Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · Autumn 2023
The lost lake of Spencer Park and the Wilson family of Price's Candles
Welcome to the first in our series of three Autumn talks on the heritage of Wandsworth Common. Coming up on the 15th of November we have a talk from Sue de Mont on the railways of Wandsworth Common, and then on the 29th of November we'll be welcoming Philip back again to talk about sport and the development of sport on the Common. But tonight we're talking about the Black Sea.
Philip will be talking for about 45 minutes — that's the aim — and then there's about 15 minutes for questions, which will take us up to eight o'clock. I know that some people need to be away at eight, so do feel free to depart at that point if we haven't quite made the cut-off.
Can I just alert you to the fact that our best-selling book on the history of Wandsworth Common — The Wandsworth Common Story — is at the back of the room. If you don't already have a copy, I urge you to consider purchasing one. Christmas is coming. And if any of you are not currently members of the Friends, I encourage you to consider joining — please do talk to Richard or Julia at the back after the talk.
Philip probably doesn't really need any introduction — he's our go-to historian when it comes to Wandsworth Common — but I would urge you to consider signing up for his monthly newsletter, the Chronicles of the History of Wandsworth Common, which is a fascinating read every month. I'm not quite sure how he finds the time to produce it, but he does. I will now hand you over to Philip.
It's called "The Black Sea — Birth, Life and Death," and the reference to birth, life and death is not just to the origins of the lake itself but to the things that happened to people in and around it. There are births, there's a lot of life, and there are unfortunately an awful lot of deaths — which I'll talk about. Wandsworth Common is generally a very safe place, historically, but not so much in the 19th century, where quite a lot of rather unfortunate and very unpleasant things happened. There are some laughs as well, I hope.
The most famous image of the Black Sea is a beautiful watercolour, owned as I understand it by Wandsworth Council, which I have never been able to see in the original. Just so you know where you are: this is the Common as a whole, and we're going to be talking about the top end, which is where Spencer Park is. That is all that remains of the Black Sea.
The watercolour is beautiful. I don't know by whom it was painted. Clearly it was done after 1858 — that's when the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building was constructed, as an asylum for girls orphaned by fathers killed in the Crimean War — and there are no trees around the lake in the image at all, though some grass is visible, so it must be a few years later. I think these are the last days of the Black Sea, which was essentially around 1870.
Here is a Stanford map. You'll notice that what is now Emmanuel School — which was the equivalent patriotic school for boys — didn't yet exist. That school only lasted nine years before Emmanuel School took over, having outbid the local council, which couldn't afford the rates Emmanuel School could. That's why Emmanuel School is still there — but that's another story.
Starting with some maps: you can see this was quite a wet place. This is from the early 1860s. I came across the image originally on a beautiful card sold in Wandsworth libraries — that's where I found it — and when I went to the Art UK website (a really good website: 157 paintings and other images associated with Wandsworth, including some fantastic portraits going back centuries) this image was not among them. One day I would really like to see the original.
On the number of islands: the accounts vary. Some say there were 13 islands, some say seven. The maps do vary. One of what appears to be an island was in fact where the boathouse was, with an isthmus connecting it to the shore. In any case, there are no trees whatsoever in the earliest images, and no railway line — because Windmill Road didn't exist at that time, and nor did Earlsfield Road. Quite a lot of battles were fought over whether the people of Earlsfield, at the bottom of the hill, should have a through road to Clapham Junction. The conservators of Wandsworth Common did not want more roads. It was quite a battle to get Earlsfield Road created, and then extended into Windmill Road along the edge of the railway down towards Clapham Junction.
Going back further: this is the Rocque map of the 1740s. I've coloured in what was at that time Wandsworth Common — about twice the size of what it is now. Much of that land has gone, as you might expect. You can vaguely make out Nightingale Lane, Burntwood Lane, and All Farthing Lane. There were some orphaned bits of Common land then, and even more orphaned bits now. These are not macadamised roads — they are tracks — which is why they tend to wander.
