, and find treasure. Such is the power of archaeology to create a sense of wonder about the past, the extraordinarily open and welcoming dig at the Roman settlement at Silchester, under the watchful eye of Professor Michael Fulford has become an occasional joy for the family (see http://www.reading.ac.uk/silchester for details) because the Reading archaelogists allow everyone, from the very youngest, to get involved.

My house in Wokingham, though, is no Roman villa and our corner of the town is not as remarkable as Insula IX at Silchester. Ours is a large, Tardis-like, semi detached Victorian villa (built in 1895) on a plot of land that had once been an orchard, probably a brickfield for local building and only latterly used as land for houses. Even the road on which it was built is a new road, built after 1856. Many of the houses to the south of our house were built in the 1860s. Even relatively small scale maps provide good evidence of how the road grew. In 1816 (Figure 1) Gypsy Lane and Cockpit Path met where they do now, but there was no sign of the road springing from their intersection which now runs past the house. The area indeed, seems, to have been common land. By 1856 (Figure 2) the space between Cockpit Path and the current path to Sale Cottages was enclosed and by 1872, with the road now built (Figure 3), the same piece of ground is shown to have trees, probably an orchard (indeed at least one contemporary newspaper source specifically mentions apple trees on the house abutting ours). The enclosed land was still there in 1883 (Figure 4) but by 1898 (by which time our house had been built) the rest of the area was in-filled with houses.

Figure 1: Langborough Road area in 1816

Figure 2: Langborough Road area in 1856

Figure 3: Langborough Road area in 1872

Figure 4: Langborough Road area in 1883

Figure 5: Langborough Road area in 1898

I started, then, trying to get my son to see the pattern in the evidence. There seemed to have been three distinct phases of development on the land on which our house is built which, in stark terms, works as follows:


• Phase 1: Up to some point between 1816 and 1856, the land was unenclosed common land

• Phase 2: From at the latest 1856 until at least 1883, the land was enclosed and had trees

• Phase 3: From 1897, the land had houses on it.


But map work, and the slow exploration of the landscape a la Marc Bloch is all well and good if you’re an adult: it’s torture if you really can’t wait to get dirty and cut into the soil, so we decided to put in two exploratory pits - first a test pit located 2.5m from the northern boundary of the garden and 70cm from the eastern edge of the garden (the test pit measured 40cm by 40 cm approximately) and then a trench located 1.5m from the northern edge of the boundary of the garden and 5m from the western boundary. The trench measured 1.47m x 59 cm.

Figure 6: Image of rear of our house (copyright Google)

Doing as best as I could to imitate – if in a rather ham-fisted way – the method of real archaeologists (my touchstone here is Time Team, and reading occasional archaeological reports in awe at the inventiveness of field archaeologist) we beavered away looking for evidence. The test pit yielded fewer pieces of evidence than the trench, but probably as much per square metre overall. We found the following in the test pit:

• At 30cm depth, several pieces of loose, broken and charred brick which may be evidence of a previous building or, because they are so misshapen, possibly evidence of brickmaking on the site.

• At 42-44cm, a few small pieces of domestic blue and white Victorian china

• At 52cm, the soil changed to a light clay and produced some flint.


In the trench we found more evidence of how the land was used. I'd like to say we put the trench where we did because it ran parallel with what would have been a wall or boundary; it was therefore likely to have more evidence than a trench in the centre of the garden. In truth it was the result less of precise deduction or cool induction than of hope. We found, 


• At about 34cm depth, larger pieces of brick, but also large pieces of agricultural tiling and garden terracotta pots;

• At 41 cm, some very small pieces of domestic Victorian pottery. We also found a piece of silver from a wallet, dated 1902/3 and made by Thomas De La Rue & Co. from the evidence of the silvermarks on the piece of silver itself.

The silver corner from the de la Rue wallet

The de la Rue wallet (or rather one very like it)

• At 44 cm, more Victorian blue china, a thick piece of glass from the bottom of a wine glass (probably a mid-Victorian rummer, years rummaging in antique shops told me) and some thinner glass from a wine glass

• At 48 cm, smaller pieces of Victorian china, and a small fragment of a brown beer bottle.

