Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · January 2022
The Beaches, the Wilsons, Hollybrook School, and Kalulu
Our starting point is a letter written on 20 December 1877 from a house called The Beaches. I first saw it in 2018, when it was reproduced in the Wandsworth Society's Christmas edition. Edward Potter, a well-known local architect and long-time member of the Society's executive committee, had sent it in. He was curious about it: he didn't know where The Beaches was, who the author was, or what the letter was referring to. It appeared on the inside back cover of the magazine, and as far as anyone knows, nobody replied. It has been playing on my mind ever since, and I think I have now largely cracked it.
The letter runs as follows:
The Beaches, December 20th, 1877.
My dear Martin,
Thanks for your note. The above slight sketch will answer the question as to attire — as you can see from the little image, you were expected to wear a tail coat. Come to the Wandsworth conversazione and anyone there will direct you to the school. If you could, wouldn't you come first to The Beaches and feed with us? We of course should be all in a bustle, but I dare say you won't mind. Come as early as you can. If you come straight to the school first, partake of stand-up tea, and either the Pater or Mater will be near at hand to greet and introduce you. I'm afraid all you will know will be behind the scenes until after the performance.
The Operetta is a composition of Ambrose's — music by eldest brother, scenery by your humble servant, dresses by everybody — but let me warn you not to be excited, as the anticipation may be seriously damped by the reality.
The play is called The Alchemist. The Alchemist is always trying his hand at making gold, and signally fails. The farrier system works up to a certain point, and then in the end brings about his doom. Alfonso, a young man of handsome visage but slender means, seeks the hand of the Alchemist's niece — accepted by niece but refused by Alchemist. A fairy brings about the marriage, disguising Alfonso, who lends the Alchemist money so that he may carry on his experiments, and so gets the promise of marriage. The Alchemist's servant, the comic element, hates experiments and loves his supper, which he never gets, and complains of hunger. The farce is called Aunt Tabitha, being an episode in the life of an old lady who is too fond of her cats. It is full of Wilsonian puns.
We're very glad you're coming. Please forgive this hasty, sketchy and scratchy note, and believe me, with kind wishes for happiness at Christmas,
Yours, Edwin Wilson.
The magazine posed three questions to its readers: Where was The Beaches? Which school was Edwin Wilson referring to? And which Operetta was the writer going to attend? Nobody answered.
Some time after seeing the letter, I recalled that someone from a completely different source had asked the same questions — where was The Beaches, and who were the Wilsons? The query had appeared on a website created by a local resident called Robert Lawton, who lived in Burntwood Close. The site was taken down in 2014, but the Wayback Machine, which archives the internet, had preserved it.
Lawton had received an email containing an extract from the diary of a great-great-grandmother, written in 1869. It read:
We by this time were wishing for a larger house, and especially for more garden than we had at The Elms, and decided to move. We looked over some houses in the neighbourhood, but all were either too small or too expensive. My husband therefore decided to build a house suited to the requirements of our large family. He selected a site on Wandsworth Common, part of a nursery ground belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford. This was at the time a very nice open part, with only one or two houses, and on March the 25th the first brick was laid.
The correspondent had also sent photographs of the house and of a Victorian family group. And Lawton had noted: apparently the house was called The Beaches, and the name of the great-great-grandfather was Joseph William Wilson.
With more than enough to go on, I set off in search of the house. The area in question was where the Neil family had their nurseries — a large tract now occupied by the toetrack and surrounding streets, which in the 1860s was still open nursery ground. An 1866 advertisement from the Neil family confirms the picture: they were selling off large quantities of stock — roses, trees “suitable for making an immediate blind” — because their nursery ground was being required for building purposes.
I was convinced, for a while, that I could identify the house from the photograph. I was wrong. I had a fixed idea and was, embarrassingly, out by about thirty yards. The archivist at Magdalen College, Oxford, found the lease, which contains a reference to a road “about to be built” adjoining the property — this turned out to be Ralph Road, named after the then President of Magdalen, Martin Ralph. The house was just to one side of that new road, not where I had first thought.
The Beaches has since been demolished. It was a very large plot — about 150 to 160 feet deep and 70-odd feet wide — too good to leave as one house, and at some point it was cleared and several houses built on the site. It was one of the few villas built in the area in the 1860s and 1870s that has not survived.
The Wilsons were a large family — no surprise that they had moved from The Elms at East Hill, which was clearly not big enough. The earliest children were born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, but gradually the births shift to Wandsworth: Wandsworth, Wandsworth, Wandsworth — there were a great many of them. On the 1871 census, the fifth name on the list is Edwin, who was fifteen at that date, placing him in his early twenties when he wrote the letter. Further down the list is a son called Norman Octavius Wilson — clearly the eighth son, aged six months.
The father, Joseph William Wilson, was a very significant figure in nineteenth-century architecture and engineering — more engineering than architecture. He was closely involved in the construction of the Crystal Palace in 1851, in charge of all the woodwork — and there was a great deal of it, not just iron and glass. He invented new techniques for the purpose and was later responsible for helping to move the structure to Sydenham, where a whole new floor was added. He also built piers: Hunstanton, Bognor Regis, Tynemouth, and Westward Ho.