The earliest Ordnance Survey map shows the lake clearly: that's the Black Sea, and that's the house and park next door, which was going to become All Farthing. "All Farthing," incidentally, is a corruption of "Half Farthing" — run it together in a London accent, "arf-far-thing," and you get all farthing. A half farthing was the smallest denomination of coin, something worth virtually nothing. The name stuck.
On later maps you can see the lake is going to become much larger, and the park larger still and very gorgeous — subdivided and beautifully laid out. The people who made it gorgeous were the Wilson family.
The Wilsons owned Price's Candles. You might ask why it isn't called Wilson's Candles — in fact, they invented the name "Price" specifically to conceal the economic relations: who was backing them and how it was all being organised. William Wilson, the founder, was a Scottish iron founder who failed miserably at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when demand for weaponry diminished. He had to leave his hometown — Wilsontown — and come to London looking for work. He found work as a Russia agent, buying and selling between Russia and Britain, and his principal income was from tallow: animal fat, presumably exported via the Black Sea and around to England. The most important use for tallow was candles — which is how he started making candles.
I always assumed that because the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum was a Crimean institution — caused by the Crimean War — and the Black Sea was where the Crimea was, that must be the origin of the name. It isn't, because the name "Black Sea" is used for this lake 30 or 40 years before the Crimean War. Why then? It could be because the water was very black — but then a lot of water on the Common would have been black, so that doesn't explain it uniquely. I think the most likely explanation is the Wilson connection with the actual Black Sea, through the tallow trade. And they were a fantastically funny family — great pranksters who told really good jokes — and I think they liked irony: "the Black Sea" for this muddy puddle. They also had a bit at the edge called Botany Bay, where the gypsies lived and criminals congregated. So that gives you a sense of their humour.
They had lots of children. Everybody says there were 13, hence the 13 islands — the story being that he created a new island every time he had a child. This cannot be true because the maps just don't tally. I can't find 13 children unless a high proportion of them died, which seems unsurprising for the period. But there were lots of children.
The most eminent son was George Ferguson Wilson — the genius of the family. He was a born chemist who could do the most extraordinary things. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and various other institutions. He found ways of taking fat and oil, removing the smell, making it white and bright and non-sputtering. He did brilliant things with all sorts of oils and fats, and the firm became the principal producer in Britain of sperm whale oil — from which the finest candles in the world were made, by appointment to Queen Victoria.
One of their products was "Wilson's National Sperm" — they knew exactly what they were talking about, and exactly the joke they were making. The sperm whale gets its name because if you crack open the head of a whale, out comes something that looks remarkably like semen. Sailors, presumably, were thinking along those lines when they named it.
I'm fairly sure that the reason the firm became so interested in sperm whale oil is because of a man called Champion who lived on the other side of the Common — he's been called the father of British whaling in the 18th century. His father had been prominent in the East Indies trade, and on the voyages back and forth between India and England had passed through the Southern Ocean and seen enormous numbers of sperm whales. At exactly that time, North American whalers were fishing out the sperm whales of Nantucket, and Champion suggested that the whale industry ought to shift to the Southern Ocean — to Australia and New Zealand. That continued, probably until the 1960s. Champion living 200 yards from the Wilsons: I can't believe they weren't connected, but without going into the archives I can't prove it.
Palm oil became equally important as sperm oil diminished. They bought huge areas of Sri Lanka — thousands of acres — and what was particularly important to them was that they did not use slave labour. This was terribly important to them, and they made it clear in their publicity materials. They also had a sense of humour: one of their printed advertisements has a little image of the Charge of the Light Brigade. They were good at visual jokes in their propaganda materials.
This is a map from 1829 — the year the Wilsons moved into their house. Bolingbroke Grove is labelled "Five Houses," Trinity Road is visible, and All Farthing Lane. You notice there's a very large lake with a little walkway across it, and quite a lot of water at this end of the Common.
Then, in the early 1830s, a railway came along. The question was which route it would take. It was going from London to Southampton — initially at least — and the engineers knew that this is what it would mean: loads of men cutting a great trench straight across. There was a problem for the railway company: they didn't like going through gentlemen's parks because it cost them a great deal more. Through Common land it was practically free, and you didn't cause the same disturbance. So the line had to squeeze through the gap at Five Houses — what is now Spencer Road — and it did.