A very few of the 'finds'

Here comes the difficult bit. The mud and soil lies all around you: your son or daughter wants to keep digging. Now, though, the historian in you wants to draw...conclusions. Sharp intake of breath, and hope he follows. We thought our finds were consistent with the following sequence of events for the space occupied by the back garden of our house:


During Phase 1: When the land was unenclosed, the pottery and glassware at deeper than 41cm in both points suggested that the open land carried some rubbish.

During Phases 2 and 3: Between 1856 and 1897, bricks and agricultural tiling seem to suggest that it was used for brick-making and/or agriculture.

During Phase 3: The piece of silver from Thomas De La Rue and Co. (dated 1902/3) suggests no more than that someone (we know from Census data probably who) was working in the garden and lost the edge of what would have been a very expensive wallet at that time. This suggests that the owner was at least digging down to 41cm, so some our finds might have moved in the soil in the trench. (I suggested that his wife would have been furious that he lost the silver flange from the wallet).


All in all, then, the evidence broadly confirmed the sequence of building suggested by the historical record - which might, in all fairness, be a disappointingly mundane conclusion to reach when you are young. But a ‘finds table’ stacked with 'evidence', mounds of earth, grubby clothes and fingers, and a sense of discovery make up for much even when the 'archaeology' isn’t, frankly, that much more illuminating than maps, newspaper data, photographs and house directory evidence would have been.


Give it a go: charm your kids with a walk into the garden and into the past, this weekend - shovels at the ready...

Scottish genius and Chilean water: Copland & Foulis and the Tarapaca Waterworks

Scots, it has often been said, made a conspicuous mark on the world in two vital domains of the British Empire and British trade in the Victorian era – organisation and administration on the one hand, and engineering on the other. This note reviews the experience of one engineering company (and in particular one family who worked for it) which, far from home, had a profound effect on the lives of others and benefitted their own country not inconsiderably.

William Alexander Parker 1879-1943

Born on April 27^th 1879 at 158, Hill Street, Glasgow, William Alexander Parker was born to be an engineer and something of an adventurer, while his father, John Dunlop Parker (1844-1916) shaped not only his career but engineering practice in Chile. In 1862, aged only 18, John Dunlop (hereafter JD) entered the service of the North British Railway Company where he worked under James Bell, the ‘Engineer in Chief’. Headquartered in Edinburgh, the Company expanded rapidly after the 1846 opening and, following a series of amalgamations and take-overs, it became the largest of the Scottish railways by the mid-1860s.  By that time, it had opened a number of branch lines, built a new main line from Edinburgh to Carlisle, taken over the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee and Edinburgh & Glasgow railway Companies, and absorbed numerous smaller railway operations.  In the 1880s, it built the (replacement) Tay Bridge and the massive Forth Bridge in a joint venture with its partner railway companies and, by the end of the 19th century, it had built the West Highland Railway from Glasgow to Fort William.  In fact, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Company’s rail services stretched from Newcastle to Aberdeen on the east and from Silloth in Cumbria to Fort William and Mallaig in the west. 

Logo of the NBRC

In 1871 JD joined the staff of the Clyde Trust, carrying out, during 12 years service important dock extensions and other works as Resident Engineer and Manager. By 1875-6 he is listed as a member of the  ‘Assistant Engineers’ Department’ while residing at 16 Robertson Street, Glasgow in the Post Office Directory for Glasgow, working hard no doubt on many of the dock projects of the Trust. In 1883 he joined the consulting practice of Sir William Robertson Copland, M. Inst. C.E., (Copland & Foulis, gas, water & sewerage engineers, 146 West Regent Street and, earlier, of 83 West Regent Street) and was associated with many of the water supply, drainage and other undertakings carried out by the company.

Sir William Copland (1838-1907)

Experience with Copland’s firm was clearly valuable for more aspiring engineers than just John Dunlop Parker. For example Professor William Aitken Miller (1886-1958), the doyen of Australian work in experimental stress analysis and Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney, began his working life in the same engineering office and many other Scottish engineers traced their practice development to the firm of Copland & Foulis.

Among other things it was Copland & Foulis that designed the infrastructure for Glasgow’s gas supply in 1868, so that the mark they left on their own city was lasting. Many of the ‘Copland graduates’ went on to establish their own consulting practices. “After Sir William Copland's death in 1907 [says his IMechE. Obituary], J.D. Parker carried on an extensive practice in Glasgow with his son and Captain P. I. Whitton”. J.D. Parker was elected a Member of the Institute of Civil Engineers on the 2nd March, 1886 and elected a member of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 6^th November 1889 – signs of his being recognized as a one of the professional engineers in a city thriving on engineering know-how at the time.

