Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books: A Quick Guide
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On this page, we feature extended articles on Writers’ Lives from the Chiswick Timeline of Writers and Books. The entries have been written by members of the Chiswick Writers Research Group, brought together by the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society. Its members are: Francis Ames-Lewis, Val Bott, Meg Clarke, Hazel Dakers, Diana Oppé and James Wisdom – and we are very grateful to them. They are happy to respond to any queries. As with all history, they say, the entries are only provisional – they may spark more details or alterations, which they will be happy to hear about and incorporate into revised entries. Please address comments and queries to admin@chiswickbookfestival.net.
Return to Chiswick Timeline: Writers’ Lives
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Kenneth Coules Barnaby (1887–1968)
Naval Architect, born in Chiswick, from 1895 at The Hollies (later Heron House), Chiswick Mall until his family and Thornycroft moved to Southampton in 1909. 100 Years of Specialised Shipbuilding and Engineering (1964) a commemoration history of Thornycroft.
Kenneth Barnaby was appointed Thornycroft’s Naval Architect in 1924, was awarded the OBE in 1945 and retired in 1955. His father, Sydney Barnaby, had become Thornycroft’s Naval Architect in the mid-1880s and served until his son replaced him. Kenneth’s grandfather, Sir Nathanial Barnaby KCB, was the Director of Naval Construction for the Royal Navy from 1872 to 1885. Coules is the maiden name of Blanche, John Isaac Thornycroft’s wife.
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Edward Baynard (1641 – fl. 1719).
Physician and poet. Health, a Poem. Shewing how to procure, preserve, and restore it. To which is annex’d The doctor’s decade by Dabry Dawne M.D. [Edw Baynard] (London 1719), was printed in at least nine editions before 1764.
Born probably at Preston in Lancashire, Baynard moved between London and Chiswick at the time of the great plague of 1665. Could this be distantly connected with the enlargement of parish cemeteries in 1349, including that at Chiswick where ‘on 22 April the king licensed John de Bray, a Chiswick resident, to provide half an acre of land to the dean and chapter of St Paul’s in their capacity as parsons’? Baynard studied at the University of Leyden from 1671, and probably graduated from that seat of learning; he was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1687. His popular book Health, a Poem, consists of homespun advice about health and medicine. It is based largely on his experience as a physician both in London and at the hot baths at Bath between 1675 and 1701, and is prefaced by a diatribe principally on the evils of drunkenness. Baynard also wrote a letter, appended to ‘The ancient Psychrolousia revived’ (1702), Sir John Floyer’s treatise on cold bathing, which contained ‘an Account of many Eminent Cures done by the Cold Baths in England; together with a Short Discourse of the wonderful Virtues of the Bath Waters on decayed Stomachs, drank Hot from the Pump.’ He is thought by some to have been the ‘Horoscope’ of Sir Samuel Garth’s Dispensary (1699), a satirical epic poem about the construction of a dispensary for the poor at the Royal College of Physicians.
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Mary Berry (1763-1852)
Mary Berry, author, was born 16 March 1763, at Kirkbridge in Yorkshire. From the time of their mother’s death, when Mary was 4 years old, she and her sister were brought up by their grandmother, Mrs. Seaton, at Askham, in Yorkshire. When Mary was 7, in 1770, they moved to College House, Chiswick Mall. Once she was 12, Mary’s governess married and from then she and her sister were entirely self-educated and later enjoyed European travels. The two sisters charmed Horace Walpole in his old age. He persuaded them to move close to him at Little Strawberry Hill, formerly the home of his friend the actress Kitty Clive and dedicated his Catalogue of Strawberry Hill to them. It was rumoured Walpole would have liked to marry one of the sisters to provide for their future. At his death they received a bequest and Mary was responsible for the publication of Walpole’s letters and other writing. She also published a number of her own works including: Some Account of the Life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell, followed by a series of Letters from Lady Russell to her husband, Lord William Russell, from 1672 to 1682, together with some Miscellaneous Letters to and from Lady Russell. The work was published from the originals in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. The first volume of her most ambitious work, ‘A comparative View of the Social Life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution,’ was published in 1828; a second appeared in March 1831, called ‘Social Life in England and France from the French Revolution in 1789 to that of July 1830.’ http://www.historyhome.co.uk/people/berry.htm
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Rev Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844)
Born Gibraltar. First poetry published aged 15. Published his translation of Dante’s Inferno in English blank verse in 1805 and completed the entire Divine Comedy in 1814. Italian poet Ugo Foscolo considered this not only the best translation in the English language, but the best in any language. It was promoted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge who admired the work.
In 1814 became Reader (or Curate) to St Nicholas Church and leased Hogarth’s House from then till 1833. Appointed Assistant Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum in 1826. Welcomed fellow poets and writers to his second home in Chiswick, including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincey and Gabriele Rossetti. Spent his last years revising his translation of Dante. Buried in Westminster Abbey.
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John Chardin (1643–1713)
Huguenot jeweller, traveller and travel-writer. Le couronnement de Soleïmaan troisième, roy de Perse (Paris, 1671); Journal du voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes orientales (Paris, 1686); The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, &c. (London, 1686); Journal du voyage du chevalier Chardin (10 vols, Amsterdam, 1711). He lived in Arlington House, Turnham Green, by 1705 (when John Evelyn commented favourably on the gardens) until his death in 1713.
Born Jean-Baptiste Chardin in Paris, the son of a rich Parisian jeweller, he followed his father into the jewellery trade. In 1664 he left Paris on his first journey to the East Indies. He reached Persia, via Constantinople, in 1666, and shortly became Shah Abbas II’s agent for the purchase of jewellery. He visited India in 1667-1669, returning to Paris in 1670. In 1671-73 he travelled again to Isfahan where he stayed for four years, returning to Europe via India in 1677-80. Due to the persecution of the Huguenots in France in 1681, Chardin settled in England. He continued his profitable trade in jewellery, and was knighted and appointed Court Jeweller to Charles II. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1682, when he was living at Holland House, Kensington; and from 1684 he was for several years English envoy in Holland and an agent for the Dutch East India Company. In 1713 Chardin was buried in St Nicholas, Chiswick. Chardin Road, running between Elliott Road and Turnham Green Terrace, is named after him.
The first of the projected four volumes of his Journal was published in 1686 concurrently in French and English. An English translation of Chardin’s first publication, The Coronation of Solyman III, the Present King of Persia was included with the 1686 translation of his Journal, entitled The Travels of Sir John Chardin… This is the first part of his journal account of his second trip to Persia. Three more volumes of his Journal were finally published simultaneously in ten duodecimo volumes in Amsterdam in 1711. Chardin had good Persian, and full access to the Safavid court: the detailed accounts of the places and people he encountered and his descriptions of contemporary Persian politics are reliable and well regarded.