There are early proposals where the line goes straight through the middle of the lake, and a later version, from around 1835, showing the route that was actually taken — through where the pathway was.
The Wilsons were, as you can imagine, pretty furious. They had only just moved into this beautiful house and were expanding the lake — digging it deeper and deeper. It had been useful as a water source and as a reservoir; it probably started as a gravel quarry. And then suddenly there was a railway line at the end of their park. The Common was extraordinarily wet — you can't imagine how wet it was. Even when I was a child, the part now called the Scope was wet all year round. Even today you can see straight lines forming a grid across the Common: these are the drainpipes, first put in by the Metropolitan Board of Works in the late 1870s — 8,000 pipes. The railway cuttings also made a big difference: cut a big trench, and the water just flows away.
William Wilson sued — or at least got shirty with — the London and Southampton Railway (later the South Western Railway), and insisted they provide a wind pump. That's why there is a windmill on Windmill Drive. It is not a mill — as you probably know. It has no grinding mechanism. It's a wind pump, constructed to pump water from the railway cutting into the nearby lake known as the Black Sea. The windmill stopped working in 1870 when the lake was filled in.
There's a lovely model of the windmill in the Wimbledon Windmill Museum, which Philip commends highly. The plaque on the windmill here records its history: "This is all that remains of a smock mill constructed in the 1830s by the London and South Western Railway Company to pump water from the cutting into a nearby lake known as the Black Sea. William Wilson, the founder of Price's Patent Candle Works Company, created a garden around the lake as part of his estate."
George Ferguson Wilson spent his youth on the Black Sea — literally on it, in boats — and grew up obsessed with water and water plants. He tells one story very humorously: somebody who lived more than half a mile away had imported some elodea — Canadian pondweed, now called elodian — for their aquarium, which was all the rage at the time, and put a small plant in a pond. Because it was a completely new environment, it took over and annihilated everything else. George's account:
The weed made its appearance in the five-acre pond. Some aquarium owner living more than half a mile off had put a small plant in a pond, and it spread very rapidly, soon overpowering all the old weeds. My brother, who had lately returned from India, suggested dragging it by means of a boat, a pole pushed to the bottom and then twisted round and round. This brought up a huge bunch of weeds. We found this by no means a bad gymnastic evening exercise, and two of us at each end of a punt in little more than an hour had pulled up as great a load as it was pleasant to punt with. Finding a greater impression to be made on the enemy than we first anticipated, a man was employed to work constantly, and in about three weeks an immense pile on the bank was the result. This in a few months settled down into a solid black mass, cutting like cheese, which, being used as manure for the garden, has given such peas and cabbages as we never had before.
Late in life, George Ferguson Wilson married Ellen Barchard — you'll know the name from Barchard Street in Wandsworth. The Barchards were a very prominent local family. Ellen was a botanical illustrator; she was 36 or 37 when she married, which was relatively late in Victorian society. There are plants named after her, and plants named after him. Their son, the prodigious Scott Barchard Wilson, has birds named after him, because he wrote the classic Aves Hawaiienses, a multi-volume book on the birds of Hawaii.
George Ferguson Wilson, having grown up in such a watery place and being mad about water and water plants, bought a large plot of land at Wisley in Surrey to form an experimental garden. He became vice-chair of the Royal Horticultural Society, and that is why Wisley Gardens exists — and why there is so much water there. The RHS garden is, at its heart, his garden.
There is a further Wandsworth connection: Professor Lindley, the great botanist for whom the RHS Lindley Library is named, used to take groups of students onto Wandsworth Common botanising. One of those students was John Buckmaster — thought you'd like to know.
A figure of a rather different kind: Jack Black, the Battersea Otter, who was Queen Victoria's rat-catcher. He called himself "the Battersea fellow," and here he is with his rats and the royal cipher. He said of himself:
I can go out at four in the morning and come home by eight with a barrow full of freshwater fish. Nobody knows how I do it because I never takes no nets or lines with me, I assure 'em — I catch 'em with me hands, which I do. But they only laughs. I sell fresh fish — perch, roach, dace, gudgeon and such like, and even small jack-pike — at threepence a pound or what they'll fetch. And I've caught near the Wandsworth Black Sea, as we calls it, half a hundredweight sometimes, and never less than a handkerchief full.