Copland must have introduced J.D. (and later his son) to the particular problems of water and waste engineering. George Eyre-Todd’s ‘Who’s Who In Glasgow in 1909’ described Copland thus:

From 1862 to 1866 he [Copland] was Burgh Engineer for Paisley: then he began business in Glasgow as a civil engineer on his own account. Here he made special study of drainage and water supply, and designed and superintended the construction of water supply and drainage schemes for many Scottish districts. Among his larger works was a great water-supply system for the province of Tarapaca in Chile, which includes the important town of Iquique. Upon these subjects he was a recognised authority, and a frequent witness before Parliamentary Committees and Royal Commissions.

It was Copland, then, that introduced the Parkers (father and son) to the problems of water supply in the Tarapaca region of Chile. Tarapaca was then, as now, a semi-arid, semi-desolate place. Water and the supply of it to towns such as Iquique was a lucrative business, dominated by an entrepreneurial Yorkshiremen called John Thomas North. North carried water, expensively, by carrier overland to the cities.

John Thomas North

Mid-nineteenth century Iquique had been supplied with water transported from other parts of the coast or from the interior of the country and was obtained from so-called "hangovers" or brackish water distillers. From 1880 several projects to provide drinking water to the increasingly prosperous city of Iquique were suggested. These initiatives, however, did not succeed, either through lack of resources or by open or covert opposition of the Tarapaca Water Company, owned by John North, who operated a shuttle water tanker from Arica.

In open opposition to North, Thomas Hart formed a corporation in Britain to bring water to Iquique by pipe from the interior. North organized a media campaign to discredit it, thus preventing the scheme from immediate implementation. Hart in 1888 organized the Tarapacá North Waterworks Company, which obtained permission from the Municipality of Iquique to establish water service in the city.

North was not going to leave Hart a free hand. According to Howard Blakemore’s economic history of the nitrate trade of the region in the late nineteenth century, "At the end of September 1888 there was registered in London [North’s] Tarapaca Waterworks Company Limited, with an authorized share-capital of £400,000 in 40000 shares of £10 each". The subscribers to the company originally set their business in motion in Glasgow with, the Banker Magazine in 1894 noted, “the object of supplying water to the town of Iquique, in the Republic of Chili. The syndicate incurred preliminary expenses to the extent of £3000".

It remains to be established whether Copland (or indeed J.D. Parker) was a subscriber, but it seems that Copland staff were involved in the original, and ongoing, work in connection with the project to establish water supply throughout the Tarapaca region. As if proof were needed of that, the picture below shows the name of Coplands on one of the great water storage tanks constructed during the 1880s:

One of the water storage wells in Iquique –

to the left is clearly seen ‘W.R. Copland, Engineer’

Iquique was probably the first exposure of J.D. Parker to the problems of extreme engineering. We know for certain, thanks to the researches of the Chilean historian Luis Castro, that John Dunlop Parker was early on the scene, although apparently first engaged as a Copland consultant by North’s great rival, the Glaswegian Thomas Hart:

At the end of 1884 Thomas Hart returned to his idea, aborted two years earlier, of piping water from Pica. As a result of this, his license was approved on January 23, 1885, entailing a new concession from the recognition of the rights he had acquired in June 1882. In March 1885 the engineer J. Parker arrived in Iquique.

In this port he met with the engineer William Sterling who came from Tacna, and they prepared drawings and cost studies on the ground for almost two months.

In 1886 [Hart] returned to Scotland and created, in the city of Glasgow, the Iquique Water Company with a nominal capital of £350,000, leaving the majority of shares unallocated. In January 21^st of that year the engineer John Inckwell [John Tuckwell?] began preparatory levelling in order to begin the laying of the pipes and [the Chilean] Congress authorised charges of 2 cents per decalitre.[1]

J.D. was working in good company. William Stirling (1822-1900) was appointed Engineer with the responsibility of building the railways that sustained North’s nitrate companies. He was the son of the Rev. Robert Stirling, D.D. (1790-1878), the inventor of the Stirling Hot Air Engine and the brother of Patrick Stirling (1820-1895), successively Locomotive Superintendent of the Glasgow & South Western and Great Northern Railways, and of James Stirling (1835-1917), successively Locomotive Superintendent of the Glasgow & South Western and South Eastern Railways in Great Britain. (The Chilean nitrate rail lines were completed in 1890).