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Mavis Cheek (1948-2023) (updated July 2023)
Writer of comic novels for some of which Chiswick forms the background – Pause Between Acts, Parlour Games, Dog Days, Aunt Margaret’s Lover, Yesterday’s Houses. Born in Wimbledon. Lived at 48 Oxford Rd South 1978-1990 and 11 Gordon Rd 1990-2001. Later, Mavis Cheek lived for some years in Wiltshire before moving to Brentford.
Born in Wimbledon in 1948, Mavis Cheek grew up there. Her career started with Editions Alecto, contemporary art publishers who opened a West End Gallery in the 1960’s. By working in the gallery – with artists such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres, Ed Ruscha and Bridget Riley – Mavis learned about modern and contemporary art. Despite being happy there for 12 years, Mavis left to study for an Arts degree at Hillcroft College for Women.
Shortly afterwards her daughter Bella was born and Mavis began writing for a living. Starting as a journalist and travel writer, next she wrote short stories and in 1988 her first, prize winning novel, Pause between Acts, was published by Bodley Head. This was also the first of her novels to take place in Chiswick of which there were several more:
1989 Parlour Games, 1990 Dog Days, 1994 Aunt Margaret’s Lover, 2006 Yesterday’s Houses
To date, 2020, there have been a further 11 novels and short stories published in various collections. Mavis Cheek’s writing has a keen sense of the ridiculous and her novels are always infused with humour.
Mavis’ professional activities have included serving on the committees of PEN, Writers in Prison and The Society of Authors. She has taught creative writing courses in prisons and elsewhere in the UK and abroad. She is both founder and patron of the Marlborough Literature Festival.
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Lady Mary Coke (1727- 1811)
Letter and journal writer. She bought Morton House, Chiswick, four years before her death there in 1811. Sir Stephen Fox built it late in the 17th century She is best known for the pithy journal she kept from 1766 to 1791, making pointed observations of people in her circle and political figures. It was for her own amusement and only published in 1889. Morton House, Chiswick (1807-1811).
Lady Mary Coke (1727-1811) was the fifth and youngest daughter of the soldier and politician John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll (1680-1743), and his second wife, Jane (c.1683-1767). She lived in Aubrey House, in the Campden Hill area of Holland Park from 1767 to 1788. She bought Morton House, Chiswick four years before her death there in 1811. This later became merged into Chiswick House Grounds*. She enjoyed gardening and reading history. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in her father’s family vault on 11 October 1811.
She is mainly known for her vivid journal involving pointed observations. It was never intended for publication but written to amuse herself and for her sisters, most especially Anne (1719/20-1785), who had married William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford, in 1741. She began writing it in August 1766 and stopped making regular additions in January 1791, when Anne’s husband died. The published edition includes entries only up to December 1774. (Her great-great-great-nephew James Archibald Home edited this edition., published in 1889).
After 1791, Lady Mary continued to pass on her opinions to friends and relatives, such as her niece Lady Frances Scott (her sister Caroline’s daughter by her first marriage to Francis, earl of Dalkeith) and her first cousin once removed Lady Louisa Stuart.
She married on 1 April 1747, Edward Coke, Viscount Coke (1719-1753); son of Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester. Edward left her alone on their wedding night and from then on virtually imprisoned her at his family estate at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. She never used the title Viscountess Coke and was legally separated for more than three years before his death in 1743, when she was 26. Lady Mary never remarried, but with money from her father and the Viscount she lived an independent and varied life.
https://www.rct.uk/collection/1081423/the-letters-and-journals-of-lady-mary-coke-volume-first-1756-1767-edited-by-j-a
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Edward Gordon Craig (1872 – 1966)
OBE, CH (1958), theatrical theorist; actor, director and stage designer. The Art of the Theatre (1905); Towards a New Theatre (1913); Henry Irving (1930); Ellen Terry and her Secret Self (1931); Index to the Story of My Days (1957). He lived at 20 Addison Road (now Grove), Bedford Park, W4, from1895 to 1897.
Edward Gordon Craig (the surname he adopted in 1893) was born in 1872, the illegitimate son of the architect William Godwin and the actress Ellen Terry. With his wife Helen May Gibson, including the dancer Isadora Duncan. Early in his career, from the age of twelve, whom he married in 1893, he had five children; and he fathered five more with a series of mistresses Craig acted with Sir Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre company; but his acting career ended in 1897, when he moved into stage design and directing. His first production, of Dido and Aeneas, was influential in reviving interest in the then little-known music of Henry Purcell. In 1911 he directed a celebrated production of Hamlet for Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. Later, he insisted on having full artistic control over any project that he directed or designed, which resulted in his withdrawal from theatre directing.
Craig was a theorist whose writings had considerable influence on the development of theatre in the twentieth century. Although he published no writings while he lived in Chiswick, later he wrote important theoretical works The Art of the Theatre (1905; and republished in 1911 as On the Art of the Theatre) and Towards a New Theatre (1913). He also wrote two theatrical biographies, Henry Irving (1930) and Ellen Terry and her Secret Self (1931), and an autobiographical memoir, Index to the Story of My Days (1957). He was the editor and principal writer for the earliest international theatre magazine, The Mask. In On the Art of the Theatre Craig examined the problems of stage directing, arguing that it was performers, not dramatists, who created the first works of true drama. The ideal director should seek a faithful interpretation of the text, and must be committed to training in all aspects of dramatic art.
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Anthea Craigmyle (1933 – 2016),
Painter, illustrator and editor. A Vicarage In The Blitz. The Wartime Letters of Molly Rich 1940 – 1944, edited and illustrated by Anthea Craigmyle (2013). She lived in the (Old) Vicarage, Chiswick Mall, W4 2PJ (1934 – 1944) and at Cedar House, Chiswick Mall, W4 2PS (1999 – 2016).
Born in 1933 in the Vicarage of St Nicholas Church, Anthea Craigmyle (née Rich) was the fourth child of Canon Edward Rich (Vicar of Chiswick, 1934 – 1944) and his wife Molly. She trained as a painter at Chelsea School of Art (1950 – 1953), taught inter alia by Ceri Richards, and Julian Trevelyan. She married in 1955 Thomas Donald Mackay Shaw, 3rd Baron Craigmyle, who died in 1998. In 1939 the Rich family gave refuge to a 20-year-old Austrian named Otto, who in 1940 was interned at Huyton, Lancashire, and latterly in Australia; late in 1942 he joined the Pioneer Corps and then the army, serving in England, France and Germany. Having adopted him as though her fifth child, Molly Rich wrote over 600 letters to Otto, between 1940 and 1944. After her death in 1974, Molly’s letters were handed back by Otto to Anthea Craigmyle, who took on the responsibility of editing them into a vivid account of life in Chiswick Vicarage during World War 2, providing her book with warmly humorous pen and ink illustrations.