Half a hundredweight — that's 56 pounds of fish, overnight. Rather a lot.
The Black Sea was one of the great enigmas of Victorian science. There were eels in it — lots and lots of eels. It was a very famous centre for eels. People were obsessed with finding out the sex organs of eels: indeed, Freud spent the first four or five years of his career dissecting hundreds upon hundreds of eels that he bought in Trieste, where he was then living, and he never found their gonads. He was really obsessed with it. That is because everybody believed that since the eels were in the Black Sea, they must be breeding in the Black Sea; if they were breeding there, they must have gonads. But nobody ever found any. And how on earth would eels arrive? They'd have to come up the River Thames, climb out, and wriggle across railway lines and hills and fields. It stands to reason they must be breeding there — but no evidence.
What they didn't know — and the encyclopaedias of the day said the same — is that mature eels, after perhaps up to a hundred years in their pond, will leave and go down to a river, out to sea, and all the way across to the Sargasso Sea, where they reproduce — although this has never actually been observed. The eggs hatch, and the young migrate back to the pond they came from. An equivalent phenomenon occurs in the North Pacific; New Zealand eels, incidentally, travel to an equivalent area off the coast of Tonga, thousands of miles away.
The Black Sea was exceptionally rich in organisms. There was the water soldier — a very rare plant now — and attached to its roots were strange and very rare creatures that entomologists would make special journeys to find. It was also particularly famous for a water mite called a Hydrachnid, of which there are hundreds and hundreds of species. One book on water mites has Wandsworth Common — almost certainly the Black Sea — on almost every page of its first chapter, with some species noted as having been found here and nowhere else in the world.
In mid to late 19th century, people were obsessed with microscopy. At a great exhibition of microscopes in 1864 — attended by John Colenso the Bishop of Natal, Dr Livingstone, and many others — the star of the show were microscopes exhibited by Mr C. Baker of High Holborn. Among the objects placed under these microscopes was:
The fresh water Cristatella, a polyp found in the Black Sea, Wandsworth.
I was baffled when I first read this — I'd never heard of "Cristallia," which is how it was printed, a misprint. It is in fact Cristatella mucedo, the moss animal — almost uniquely found in the Black Sea at that time. It is an animal, but it looks like moss.
Jeffrey Bevington — whom Philip has discussed in other talks — was a great mid-19th-century photographer who lived in Ivy House, within sight of the Black Sea, and died very young. A colleague, another famous early photographer called Peter Lenny Foster, lived just 50 yards away; they clearly knew each other, though whether they shared technology and techniques I can't say.
Bevington's photograph of his family playing croquet in the garden of Ivy House — his brother, mother and father — is still used by the British Croquet Association on its website to represent croquet in the 19th century. It is a beautiful photograph; phenomenally detailed for something that small.
Peter Lenny Foster is chiefly famous for his photographs of the raising of Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment, and for a photograph of Waterloo Bridge. The reason he took the Cleopatra's Needle photographs was that the Society of Arts — the body that later became the Royal Society of Arts — was just around the corner, and every day as he arrived from his train he could see the transformation happening. So he took a photograph every day, producing a whole sequence.
He also took one of the earliest photographs ever taken of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum — perhaps the very first — which the RSA archive currently catalogues merely as "a school." One day Philip intends to tell them what it is.
What is particularly tantalising is that the classic study of Foster says his best photograph is one of his children boating on the Black Sea. But where is it? The album has been given back to the family, and families can be large and diffuse. Philip cannot find it. He would very much like to.
Fernside, visible in the background of some of these photographs, was one of the largest houses in the area — stretched from Wandsworth Common station almost all the way down to the Upper Tooting Road, a long curving house with enormous grounds. Ivy House was at the top of Trinity Road where it meets East Hill. It was knocked down and small terraced houses were built there around 1905–06; the site was then hit by a V1 bomb, stood empty for twenty years, and is now a block of flats.