Edwin Wilson inherited his father's draughtsmanship but turned it towards natural history illustration. The lovely drawings that litter his letter were an early sign of what he would become. In his early twenties he worked at the Natural History Museum in London as an illustrator, specialising in insects. He was headhunted by Horace Darwin — son of Charles Darwin — who had founded the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, a firm that dominated technical illustration in Cambridge throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Darwin sent Edwin to Vienna and Germany to learn lithography, then a very new skill with almost no practitioners in Britain. Edwin eventually travelled all over the world drawing insects, and made contributions to landmark scientific works: the classic fauna of Central America, the Fauna Hawaiiensis, and many others. His illustrations of Central American tree-hoppers, leeches, bats and dissected moles are strikingly beautiful, as well as scientifically precise.
In reading the Fauna Hawaiiensis, I came across a passage that introduced a new character: “Mr Scott B. Wilson, who himself studied the Hawaiian avifauna, gave me much useful information when I first left England for Honolulu.” Scott Wilson was the son of George Ferguson Wilson, managing director of Price's Patent Candle Company — whose large house and grounds in the area eventually became Spencer Park. Scott Wilson was a distinguished ornithologist, and a bird is named after him. He and Edwin Wilson were not related; they were simply, in the way of Wandsworth Common, neighbours whose paths crossed on the other side of the world.
I discovered that the Wilson children had attended Hollybrook School, situated at 21 and 23 North Side — still a recognisable building today, though no longer a school. The newspaper report of the school's Christmas entertainment is heavily annotated with references to E. M. Wilson, M. Wilson, and Wilson senior: clearly a family very deeply involved in the life of the school.
The headmaster was a man called John Conder, whose name I recognised from another context entirely. When Wandsworth Common was under threat in the 1860s, Conder was one of the signatories of the famous “great and good” petition, alongside Tom Taylor, Nassau Senior, Robert Hunter, and the redoubtable John Buckmaster. He remained active in the cause throughout the 1870s, and notably defended the creation of the lake on Wandsworth Common — there was no lake there before; it was made after the Black Sea, which had been on the Spencer estate, was filled in and absorbed into what became Spencer Park. Some local people had objected on grounds of smell, disease, and the prospect of boys swimming naked. Conder wrote:
I do not think a small lake, properly made, is likely to be an unhealthy addition to the neighbourhood, and it would certainly be an ornament. Those who remember the Black Sea in its best days — it declined latterly — will most likely agree with me.
Conder had come to Wandsworth to be among the first teachers at All Farthing School — a national school on what was then Farthing Lane, now St John's Hill, built in 1858 thanks to local benefactors before the era of state education. He was twenty-three at the time, teaching there with his wife Christiana, aged twenty-two, and their eleven-month-old son James. He was ordained as a deacon by Samuel Wilberforce — “Soapy Sam,” so called for his habit of rubbing his hands together — who had grown up at Broomwood House on the edge of Wandsworth Common.
By 1881 Conder had left Hollybrook School and opened another small school in Wendy, Cambridgeshire. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, as it seemed most middle-class men of his generation were. He then became a missionary and sailed to Fray Bentos — which is, despite what you might think, a real town in Uruguay, at that time a small settlement grown up around a beef-processing factory. (The factory is now a World Heritage Site.) He travelled hundreds, indeed thousands, of miles through South America, ministering to English-speaking Protestants. He died there of cancer of the tongue in 1885, still in his forties.
The next issue of the South American Church Mission Society journal records: “The widow of the late Reverend J. Conder of Fray Bentos, with her youngest boy, has arrived in England.” Her name was Christiana. What happened to her is distressing: the Springfield Hospital admission records show her admitted in November 1892, discharged in 1893, readmitted in 1894, discharged in 1895, then admitted again from 1897 until her death in 1901.
Now: do you know the phrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume”? And the book in which that scene appears — How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa by Henry Morton Stanley, published by Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle in 1872? If you look at the first illustration in that book, you will see a small boy carrying a gun. His name is given as Ndugu M'hali, but he is better known as Kalulu.
This is how Kalulu came by his name. He had been enslaved, and when Stanley set off for Africa to find Livingstone, the boy was given to him. Stanley liked him very much but disliked his name. After some discussion — should he be called Lion? Cow? Bombay Dog? — someone suggested a Swahili name: Kalulu, meaning the young of a blue-black antelope, now extinct. Stanley's account runs:
“Just look at his eyes — so bright. Look at his form — so slim. Watch his movements — how quick. Yes, Kalulu is his name.” “Let his name henceforth be Kalulu,” said I, “and let no man take it from him.” And thus it was that the little black boy came to be called Kalulu.
Stanley brought Kalulu back to England — photographs were taken, probably in Leicester Square, some in African dress and some in European clothes. Stanley also wrote a novel, his only one, called My Kalulu, which some have described as having a distinctly homoerotic character; I am not qualified to judge.