Life in Chiswick Vicarage during the war was chaotic. The Riches had four children, and also housed the Curate, Fred Wright. Several bedrooms accommodated further refugees from Estonia, Austria, Germany and Belgium, evacuees from blitzed London, and visiting family and friends. Molly Rich was not raised to run a household, and her incompetent cook departed in 1940. In addition to keeping house, she undertook much parish work, dug up the lawn to grow vegetables, constructed an air-raid shelter in the cellars and joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Mothers’ Union. She also found time regularly to send letters written with great charm, humour and energy to her evacuated children, and to members of her extended family at home and abroad; and to Otto, for whom ‘these letters kept me alive’.
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William Dalrymple (b. 1965)
Historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a broadcaster and critic. Dalrymple first went to Delhi on 26 January 1984, and has lived in India on and off since 1989. He spends most of the year at his Mehrauli farmhouse in the outskirts of Delhi, but summers are in Chiswick and Edinburgh. His first book, In Xanadu, written in 1986 when he was only 22, described following on foot the outward route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia. He began with travel writing with an historical element, then moved on to history and art history, particularly of the Indian sub-continent.
Dalrymple is the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle. He is a cousin of Virginia Woolf. His interests include the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity. All of his eight books have won literary prizes. His most recent book, published in 2019, is The Anarchy, a history of the Indian Subcontinent during the period from 1739 to 1803, which saw the collapse of the Mughal imperial system, rise of the Maratha imperial confederacy, and the militarisation and rise of power of the East India Company. A list of his numerous books can be found at: http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/books
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Edith Brearey Dawson, née Robinson (1862-1928)
Water-colourist, jeweller and enamellist, worked collaboratively with her husband Nelson Dawson, m 1893, a metalworker with whom she collaborated. Born Croydon into a Quaker family, lived at Swan House, Chiswick Mall 1898-1911 then at Staithe House, further upstream on Chiswick Mall. In 1906 Edith published Enamels in the “Little Books on Art ” series, dedicated to her daughters.
Edith’s health was affected by her work and she ceased to undertake enamelling from about 1914. Sources: Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain & Ireland 1851-1951 [https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1203113444]; Rhoda Bickerdike (nee Dawson), The Dawsons: An Equal Partnership of Artists, Apollo, November 1988, p. 321.
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John Denham (1615 – 1669), KB (1660).
Poet, playwright and translator. The Sophy: A Tragedy (1641); Cooper’s Hill (1642); The Anatomy of Play (1651); The Destruction of Troy (1656). [Warwick Draper, in Chiswick (1973 ed., p.70) states, without supporting evidence, that Denham ‘lived in Chiswick’].
A staunch Royalist, John Denham was born in Dublin; his father (also Sir John Denham) was Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. Educated in London, at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Lincoln’s Inn (admitted to the Bar in 1639), Denham was appointed High Sheriff of Surrey and governor of Farnham Castle in 1642. He spent five years (1643-48) at Charles I’s court at Oxford. After the king’s execution, Denham served Queen Henrietta Maria in Paris, and in 1650 was in Poland raising funds in support of Charles II. At the Restoration he was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works by Charles II in 1660, was knighted (KB) in the same year; and was elected MP for Old Sarum (1661) and FRS (1663). In around 1665 he commissioned, and perhaps designed, the original Burlington House on Piccadilly. In 1665 he married a second wife, Margaret Brooke, who openly became mistress to James, Duke of York: this scandal appears to have stimulated Denham’s madness (or perhaps this was dementia). However he recovered from this after his wife’s death in 1667, which was rumoured to have resulted from poisoning, for which no evidence was discovered.
In 1636 Denham wrote an English paraphrase of the Aeneid Book 2: its publication in 1656 included a verse essay on the art of translation. His best-known poem is Cooper’s Hill, in which he sensitively described the landscape of the River Thames around the family home at Egham, Surrey. This poem established Denham as the first contemplative poet of the English rural, topographical landscape: it was described by John Dryden as ‘the exact standard of good writing’. His collected poems were first published in 1668, and at the end of his life he wrote several scathing political satires castigating the conduct of the Dutch war. He died in his London office, apparently of apoplexy, in March 1669, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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Ford Madox Ford (1873 – 1939)
Novelist, poet and critic. Books include Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work (1896); The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906 – 1908); The Good Soldier (1915); Henry James: A Critical Study (1915); the Parade’s End trilogy (1924 – 1928); Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance(1924); The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1929); Return to Yesterday(a memoir; 1931). He was editor of the English Review (founded 1908) and the Transatlantic Review (founded 1924). Ford never lived in Chiswick, but sections of his trilogy Parade’s End were set in Bedford Park.
Born Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873, Ford Madox Ford adopted the name ‘Madox’ after his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and changed his surname to ‘Ford’ in 1919. In 1894 he married Elsie Martindale, and they lived on Romney Marsh and from 1901 at Winchelsea, becoming a friend of writers living nearby, such as Henry James, H.G.Wells and Stephen Crane. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad, who became a friend and literary collaborator. Together they wrote Romance (1903), and after Conrad’s death in 1924 Ford wrote a biographical memoir of him; this is one of his most affecting books, combining criticism with reminiscence.
Ford was a prolific novelist and critic, with some 80 books to his name; he was described by Anthony Burgess (q.v.) as the greatest British 20th-century novelist. His most celebrated novel, The Good Soldier (1915), was included amongst The Observer’s ‘100 Greatest Novels of All Time’. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece of modernist technique, using an unreliable narrator to piece together a complex plot of sexual intrigue and betrayal through elaborate time-shifts’. Ford served in the Great War, was seriously wounded at the Somme in 1916, and contracted pneumonia in the Ypres Salient. His wartime experiences closely informed his Parade’s End trilogy. This is one of the greatest literary works about the First World War, and has been seen by some critics as one of the greatest works of fiction written in English. It is another important work of European modernism, extending Ford’s ‘experiments with presentation, exploring mental multiplicity, time, memory and “stream of consciousness”.’ He was also one of the 20th century’s finest literary critics, writing critical biographies of contemporaries and friends such as Henry James and H.G.Wells. In 1908 he founded and briefly edited the English Review, and in 1923, with Ezra Pound’s help, the Transatlantic Review, in which he published original work by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.