Walter Besant — you may have heard of Annie Besant, the great feminist; she was his sister-in-law. In the 1840s he was at a school in Stockwell and used to walk to the Black Sea. He tells the story of a pike ripping little boys' bottoms as they swam in the lake. You may laugh — but here, from the Independent magazine in 1993, is an article about "The Killer Pike of Clapham Common." So apparently it is not unheard of.
The Black Sea was the scene of a remarkable number of dramatic and often tragic events in the 19th century — which I haven't had time to go into fully tonight. The list includes: a suicide by a girl driven by jealousy in 1853; a fatal accident on the ice; a case of what the press called "lynch law at Wandsworth over the Black Sea"; an attempted suicide in the Black Sea; and the deaths of young women — almost all, in every case, because of a man. There were also some cases of the murder of newborn children, sadly not unCommon in that era.
I will tell you about the lynching, because you clearly want to know. A man calling himself "Count Kaskavisky" — alleged by "Herr Ingo Water" — had been placing adverts in newspapers for young women seeking to get married. They would write to him, he would write back, arrange to meet them, and then blackmail them — they had, as it were, "lost honour." This was found out, and a married woman set him up accordingly. She arrived at the appointed place by the lake with a little white handkerchief — presumably so they could recognise each other — and sat down. He arrived with his own white handkerchief and sat with her.
No sooner had they prepared to seat themselves than the lady, in a very wonderful way, abruptly left her companion and ran off, while the gentleman was seized by two rough-looking men who forthwith had the assurance to lug him down to the banks of the lake and chuck him into the water. Suddenly the delightful stillness of the Black Sea was broken by a series of the most heart-rending shrieks. He was seen to wallow out on all fours from a plane of mud in a very deplorable condition. He glistened when at last he emerged. He presented one of the most unhappy spectacles that ever a gaze witnessed — he glistened from head to foot with mud like some enormous boa constrictor. His coat was rent across, his hat was smashed, his face revealed the most hideous mass of mud that ever made a human being look like a chimpanzee.
And of course, everybody who was in on it had gathered round, and they jeered at him and mocked him and chased him, until he took refuge in the Freemasons' pub. The newspaper called this "The English love of justice." He didn't come out well anyway. But you get the picture.
In 1867 a newspaper described the Black Sea as: "an ornamental piece of water, five acres, absolutely beautiful and delightful, with 13 small islands, trees and flowers." Eight acres of ground were leased to Mrs Wilson — her husband William having died; she was very old by this point. But since her death, the lease had been purchased by the Lord of the Manor, Lord Spencer:
…and the gravest apprehensions are entertained in the neighbourhood that the 18 acres will be turned into building sites.
A letter to The Times followed — a beautiful piece of writing from someone signing themselves "J. Gravell," living on Lavender Hill:
It is a piece of water two or three acres in extent — dotted over with pretty little eylets, each having two or three birch trees growing on it, and in summer, when the yellow flag and the broad-leaf water lily are in bloom, a more charming little spot cannot be imagined. Its banks are the favourite promenade of the neighbouring inhabitants. Its waters are much affected by the angler. The stranger who in his rambles accidentally drops upon it is surprised and delighted with the pretty little picture so suddenly revealed to him. But alas, this thing of beauty is doomed, and is to be replaced by bricks and mortar.
For I learn on good authority that Lord Spencer, who is Lord of the Manor of Wandsworth, has granted to an architect a lease of the housing grounds abutting upon the lake; that the trees are to be cut down and the water drained off, and the whole to be plotted out and let in building lots. Lord Spencer's right to do this has long been questioned — but even if he has the right, it is little less than cruel barbarity to exercise it and so destroy one of the few bright spots left in the suburbs of this teeming metropolis. I implore that you would raise your powerful voice in our favour. It might yet be in time to prevent the perpetration of this shameful piece of vandalism.
Your obedient servant, J. Gravell, Lavender Hill.
It was not in time. The plots were sold. Spencer Park was built, starting around 1870 to 1878.
One final intriguing detail from the maps: there is a path that still exists, running from the corner at Trinity Road, which has a slight bend in it. That bend has been in the same place since the Rocque map of the early 1700s. When you walk along that path and reach that bend, you are standing at the point where the lake used to reach. The paths were used by people to gain access to the lake and walk around it. That bend is the last trace of the Black Sea on the ground.