But it was North’s company that the Copland engineers ended up assisting. We know, from later evidence, that it was the Tarapaca Waterworks Company for which William, certainly, also worked.

Desolate and arid, the interior from which the water would be sourced from springs at places such as Pica is unforgiving to the mechanical engineer. One contemporary description of the engineering problems facing the railway engineers gives a sense of the challenges faced:

The interior of the Tarapaca region

“The original concessionaires transferred the lines in 1873 to a company known as the National Nitrate Railways of Peru, which was later, in 1882, reconstituted as the Nitrate Railways Co., Ltd. The system is worked under four separate concessions, the principal terminus being at Iquique, one of the chief ports of Northern Chile, with a population of over 37,000. It hardly ever rains in Iquique, and water has to be brought sixty miles from the oasis of Pica. The railway company has a condensing plant at Iquique capable of supplying distilled water from sea water at a rate of 200 tons in twenty-four hours. Water for the locomotives is also supplied by the Tarapaca Waterworks through a pipe-line about fifty-seven miles in length from the Andes Mountains.

If water transportation was important for the engines in the marshalling yards of southern Chile, how much more significant was the supply of fresh water to the towns? Schemes came and went at the end of the nineteenth century; after the death of North and the political machinations he seems to have engineered in Chile, commonsense seems to have prevailed. In 1905 the Board of Trade Journal reported,

The ‘Diario Oficial’ of Chile of 7^th June contains a Decree authorising the construction of waterworks in Iquique, at a cost of 3,000,000 pesos (about £250,000).

For the Parkers, this was likely to have been the unique opportunity they were looking for. With the advantage of earlier experience via Copland & Foulis, and with the freedom after 1907 to establish a separate business based on those connections, it is likely that this was the point at which the father and son partnership took the step into the unknown. Waterworks engineering contracts would have been in the offing in Tarapaca, and the triumvirate had the connections and experience to make the most of them. 

That they did so was in no small part due to a number of circumstances. First, the training and experience afforded by Coplands - and not least the connections - made entering the business of engineering consulting in Chile entirely possible. Secondly, the hard work on the Tarapaca Water Works had proven capability and determination in the face of almost overwhelming odds. Above all, perhaps, a schooling in engineering which supposed a fluency of technical command that come from engineering education grounded in practice in fields as varied as locomotive and rail engineering, drainage, water supply and storage engineering. Arguably it was the very British, or peculiarly Scottish, attitude to this fluency of skill that made it possible for the Parkers to succeed. 

---

[1] Luis Castro. (2009), ‘Visión histórica del manejo de los recursos hídricos en el Norte Grande de Chile (fines del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX)’ , Simposio “El acceso al agua en América: historia, actualidad y perspectivas”  53 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México, July 2009, p. 12. [My translation]

Meat flavour and the British palate: why so dull?

During the siege of Paris in 1870 a peculiar variety of animals were consumed from among the live specimens kept at the zoo in the city: lions, tigers and even elephants famously went to the abbatoir. What has always seemed extraordinary to British sensibilities, but perfectly normal to French ones, is that in the midst of the most remarkable dearth and rarity of meat the gourmands of the city could expend so much endeavour in describing and appreciating the subtle differences in the flavour of these exotic meats. Henry Labouchere, incarcerated in the city throughout the siege, noted 'Epicures in dog flesh tell me that poodle is by far the best, and recommend me to avoid bull dog, which is coarse and tasteless.' (Labouchere, 1871, p. 84).

William Hogarth 'The Roast Beef of Old England' (1748)

How such a refined epicurean sense of meat flavour obtained in France, and survived the rigours of the most withering and unremitting siege of nineteenth century Europe while England's dull 'rostbifs' dully and dutifully ate boiled and grilled meat with an apparent indifference to flavour and taste, has seemed almost to prefigure the caricatured differences between these two nations. The British, indifferent to flavour, sought sustenance and protein; the French, even in meagre privation, revelled in the taste of different, and differently cooked, meats and meat flavours. While France boasted the appreciative and discriminating palates with regard to meat of Grimod de La Reynière and Brillat Savarin, England possessed an attitude to meat best represented perhaps by George Dodds's observation that 'we may have acquired a sort of national taste for strong in preference to delicate flavours' (Dodd, 1856, p. 410), and Englishmen smothered indifferent meat with condiments to avoid meat flavour. The Exeter Post journalist seems largely correct who said of English meat cooking in 1865 that '...if the sauce were the dinner, truly there was nothing left to be desired. But...of meat flavour there was none' (Exeter Flying Post, 22nd February 1865).