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Robert Fortune (1812-1880)
Horticulturist, traveller. He began work at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh before later taking up a post at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Chiswick in 1848. Working for the RHS and the British East India Company, Fortune was sent to China to collect new plant series and managed to secure clandestinely a large number of tea plants. The result, after grafting and propagation at the RHS in London, was the plantation of 20,000 tea plants in the Darjeeling region of India – the start of the tea industry in India. Other plants he introduced as a result of his later travels were the kumquat, as well as many varieties of tree peonies, azaleas, roses and chrysanthemums. Fortune died in London in 1880 and is buried in Brompton cemetery.
Publications include A Journey to the Tea Countries of China 1852
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Jo (Joseph) Grimond (1913-1993)
Politician and writer. The Leader of the Liberal Party from 1956-67 and in 1976 during the post Thorpe interregnum. Member of Parliament for Orkney and Shetland 1950-82. He died on Orkney and was buried in Finstown on Orkney. Upon leaving the House of Commons, he was created a life peer as Baron Grimond, of Firth in the County of Orkney on 12 October 1983. 24 Priory Avenue, W4 (1976-1993).
Books published while he lived in Chiswick include:
The Common Welfare (Temple Smith, London, 1978)
Memoirs (Heinemann, London, 1979)
A Personal Manifesto (Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983)
The St. Andrews of Jo Grimond (Alan Sutton, St. Andrew’s, 1992)
Jo (Joseph) Grimond (1913 -1993) was born in St Andrews, Fife, the son of Joseph Bowman Grimond, a jute manufacturer, and Helen Lydia Grimond (ne Richardson), lived in Chiswick at 24 Priory Avenue, W4 from 1976 until just before his death .He was educated at Eton. He read Modern Greats (PPE) at Balliol College, Oxford. His first political speech was in the general election of 1935, in support of Arthur Irvine, the Liberal candidate for Kincardine & West Aberdeenshire. Three years later, his marriage to Laura, youngest daughter of Lady Violet Bonham Carter and granddaughter of H. H. Asquith reinforced his Liberal convictions.
Grimond won the Orkney & Shetland seat for the Liberals at his second attempt in the 1950 general election with a majority of 2,956. Within two days of his election, he became Liberal Chief Whip. In the 1951 election he doubled his majority even though the Liberal vote in the country collapsed. He was the leader of the Liberal Party from 1956-67.
He appealed to the at that point younger generation of voters, who were not necessarily committed to the apparently class-dominated major parties. He made the party a respectable political organisation to join, and attracted experts who contributed to a real renaissance in Liberal thinking. In his books, The Liberal Future(1959), and The Liberal Challenge (1963), and in numerous pamphlets, he gave political liberalism a new direction and purpose.
He was the author of a number of further books, including The Common Welfare (1978), Personal Manifesto (1983) and The St Andrews of Jo Grimond (1992). He wrote his own autobiography, Memoirs (1979), and collaborated with Brian Neve on The Referendum (1976). He wrote a large number of pamphlets; key ones include The New Liberalism (1957) and A Roar For the Lion (1976.
https://liberalhistory.org.uk/history/grimond-jo-lord-grimond/
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William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
Poet, critic and editor, known for ‘Invictus’. Works include: Echoes (1888); A Book of Verse (1888); Views and Reviews (1890); London Voluntaries (1893); Poems (1898); Hawthorn and Lavender (1899); For England’s Sake (1900). Editor of The London (1877–1878); the Magazine of Art (1882–1886); and The Scots Observer, latterly The National Observer (1889-1893). Lived at 1 Merton Place, Chiswick High Road in 1887-8, later site of Merton Avenue. Sources: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-ernest-henley; Selected Letters of W.E. Henley, Damian Atkinson, Ashgate 2000, Routledge 2016
Henley endured periods in hospital because of tuberculosis, such as the 20 months in 1873-1875 spent in an infirmary in Edinburgh. At this time he started to write free-verse poems about hospital life, including his most celebrated and often quoted poem ‘Invictus’. These poems, some of which were published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1875, and later in A Book of Verses in 1888, are amongst the earliest British poems in free verse form; they have been described as anticipations of modern poetry also in their experimentation with sudden narrative shifts and internal monologue. He also wrote poems in old French forms, such as ballades, rondels and villanelles, which were collected and published by Gleeson White in 1888.
Henley was introduced in 1874 by Sir Leslie Steven, then the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, to Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he formed a close friendship that came to an end in 1888; Stevenson’s character Long John Silver in Treasure Island is in part based on Henley. In the Magazine of Art, Henley published enthusiastic studies of the work of Whistler, and of Auguste Rodin. Henley was an influential figure in late 19th-century literary circles: in the National Observer he brought to public notice the work of several major poets and writers, such as Thomas Hardy, G.B. Shaw H.G. Wells, William Butler Yeats, and Rudyard Kipling, among others. Henley was ready with encouragement for unknown talents and strident in his dismissal of undeserved reputations. The masculine, imperialist poets of the 1890s, sometimes known as ‘the Henley regatta’, stood in opposition to the ‘decadent’ poets of the time. Henley’s poems, such as ‘Invictus’, often deal with issues around inner strength and perseverance.
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Herbert Percy Horne (1864 – 1916).
Architect, typographer, art historian, editor, poet and antiquarian. The Binding of Books. An Essay in the History of Gold-Tooled Bindings (London, 1894); Alessandro Filipepi, commonly known as Sandro Botticelli, painter of Florence (London 1908; repr. Princeton, N.J. 1980). 6 Newton Grove, W4 (late 1870s).
An associate of the Rhymers’ Club in London, Herbert Horne was apprenticed in 1882 to, and in 1885 became partner of, the architect Arthur H. Mackmurdo. In 1882 Mackmurdo and Selwyn Image had established the Century Guild to promote the crafts of book decoration, typography and printing as fine arts. With Mackmurdo and Image, and with the guidance of Emery Walker and the Chiswick Press, Horne launched in 1884, and from 1886 edited, The Century Guild Hobby Horse (later simply The Hobby Horse), the first Victorian periodical devoted exclusively to the visual arts. The high quality of its production, layout and typography complemented the importance of the artistic ideals it espoused. It foretold and encouraged the growing Arts & Crafts concerns with graphic design and private-press printing. Horne published articles that argued in favour of the vital social role of art and artists: his was a journal that defined the purposes of art in late Victorian England, and was aimed at the most dedicated art lovers. Contributors included Oscar Wilde, the architect C. F. A. Voysey and the ceramicist William de Morgan.