When were the first houses of Spencer Park completed?
They started in 1870, and the first houses had probably been completed by around 1878 — so sometime in the first five or six years of development. I think they did it in bits. It might explain why the oldest houses are clustered in one area and there's a whole section by the railway line that came later — perhaps because nobody particularly wanted to live right next to the railway.
What happened to Wilson's house, and what became of the Wilson family?
I absolutely don't know what happened to the house, and I have looked and I am looking and I will continue to look. In many other cases you can find records of auctions of building material — they often had gorgeous things inside: lovely Adam fireplaces and so on — and local builders would bid for the contents. It may be that a prospectus will eventually turn up in the archives. As for the Wilsons: George Ferguson Wilson and his wife Ellen moved to Weybridge after the Black Sea years. He continued developing the garden at Wisley until his death. He hadn't yet formally gifted it to the Royal Horticultural Society at that point. Thomas Hanbury — a Clapham boy, a fantastically rich Quaker who loved gardens — then bought Wisley and gave it to the RHS. Their son Scott Barchard Wilson shot himself, very sadly, but not before completing Aves Hawaiienses. Other members of the family continued to live in the area — north of the Common and around Clapham.
Are the Wilsons connected to the Wilson Hospital?
I don't know of a connection and can't think why there would be one — though it's possible. They don't seem to have moved in that direction. But I'd double-check.
Was the Frying Pan connected to the Black Sea?
I always assumed, growing up, that the windmill somehow sucked water out of the ground and dumped it into the Frying Pan. Not a word of it is true. They seem to be completely unconnected, despite being contiguous. The Frying Pan started as a sand pit — a very famous one, producing very high-grade sand for plasterers in London. Henry Mayhew writes about it. When the sand was exhausted, it was levelled. It has a very sandy bottom — not seaside sand, but very draining — and it was perfectly level, with sides at 45 degrees: a natural amphitheatre, used principally for military drilling, but also for political meetings. John Burns used to speak there. Marching bands performed there. It was still completely intact in the early 1970s — great for bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night. It was subsequently allowed to grow up with trees, which is probably why the Scope was treated similarly.
Were the bricks for the prison made at the Frying Pan?
It's often said — it's completely untrue. There's no brick clay on Wandsworth Common.
On the restoration of the windmill:
About ten years ago, as chairman of the Wandsworth Common Management Advisory Committee, I became increasingly concerned that the windmill was simply deteriorating. I took it on as a personal mission, and together with Peter we shamed Wandsworth Council into finding the money for a proper restoration. A firm called Cayman Windmills did the work — specialists who were also working on Windsor Great Park and similar projects. On one occasion we had arranged to meet the council officer in charge at the windmill. We had been waiting there for some considerable time when he finally turned up. He said: "Where is it?" There was an avenue of London plane trees that had been planted in front of it at some point in the 1950s or 60s, and they completely blocked the view. It had always been a dream to get the sails back on — but those trees rather settle the matter for the foreseeable future.
If you'd like to see a proper working wind pump of exactly the same type, there is one at Minsmere Country Park in Suffolk, and there is also a beautiful model in the Wimbledon Windmill Museum.
On what lies inside the windmill:
There is a door, and we were lucky enough to look inside. All you can see is a deep shaft going down to the level of the railway line. If you look up there's evidence of fire damage — probably from some time in the 19th century, when there are cases of men and women making use of the building for rather more personal purposes. The Common at that time was very lively in that respect.
Is Quarry Road named after the sand quarry?
It could well be — there were several quarries in the area. The Frying Pan was sand. The gravel pit extended all the way from Heathfield Road down to the railway embankment — which is where Peter lives, and I'm always asking him what he finds when he digs his garden. There was also a place called Potter's Hole — apparently the filthiest place in Wandsworth — which was essentially the local pit for street refuse. I think that was probably the main dumping ground before there was a proper council refuse service.
Fantastic — and with three minutes to spare. Thank you, Philip. A reminder that our next talk is on the 15th of November: Sue Demont on the railways coming to Wandsworth Common. Good night, everyone.