Was there, in fact, something more than the caricature of the lazy and barbaric British palate for meat and the sophisticated and subtle French one behind this reported state of affairs? In recent years, a picture of English pasture agriculture has emerged which seems to suggest that English preferences for flavour as a significant component of discrimination in meat emerged only toward the end of the 19th century, and only then started to be translated into the realm of gourmet appreciation.

During the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century in England, 'improvement' focused primarily on yield and other elements of efficiency (such as improving herd survival rates and maximising the value of by-products such as tallow). However, even at the height of the movement to use breeding to improve output, there was some interest in improving the flavour of meat. The great breeding experimenter Robert Bakewell for instance, whilst interested principally in breeding sheep able to yield more wool, was not  indifferent to the claims of breeding's effect on flavour (Wykes, 2004). Arthur Young, noting the impact of Bakewell's work on mutton quality in 1804, noted in fact that the effect of selective breeding on flavour was understood even in the kitchens of Eton College (Young, 1804, 454-5), while later writers, such as Low (1834, 541) reflected that the most successful of the new sheep breeds of the period (the Southdown cross, which with a broader back and deeper carcass produced more meat, tallow and wool) was conspicuously improved in meat flavour too.

It was not until the 1850s, though, that flavour became a dominant or even significant element in breeding and husbandry (Copus, 1989), and only then largely due to the declining significance of non-meat animal products in domestic trade. The science of breeding, such as it was, began to interest itself in the effect on meat quality and meat flavour, and - through the new agricultural chemistry of the 1860s - in taint, kinetics in cooking and the effect of preservation techniques on flavour. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the 20th, as Richard Perren has shown (Perren, 2006), selective breeding for flavour in the extensive hacienda and prairie farms of the New World was responding increasingly to flavour requirements, and flavour fashions, in European dining rooms. It is for this reason that, until the gourmand years of the last quarter of the century, English palates accepted 'bad beef badly cooked' while Frenchmen could, even as German mortars fell about Paris, dine appreciatively on rare meats with relish - and even then, not one manufactured by Herr Liebig.

References

Copus, A.K. (1989), 'Changing Markets and the Development of Sheep Breeds in Southern England 1750–1900' Agricultural History Review, 37, 1, 36-51

Dodd, G., (1856) The Food of London (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman)

Labouchere, H. (1871) Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris (London: Bradbury Evans & Co.)

Low, D. (1835) Elements of practical agriculture : comprehending the cultivation of plants, the husbandry of the domestic animals, and the economy of the farm (Edinburgh : Bell & Bradfute)

Perren, R. (2006), Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840 (Aldershot: Ashgate)

Wykes, D.L. (2004), 'Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) of Dishley: Farmer and Livestock Improver' Agricultural History Review, 52, 1, 38-55

Young, A. (1804), General view of the agriculture of the county of Norfolk : drawn up for the consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal improvement (London: R. Phillips)

Art goes to the theatre: Montague Penley (1799-1881)

The Penley family is well known to historians of English watercolour not least because of the influential English School of Painting in Water Colours (1861) by Edwin Penley, which made a deep impression on later 19th century watercolourists.

The Penley family, though, was a theatrical as well as an artistic one and in at least one of their number they managed to combine these two aspects. Montague Penley (1799-1881) was scene painter, artist, theatrical manager and impressario and art teacher. In a long life he failed to make a substantial mark on the artistic memory of Britain while having paintings in the Paris Salons of 1844, 1846 and 1848 (http://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/salonartists/artist/id/6918), and although nine of his paintings and drawings survive in major English collections (http://www.sussexrecordsociety.org/jflistartistspics.asp?Id=407) unlike Aaron and Edwin Penley he does not appear in exhibitions of 19th century English painting and drawing. The recent appearance at auction of a pencil drawing (below)

Montague Penley (n.d.) The Plague of Epirus

(http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/9931486) suggests that he was technically accomplished in perspective - for reasons which will become clear – but was a conventional and unimaginative artist rather than an innovator even in his main field of artistic practice, which was stage scenery.