In 1904 Horne moved permanently to Florence, purchasing in 1911 the Palazzo Corsi in which he established the Museo della Fondazione Horne. This was his private collection of Italian late medieval and Renaissance paintings and artefacts, including an important panel painting of St Stephen by Giotto di Bondone (c.1267 – 1337). Of his monograph on Botticelli (1908), which Horne dedicated to Walter Pater, John Pope-Hennessy wrote in 1979 that ‘As an interpretation of Botticelli and his work it has never been surpassed’; it is ‘the best monograph in English on an Italian painter’.
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Arthur Valentine Judges (1898-1973)
An economic historian who became a leader in the study of the history of education. Served in the London Rifle Brigade from 1915 and then the Tank Corps, and in the Home Guard in WWII. Taught and researched economic history at the LSE. From 1934 was Hon Sec of the Business Archives Council, in 1939 appointed Reader in Economic History at the LSE. Irish Labour in Great Britain, 1939-1945, for the Cabinet Office.
After the war, he moved to Kings College London as Professor of the History of Education. Edited Pioneers of English Education (1952). Wrote Report on Education in Southern Rhodesia (as Chair of the Commission, 1962-3). From 1972 onwards he was Professor of the History of Education at the Institute of Education, London. Vice-Chair of the Standing Conference on Studies in Education (which became the Society for Educational Studies), served on the editorial board of the British Journal of Educational Studies. He lived at Strand on the Green and was a founder member of the Strand on the Green Sailing Club, the Strand on the Green Association and the Brentford and Chiswick Local History Society.
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Jessie MacGregor (1847-1919)
Artist and writer. A prolific painter in water colours and oils, who exhibited widely c 1870 to 1914. Author and illustrator of Christmas Eve at Romney Hall (1900) and Gardens of Celebrities and Celebrated Gardens in and Around London (1918), which included Hogarth’s House, Walpole House and Chiswick House. She was living at 15 Bath Road, Bedford Park in 1913 and then with her brother and his family at Stamford Brook House in her last years.
Granddaughter of Archibald Alexander MacGregor, founder of the drawing academy in Liverpool where Jessie MacGregor studied before attending the Royal Academy schools. She won the Gold Medal in 1871 but as a woman could not become a full member of the RA. She painted profusely and exhibited in the UK and abroad from the 1870s to 1914. She also lectured on Italian art.
In 1900 Christmas Eve at Romney Hall, which she had written and illustrated, was published; she dedicated it to her sister Ella. The last thing she published was Gardens of Celebrities and Celebrated Gardens in and Around London (1918), which included Hogarth’s House and Chiswick House. She had been painting watercolours of London gardens for an exhibition. However, WW1 put paid to exhibitions and as she continued so she became increasingly fascinated by the subject and its history. Once the War was over, publication of a book was possible which she both wrote and illustrated.
Although the National Probate Calendar recorded her death in Camberwell House, a private lunatic asylum in Camberwell, it also described her as ‘of Stamford Brook House’ and listed her executor as Ellen Emily MacGregor, the widow of her brother Archibald Grey MacGregor (d 1909). In fact Jessie was a member of a significant artistic family which was established at Stamford Brook by the time of the 1901 Census. In 1913 Jessie was living at 15 Bath Road nearby. Her nephew, John McGregor (1890-1984), son of Archibald and Ellen, inherited Stamford Brook House; he became a conservation architect and oversaw the restoration of Hogarth’s House (after bomb damage) in 1951 for Middlesex County Council. Sources: Dictionary of British Women Artists, Sara Gray, 2009; family history records via ancestry.co.uk; Romney Hall poem online at https://static.torontopubliclibrary.ca/da/pdfs/37131062340781d.pdf
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Josias [Joe] Miller (1683/4 – 1738).
Comic actor, joker and epigrammatist. Joe Miller’s Jests, or The Wits Vade-Mecum; first edition ed. J. Mottley (a.k.a. Elijah Jenkins). London 1739. Miller lived for many years probably at Vernon Cottage on Strand-on-the-Green, W4, where he died in August 1738
A 1745 edition of Joe Miller’s Jests is described as ‘a collection of the most brilliant jests, the politest repartees, the most elegant bons mots, and the most pleasant short stories in the English language. First carefully collected in the company, and many of them transcribed from the mouth, of the facetious gentleman whose name they bear, and now set forth and published by his lamentable friend and former companion, Elijah Jenkins Esq.’ However, this collection in fact has little to do with Miller, who appears in only three of the stories: although it is essentially Mottley’s work it became a standard against which to judge weak jokes. To call a joke ‘a Joe Miller’ was to condemn it as an old joke that was probably not very funny in the first place. Miller acted at the Drury Lane theatre from 1709: Trinculo (The Tempest) and the First Grave-Digger (Hamlet) were among his favourite parts. It has been said (although this might well be apocryphal) that Miller could not in fact read, and that he married a wife who could read aloud to him the parts that he was to act, for him to commit to memory.
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Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847)
Irish barrister and politician – leader of the late C18th and C19th movement for catholic emancipation and an independent Ireland. Daniel O’Connell stayed in Chiswick Mall boarding house, in what became known as Walpole House during his time as a law student in London in the 1790s. It was not until 1835 onwards that his political thoughts and speeches were published, in part years after his death.
Born in County Kerry to very poor parents, O’Connell was adopted by a rich uncle who not only brought him up but also left his estate to his nephew. Daniel and his brother were in France at the time of the Revolution, fled Paris for Douay and during their return to England in 1793 heard about the execution of the French king.
It was at this point that he lodged at the boarding house now known as Walpole House on Chiswick Mall when he was studying law at Lincoln’s Inn. Confusingly a nephew of Sir Robert Walpole and his family lived in the house until 1799 when the nephew died. It is claimed that whilst in Chiswick O’Connell was arrested at the Old Packhorse Inn, Turnham Green for drunken and riotous behaviour.
O’Connell also studied at Grays Inn and was called to the Irish Bar in 1798 but, as a Catholic, could never take silk. During his time as a law student he attended the London treason trials of radicals Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, political activist and philologist who was ordained as a priest and resided in the parsonage at nearby Brentford.
In 1800 he made his first public speech in Dublin – against the Act of Union. In 1802 he married his cousin Mary who bore him four sons and three daughters. By 1811 he was attracting such good fees as a barrister that he was able to buy a house in Dublin’s elegant Merrion Square where he lived for the rest of his life.