The facts of his life are unremarkable enough. Montague John Jackson Penley (one of three theatrical brothers and born to a theatrical father) was born in 1799 in Folkstone Kent and died in Brighton on November 11th 1881 (London Standard, 15 November 1881). In 1829 he married Laetitia Sarah Didsbury at St Georges, Bloomsbury 1829 (Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 24 December 1829). Laetitia died in Brighton on March 31 1866 aged 67 (Berkshire Chronicle - 7th April 1866). It was, though, a life of some incident and colour - colourful in the Victorian sense of being of untrammeled and unpredictable variety - if of no enduring significance beyond his death.

By the age of 20, while following his father Sampson's theatre company around the country, he'd begun work as a scenery painter. One enthusiastic contemporary report says, 'The new scenery and painting of the Theatre [in Brighton] are, we learn, by Mr Montague Penley, and deserve our warmest praise, particularly a new front drop which has a most pleasing effect' (Sussex Advertiser 15 November 1819), while ‘Proscenium, Wings and several of the Scenes by Mr Montague Penley’ at the York Theatre were evidently admired a year later (Yorkshire Gazette, 9th February 1822). 


Clearly of some at least local popularity, he was accorded a Benefit night at the same theatre that year (Yorkshire Gazette, 13 April 1822), somewhat unusual for a painter of scenery even if the theatre manager happened to be the artist's father. At a time when innovation in stage scenery was transforming theatrical productions such that, as Christopher Baugh suggests, there was for the first time a realization of 'the potential of scenery for becoming the leading performer and protagonist in the theatre' (Christopher Baugh, ‘Stage Design from Loutherbourg to Poel’, in Donohue, J (ed.) The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 2, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge:2004) p.315) scene painting had the power to lift provincial productions to the status of art, depending on the talent of the artist. How little, or how much, skill was deployed by artists like Penley is difficult to assess – little survives of the scene painters’ art of the 1820s to allow that – but the reception of his efforts appears to have been both positive and heartfelt.


Following Sampson's company meant long journeys from the south coast to the Home Counties, and from there to Yorkshire and Tyneside, and even further afield. Sampson, whose similarity to Dicken’s Vincent Crummels (failures and all) is all too painfully clear (see Alan Stockwell, Finding Sampson Penley (Vesper Hawk Publishing: 2012)), was safely installed as leasing manager of the theatre at Windsor when, in 1822, he took his company on tour to France and the Low Countries, with Montague coming too.  From the coast of France he, Sampson, wrote to the British Ambassador in Paris as follows:

‘May it please your Excellency,

Having opened a theatre at Calais and Boulogne with English plays and entertainments which have been Honoured by the highest patronage of the French and English, and having been solicited by several persons of distinction to bring the company for a short season to Paris take the liberty most humbly to sought that your Excellency will be pleased to obtain the permission for the same which should I be so happy as to obtain, trust that the merit and the respectability of the performance will merit your kind indulgence.I beg to subscribe myself

Your Excellency's Most faithful and humble servant.

S. Penley.

P.S. Beg leave to say that my company have for several years performed at the Theatre Royal Windsor under the immediate patronage of the Royal family - solicit that your leave will extend to keep our theatre open at Boulogne until the close of the season’ (J.L. Burgerhoff, Le théâtre anglais à Paris sous la restauration (Hachette et cie, Paris: 1913), p. 215)


When they reached Paris, they were not well received (a not uncommon experience for Sampson Penley, but significant here as perhaps occasioning the first theatre riot after Waterloo in Paris involving an English touring company) (ibid, pp. 22-27). It was a disaster of a European tour, and the Penleys returned to England dispirited and not a little out of pocket. (Incidentally the father of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was a member of the Penley company in France (Asia Booth Clarke, The elder and the younger Booth, (J.R. Osgood and Company, Boston: 1882): p. 9). 


It would have been on the occasion of the French tour that Montague sought to further his artistic education, remarking in a print advertisement when teaching art in the Windsor area that 'His proficiency in [art] was acquired under the celebrated Monsieur Cheni, professor of the Academie Royale, Paris' (Windsor and Eton Express, 30th September 1826). Acquiring proficiency in 1822 would have meant close attention to Salon-approved genre and history painting conventions in which perspective, the drama of emotional spasm and the heightened significance of tonal light and shade reflecting emotion dominated composition. These, of course, were precisely the elements that would translate so well to the theatrical context, and for that reason a Paris based artistic training would have been valuable to the theatrical family. Whether he received a formal training, or merely observed academic formalist artistic practice without touching a canvas himself, cannot be confirmed.