O’Connell campaigned for repeal of the Act of Union giving public speeches as his legal work took him across Ireland. When this failed he persuaded Irish Catholics not to accept emancipation of Catholics in exchange for the British Government’s involvement in the selection of Catholic bishops. In 1823 O’Connell arranged the founding meeting of the Irish Catholic Association in Sackville Street, Dublin.
Thanks to Liverpool and Peel, the Irish Catholic Association was abolished by Parliament and so, quite legally, Daniel O’Connell established a new one in 1825 which in turn was banned. Whilst Catholics could not sit in Parliament, they could be elected members. O’Connell was thus elected for a vacancy in County Clare but did not at first seek to take his seat. Finally, the parliamentary oath was amended in order that he might do so. He remained MP for the same constituency to the end of his life. In this role he opposed the abolition of the Corn Laws and fiercely opposed American slavery. In 1841 O’Connell became Lord Mayor of Dublin. He organised Repeal Libraries and meetings all over Ireland. One such meeting expected to exceed all others in Clontarf (North Dublin) was banned at the last moment and the quiet dispersal of those gathered was overseen by O’Connell.
He had by now, through his rallying speeches and skillful debate and actions in Parliament become the central focus for Irish nationalism. Clontarf was followed by warrants for the arrest of Daniel O’Connell and a number of his associates. Prior to his imprisonment for a year he spoke at meetings in London and sat in the House of Commons. Within three months the trial was deemed unfair by sufficient judges to upturn the outcome. O’Connell and his co-triallists were released and feted upon return to Ireland.
By this time Daniel O’Connell had lost his previous fire, his final illness commenced. His hopes were destroyed by seeing the suffering of the Irish people during the famine, 1845-7. This, and the subsequent mass migration destroyed all hopes of fighting at that time for an independent Ireland. His Repeal Association split into Old and Young, the latter – unlike O’Connell – believing revolution to be the way forward. Ordered by his doctors to go abroad to a warmer climate O’Connell headed to Rome, but died on the way in Genoa.
His heart was buried in Rome at St Agatha and his body, after lying in state in Dublin’s Catholic cathedral, was buried at Glasnevin. His was the largest funeral, at that point, to take place in Ireland. He was one of the most admired British politicians by his peers abroad and one of the most hated by his political enemies at home.
* https://brentfordandchiswicklhs.org.uk/search-discover/chiswick-history-homepage/grand-houses/
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O’Connell’s letter from Chiswick:
To Maurice O’Connell, Darinane.
Chiswick, near London : December 10th, 1795.
My dear Uncle, I delayed answering your letter until I should have it in my power to inform you that I had changed my place of residence, in conformity to your desire.
On calculating the expenses of retiring to a cheaper spot, and of returning to keep my term in January, I found it would not answer; so I have dropped the scheme. I am now only four miles from town, yet perfectly retired. I pay the same price for board and lodging as I should in London; but I enjoy many advantages here, besides air and retirement. The society in the house is mixed; I mean, composed of men and women, all of whom are people of rank and knowledge of the world; so that their conversation and manners are perfectly well adapted to rub off the rust of scholastic education; nor is there any danger of riot or dissipation, as they are all advanced in life another student of law and I being the only young persons in the house. This young man is my most intimate acquaintance, and the only friend I have found amongst my acquaintance. His name is Bennett. 9 He is an Irish young man of good family connections and fortune. He is prudent, and strictly economical. He has good sense, ability, and application. I knew him before my journey to Ireland. It was before that period our friendship commenced; so that, on the whole, I spend my time here not only very pleasantly, but, I hope, very usefully…….
Refs: https://www.libraryireland.com/biography/DanielOConnell.php
https://brentfordandchiswicklhs.org.uk/search-discover/chiswick-history-homepage/grand-houses/
https://archive.org/stream/correspondenceof01oconuoft/correspondenceof01oconuoft_djvu.txt
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/learning/biographies/danieloconnell(1775-1847).aspx
Published works: Mr. O’Connell’s political tour to Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and other towns in the north of England and Scotland (1835). A memoir on Ireland native and Saxon , 5th ed, (c. 1845). The select speeches of Daniel O’Connell / ed. with historical notices by John O’Connell (1865). Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell: the liberator / edited with notices of his life and times by W.J. Fitzpatrick (1888). Songs from Bohemia, by Daniel O’Connell; edited by Ina D. Coolbrith; biographical sketch by Wm. Greer Harrison. San Francisco: 1900
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Joseph Paxton (1803–1865)
MP for Coventry (1854–1865), knighted 1851. Gardener, architect and garden designer, publisher and editor. A Pocket Botanical Dictionary, comprising the names, history, and culture of all plants known in Britain . . . (1840; revised ed. 1868); The Flower Garden (1850). Editor of The Horticultural Register (from 1831), The Magazine of Botany (from 1834), and (with John Lindley, Charles Wentworth Dilke and William Bradbury) The Gardeners’ Chronicle (from 1841). Lived in Chiswick 1823 – 1826.
Paxton’s career crystallised when aged 20 he got a job at the Horticultural Society’s gardens at Chiswick. His gardening work there so impressed the 6th Duke of Devonshire, of Chiswick House, that in 1826 he was invited to become Head Gardener at Chatsworth, a post that he held until the duke’s death in 1858. He increased the Chatsworth conifer collection into a still-extant 40-acre arboretum; reconstructed the model village of Edensor; and in 1844 created the Emperor Fountain. From 1832 Paxton developed skills in constructing glass houses, notably the massive Great Conservatory at Chatsworth (1836), designed for the Duke of Devonshire by his architect, Decimus Burton, and at the time the world’s largest glass building. This was followed in 1849 by the Victoria Regia House, constructed around the duke’s huge Victoria regia water-lily, a descendant of the sample sent to Kew from the Amazon in 1836.
This led Paxton into the experimental engineering of structures of cast iron ribs and cross-ribs that formed the basis of the design of the vast Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. This was a radical, prefabricated design in cast iron and glass on an unprecedented scale, more than eight times the length of the Chatsworth Great Conservatory. After the Great Exhibition closed, Paxton and others rebuilt the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, where it was destroyed by fire in 1936. Meanwhile in 1850 he designed Mentmore Towers for Baron Mayer de Rothschild, one of the grandest country houses of the 19th century; he designed public parks in Liverpool, Halifax and Scarborough; and in 1845 he laid out the early municipal cemetery in Coventry, in which there is a memorial monument to Paxton designed by Joseph Goddard in 1868.