With his father's death in Paris in the summer of 1838, Montague took on the company and the engagements as actor/manager, leasing theatres across England - and presumably seeing out his father's leases initially. Playgoers in Windsor read that, “Mr Montague Penley has announced his intention to open this theatre [Windsor] for the season, on the 31^st of this Month” (Reading Mercury, 28 July 1838; London Dispatch, 16 September 1838) - with presumably but a short interval between hearing of the death of his father and being forced to literally keep the show on the road. He was evidently good at the job since the Morning Post of 8th September 1838 described the theatre as having ‘a rapid succession of the most popular pieces, got up with great taste and splendour’.


But this had not been his first time in charge. What one notices particularly about these independent forays, and indeed in his subsequent management, is the close alignment of the artistic and the theatrical talent of the impressario. In Newcastle from 1835 he was Manager of the Theatre (Newcastle Journal, 12 December 1835) where ‘Particular attention will also be paid to the scenic department’ and, in 1836, his productions featured a lavish ‘Panorama of Virginia Water’ (Newcastle Journal, 9 January 1836), the latter effort almost certainly intended to recall Clarkson Stanfield’s panorama of Virginia Water deployed in Drury Lane in 1829. It was Stanfield's triumph of which the Spectator critic noted ‘The painting is the finest thing, of the kind that has ever appeared in London’ (Spectator, 26^th December 1829, p. 9), and was a graphic representation which was a prodigious piece of mechanical and artistic skill including a ‘real’ waterfall and effects of breathtaking novelty. It is improbable that Penley managed to reproduce the same sophisticated effects, but he barely needed to do so in Newcastle: in small provincial theatres static but well rendered natural scenes could work wonders for an audience.

The Theatre Royal, Newcastle

The Newcastle Courant reported on the opening of the new Theatre in Newcastle in 1837 as follows,

'On Monday last, the New Theatre, in Grey-street, in this town, was opened for the first time under the management or Mr Montague Penley, and was attended by a very crowded audience. The building itself is most splendid. The boxes and gallery are beautifully embellished with richly gilt ornaments, and each panel (eleven in number) of the second circle of boxes, contains a very beautiful group of dancing boys, executed by Mr Penley and Mr John Reed. The ceiling of the auditory is divided into sixteen panels, in which are, alternately, figures of dancing nymphs and groups of musical instruments; the mouldings, &e. forming the divisions of the panels, are richly ornamented and gilt. From the centre hangs a large and brilliant cut-glass chandelier, executed by Mr Watson. The alcove off-the procenium [sic] is richly ornamented with rays executed in gold, and over it are the royal arms, richly-gilt. The boxes are lined with rich crimson paper, and the whole of the seats are covered with crimson moreen, executed by Mr. William Clark of the Royal Arcade.The new scenes, which have been, executed by Mr Penley and assistants, are bold, striking, and effective, and display great excellence as works of art. The lighting of the Theatre is not so brilliant as might have been expected from the number of lights, but the Proprietors, it is understood, are about to introduce Argand burners into the small chandeliers instead of the imitative candles at present in use, which will obviate the defect. Considering the rapidity with which the building has been erected, the interior, particularly the boxes and pit, are remarkably dry.' (Newcastle Courant, 24th of February 1837).


While in later life failures of management and not of art (which was already taking something of a backseat in his career by the 1840s in any case) determined the course of his career, the effect of Penley’s use of artistic skill on provincial productions seems to have been real and appreciated. After virtual ruin from the unsuccessful management of the Lyceum Theatre in London following only three weeks of an intended run (The Era, 19 April 1874), theatre played less of a role in his life. In retirement in Sussex he threw himself into a variety of minor artistic endeavours (serving on the Sussex (Brighton) Local Board of the Society of Arts, the Brighton and Sussex Natural History Society for whom he produced drawings, and as an informal artistic director of the Pavilion Committee in Brighton), but perhaps his modest contribution to artistic practice was in the theatre and not the art gallery – and it is for that reason as much as any that he is now forgotten.