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William Phillimore Watts Phillimore (1853 – 19130)
Born in Nottingham, died in Newton Abbot, buried in Bridgnorth. No evidence of his living in Chiswick traced, but he made a significant contribution to its history. With W H Whitear began publishing articles in the Chiswick Times in 1896. Phillimore & Whitear’s Chiswick: An Illustrated Quarterly Magazine devoted to the History & Antiquities of the Parish, followed, published at The Chiswick Times and by the authors at 124 Chancery Lane.
In 1897 they issued Historical Collections Relating to Chiswick, from Chancery Lane. Phillimore’s interest in local history grew from genealogical research into his own family; his father had changed his name from Stiff to Phillimore after his maternal grandmother. WPWP transcribed and published a substantial range of parish and other records, county by county and campaigned successfully for their safe preservation and care.
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Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)
Novelist, poet and travel writer. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789); A Sicilian Romance (1790); The Romance of the Forest (1791); The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); The Italian (1797); Gaston de Blondeville (1826). Non-fiction: A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795); the Collected Edition of her poems (1816). Her uncle Thomas Bentley (1730 – 1780), business partner to Josiah Wedgwood, was buried in St Nicholas, Chiswick.
Radcliffe published anonymously The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest brought her her initial fame. Her principal work, The Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, is one of the most celebrated English novels written in the ‘Gothic’ genre, in the following of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). The solitary castle of Udolpho, set high in the dark and majestic Apennines, reflects Walpole’s Otranto Castle: in its haunted atmosphere, strange and fearful events take place. This book cemented Radcliffe’s popularity as a novelist; it was well-known enough to be parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (published in 1817 but written in the late 1790s). Radcliffe also wrote an account of her travels in Holland and Germany in 1794. Her poetry, and her posthumously-published novel Gaston de Blondeville, which includes a good deal of verse, were relatively unsuccessful. In Radcliffe’s novels her female characters were the equal of the males: she let them dominate the powerful male villains and heroes, and considerably expanded the range of roles available to women in literature.
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Goronwy Rees (1909-1979)
Journalist, academic and writer. Lived at 5 Strand-on-the -Green and later in Bedford Park from 1975 until his death in 1979. Goronwy Rees worked as a journalist for The Guardian and The Spectator. A Marxist academic during the 1930s, Rees was friendly with Guy Burgess during this time and was probably recruited as a Soviet agent. From 1946-1949 he worked for MI6. In 1953 he became principal of The University College of Wales in Aberystwyth but was forced to resign, and leave academia, after publishing a series of revealing articles about Burgess and his fellow spy Donald Maclean.
He also told author Andrew Boyle that Anthony Blunt was one to watch, leading to Margaret Thatcher announcing in 1979 that he was known to have been a spy .Goronwy Rees wrote 10 books, including 2 autobiographies, A Bundle of Sensations and A Chapter of Accidents. (sources; WWW on Strand on the Green, Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees by Jenny Rees)
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Samuel Richardson (1689 – 1761)
Novelist and printer. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748); The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). From 1736 to 1738 Richardson rented a tenement near to Corney House, Sutton Court, Chiswick.
One of nine children of a joiner and cabinetmaker, Samuel Richardson was apprenticed at the age of 17 to the printer John Wilde. He established his own printing-shop in1719, and in 1733 he won the contract to print the Journals of the House of Commons. He later became a member, an officer and finally Master of the Stationers’ Company (the guild to which printers belonged), and he printed works such as the third edition of Daniel Defoe’s Tour through Great Britain (1742). From 1739 to 1754 he lived in a house in Fulham, later named ‘The Grange’. Later he moved to Parsons Green where he died aged 71; he was buried at St Bride’s, Fleet Street. By 1739 he was wealthy enough to lease the first of three country houses, in which he entertained such friends as Dr Johnson (q.v.), David Garrick, and William Hogarth (q.v.)
From early in his life Richardson was a prodigious letter-writer, which may have influenced his decision to write an epistolary novel, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740), sometimes described as the first novel in English, or the first modern novel. In the form of a long series of letters exchanged between Pamela Andrews and her parents, it records the struggles of the virtuous servant-girl to ward off the predatory ‘Mr B.’, the son of her deceased mistress, who finally falls in love with, and marries her.
The book was lampooned by Henry Fielding in his Shamela Andrews (1741), but Richardson went on to publish the lengthy Clarissa (1748), in which letters are exchanged between four correspondents who encourage each other to develop and reveal their characters over the course of the book. The hero of The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) was conceived as a model of benevolence and male virtue, a counter-weight to Fielding’s wayward hero in Tom Jones (1749). Richardson was a major figure in the development of the novel as a literary form, exploring his characters’ thoughts, self-awareness and emotional responses to social conflict in unprecedented depth and complexity, through what he termed as ‘writing to the moment’.
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Christine Shaw (dates not known)
Local historian. The Rebuilding of Chiswick Vicarage 1657-8 (London, BCLHS, 1982). Lived at Morton House, Chiswick Mall, 1953 – ca.1990. While researching the history of Morton House, Christine Shaw came upon the almost unbroken series of Ratebooks and Churchwarden’s Accounts, dating from 1621, in the archives of St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.
Her booklet traces the history of the financing and building of a new vicarage on Chiswick Mall. This project was approved at a Vestry meeting in October 1652 and progress was recorded in detail in the Ratebook for 1636-62. Demolition of the old vicarage began in summer 1657; construction of the new vicarage, in the hands of William Poynter (possibly a Dutch builder), and the local builder Henry Fisher and carpenter Edward Furniss, was completed with the tiling of the roof in late November that year. Fitting out of the interior seems to have been finished during 1658, at a cost of just under £281; the new Vicar, Revd James Thompson, took up residence in November 1658.
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Mel Smith (1952–2013)
Born to Ken and Vera Smith who ran her family’s greengrocery shop in Quick Road, Chiswick, London. They converted it to a bookmakers and made enough money to move to a semi-detached house. Mel was educated at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith and at New College, Oxford where he studied experimental psychology. He left and in 1963 became assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
Through the mid 70’s he had assistant director jobs around the country until he met actor Bob Goody and together they wrote and directed several productions including ‘Not the Nine O’Clock News’. In 1981 Mel and Griff Rhys Jones formed Talk Back Productions starting off with their series ‘Alias Smith and Jones’ plus such as ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ and ‘They Think It’s All Over’ . Mel moved onto producing and directing films such as ‘Radioland Murders’, ‘Bean, the Ultimate Disaster Movie’ and, ‘ The Tall Guy’ .. (IMBd)
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Don Taylor (1936 – 2003)
Playwright and director for stage, TV and radio. Stage plays: Grounds for Marriage (1967), The Roses of Eyam(1970), Daughters of Venice (1991; for Chiswick Youth Theatre (CYT)), Women of Athens (1993; for CYT). TV drama: The Exorcism (1972), A Last Visitor for Mr Hugh Peter (1981), and many others. Memoir: Days of Vision (1990). He lived at 33 Airedale Avenue, W4 2NV, from about 1970 to about 1995.
Don Taylor was born in 1936 in Chiswick, where he lived for almost the rest of his life. He was educated at Chiswick Grammar School, before studying English at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he met his wife Ellen Dryden (q.v.), and where he directed the world première of John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon (1957). He joined the BBC as a trainee, producing many TV plays, notably several by David Mercer (1960-1963). He refused an offer to produce the first series of Doctor Who, but continued to direct classics for BBC TV, such as his own translation of Sophocles’ Theban Plays (1986). Meanwhile, he continued to write for the stage: early successes were Grounds for Marriage (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 1967) and The Roses of Eyam (1970).
The BBC’s cancellation half way through screening of Taylor’s translation of Euripides’ War Plays in 1990 led him to quit TV drama to concentrate on writing stage plays. In 1985 he and his wife established Chiswick Youth Theatre (CYT) at Chiswick Community School, while their children Jonathan (q.v.) and Lucy were pupils. Taylor’s first production there was a successful Midsummer Night’s Dream; and there followed two more Shakespeare productions (The Merchant of Venice (1987) and a memorably comic Much Ado about Nothing(1991)), Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells (1986) and Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society (1992). Taylor wrote and directed several plays for CYT, notably Daughters of Venice (1991) and Women of Athens (1993), and the lyrics of two musicals with books by Ellen Dryden, The Burston Drum (1988) and Summer in the Park (1990). CYT was wound up in 1994, after which Taylor and his wife set up a professional company, First Writes, mainly to write and produce radio plays for the BBC. His last stage production was his and Ellen Dryden’s own The Road to the Sea, at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre in 2003, the year he died.
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Chief Superintendent Arthur Thorp (b 1900) A policeman who rose through the ranks to the top of the Metropolitan Police, set up the Fraud Squad and retired after 33 years to spend time on his sea-going cabin cruiser. He published his memoir Calling Scotland Yard: Being the Casebook of Chief Superintendent Arthur Thorp in 1954.
“Nat” Thorp started his police career at Chiswick in the early 1920s, and was billeted in a 7ft cubicle in the large police section house in Paddenswick Road, Hammersmith. He made his first arrest in Chiswick- a drunk reeling across the High Road. At night they patrolled in pairs, and he was popular amongst the older beat constables because he did not drink – but the publicans offered him the pint anyway. On one occasion, alone and cold, he did accept a drink and it knocked him sideways. Instead of staggering to Hammersmith he found a dinghy at Chiswick Mall to sleep in. When he woke the dinghy was bobbing on the high tide. He arrived on duty late and wet. He records his struggle to arrest “Sewer” Kelly, a local bully and tough, selling wilting violets by shoving them in people’s faces and aggressively swearing when they turned the offer down. “Sewer” had fallen head first into a drain once when drunk. Thorp’s transition to CID started when he went undercover in a bus garage to catch a bookmaker – the driver’s wives were complaining about their men losing most of their wages. And then he moved on from Chiswick.
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Dr John Todhunter (1839-1916)
Born Dublin 1839, where he studied medicine and three times won the Vice-Chancellor’s prize for English Verse. Poet, playwright and literary critic, as well as a doctor of medicine and an occasional painter and composer, he spent periods in Vienna and Paris before practising medicine in Dublin. Became a Professor of English Literature there in 1870, then resigned to travel. He settled in Bedford Park, first in Bath Road and then at “Orchardcroft”, The Orchard and was a member of the Calumet Club. He retained his links with the Irish literary revival and his later works re-interpreted Irish myths and legends. His verse plays inspired W B Yeats and he collected Jack B Yeats’ paintings; the Yeats family lived nearby. The “Playwright” of the Sette of Odd Volumes, he was its Secretary in 1892. He died in 1916 in Bedford Park.
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Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853 – 1917)
Actor, director and theatre manager. KBE (1909). An Essay on the Imaginative Faculty (1893); Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1913); Nothing Matters (1917). He lived at Walpole House, Chiswick Mall, W4 between 1904 and 1909.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree (Herbert Draper Beerbohm) was born in London in 1853. He is recognised as one of the great figures of the English theatre: he became the most successful actor-manager of his time: critics considered him to be the best character actor of his day.
In 1882 he married the actress Maud Holt; they had three daughters. Tree went onto the stage professionally in 1878. In 1887 he became manager of the Comedy Theatre, and later that year of the Haymarket Theatre. There he won high praise for adventurous programming and lavish productions, and he starred in many of the plays he produced including The Merry Wives of Windsor (1889), Hamlet (1892) and Henry IV, Part 1 (1896), through which he established himself as a leading Shakespearean actor. He also produced new plays such as Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1893), Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1893) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1896)
Her Majesty’s Theatre was constructed between 1895 and 1897 under Tree’s direction. Over the next two decades he produced and acted in some sixty plays there, overturning the received wisdom of the time that Shakespeare productions lose money, and creating stagings that appealed widely to his audiences. His successes included many of Shakespeare’s major plays, such as Julius Caesar, which was the theatre’s first commercial success in 1898, running for 165 consecutive performances. His longest-running revival, Henry VIII, ran for an extraordinary 254 performances in 1910 –1911. Tree founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1904, and he wrote several books discussing the importance of the theatre and the arts in modern society. He visited America in 1915 – 1916, where he was active in war propaganda and fulfilled a contract with a film company to Los Angeles. He died in 1917 of a blood-clot in the lung, not long after suffering an accident in which he injured his knee.
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James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903)
Painter and etcher. His Ten O’clock Lecture (1885) is a manifesto of his belief in ‘art for art’s sake’. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890) incorporated his pamphlet Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics (1878). Whistler never lived or worked in Chiswick, but he was buried in 1903 in Chiswick Old Burial Ground.
Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics was Whistler’s own account of the celebrated 1877 libel trial in which he sued Ruskin for maligning his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Ruskin wrote that he ‘never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. Whistler won the case, but was awarded only minimal damages, which left him bankrupt. In 1888 he married Beatrix, the widow of the architect William Godwin. Their fine bronze tomb, in ‘the place’, as Whistler wrote in a letter of 1897, ‘where I also at last hope to be hidden … for in no other would I be’, was designed by Beatrix’s son Edward Francis Godwin.