And here is the connection with Hollybrook School. Stanley's publisher was Edward Marston, and in a memoir written many years later, Marston recalled:
When Mr Stanley returned to England in the spring of 1873, he asked me to take charge of his little black boy, Kalulu, and I accordingly placed him at school with the late Reverend J. Conder, near Wandsworth — and there he remained about a year. My own son Arthur was at the same school, and had assumed a sort of protectorate over him. Stanley was very grateful, and wrote: “I fear, from the hearty and friendly way in which your son speaks of Kalulu, that he will get too many high-class ideas into his head and will be spoiled. I am exceedingly obliged to you for your kindness and shall ever remember it.”
Marston's son was at Hollybrook School; Kalulu went there because Arthur was already there. Conder himself wrote to the Daily Telegraph in 1877:
For thirty months I had charge of Mr Stanley's faithful young companion, Kalulu. He was a particularly kind and good lad, wonderfully full of fun and a great mimic. Kalulu had many invitations to families about Wandsworth where I then lived, and it was remarked that he adapted himself to dining room and drawing room as if he had been used to them from infancy. No one could excel Kalulu in politeness to ladies. I had Kalulu taught to swim while he was with me — when he came to me he would tumble about in the water and enjoy the splashing, but he couldn't swim. Kalulu spent a month with me in the little village of which I am now vicar — Wendy, in Cambridgeshire. I send here with Kalulu's last letter to me, dated August 1874. I am inclined to think someone else wrote the letter and Kalulu copied it; he always would write his name with a small k — wherefore, I know not.
The letter itself, dated from The Langham Hotel, 8 August 1874, reads:
My dear Mr Conder, I hope you are quite well. Fred, the young gentleman who is going to Africa with me, has started this morning for Southampton in the ship Mongolia. I am to join him on Thursday. Mr Stanley bought me a nice large gun. Please give my kind love to all my friends. From Kalulu.
Before Kalulu returned to Africa, there was one further London occasion. Livingstone had died in Africa in 1873; his body was embalmed and brought back, taking some eight or nine months to arrive. His African servant Jacob Wainwright, who had accompanied the coffin to Britain and served as a pallbearer, was also present. Kalulu attended the funeral at Westminster Abbey on 18 April 1874. Stanley wrote to Marston: “Kalulu ought to have a suit of dark grey, half-mourning.”
A photograph of Kalulu, dated around 1873–74 and attributed to one Henry Morris, is held at the National Portrait Gallery. No one at the Gallery knew who Henry Morris was. I kept coming across the name, and then found it: on the back of a carte-de-visite, “H. Maurice, artist and photographer, New Wandsworth Station and 1 Brooklyn Villas, Battersea Rise.” The local photographer had been brought in — or Kalulu had gone to the studio — for his portrait.
In 1874 Stanley set out on his great transcontinental expedition from Zanzibar, with Kalulu in the party. They crossed the continent, tracing the Congo from east to west. Near the centre of Africa, at a point on what is now the Congo River, something happened. Stanley's own account:
While delivering my instructions I observed Kalulu in the canoe on the river. When I asked him what he wanted in the canoe he replied, with a deprecating smile and a supplicating tone, “I can paddle, sir.” “Ah, very well.” The first, second and third canoes arrived soon after, and I was beginning to congratulate myself on having completed a good day's work, when, to my horror, I saw the canoe gliding with the speed of an arrow towards the falls, over the treacherous calm water. Human strength availed nothing now. We watched it in agony — for I had three favourites in her: Kalulu, Mabruki and Faraji. It soon reached the island which cleft the falls, and was swept down the left branch. We saw it whirl round three or four times, then plunge down into the depths, out of which the stern presently emerged, pointed upwards. And we knew that Kalulu and his canoe-mates were no more.
The falls are now known as the Livingstone Falls. A section of them is still called, in some maps, the Kalulu Falls. Kalulu was born around 1862 and died in 1877 — the same year Edwin Wilson wrote his cheerful, hasty Christmas letter from The Beaches.
What are your main research sources for work like this? The usual suspects: Wikipedia as a starting point — it sometimes gets things wrong but often gets them right, and the references can be invaluable. I build family trees using Ancestry.co.uk, and family members often add extra information. The British Newspaper Archive is probably the single most important source: you start picking up stray words and names, and then it builds and builds. The Magdalen College archive was extraordinarily helpful for the lease of The Beaches. The visual metaphor I use for all of this is a sphere centred on Wandsworth Common, with everything connected — and the hardest part is deciding what to include and what to leave out.
What relation was Scott Wilson to Edwin Wilson and Joseph Wilson? No relation at all, so far as I can tell. They were both Wandsworth boys, living on opposite sides of the Common. But I have a theory about six degrees of Wandsworth Common — that everybody is connected to the Common through one or two steps. It seems inevitable, rather than accidental, that Scott Wilson and Edwin Wilson should end up encountering each other in Hawaii.
How long did this research take? The letter appeared in the Christmas 2018 newsletter, and I have been dipping in and out of it ever since — probably three or four weeks of actual focused work, but spread over several years alongside other projects.
When did Hollybrook School close? Probably around 1900. It had some remarkable pupils — including at least one Senior Wrangler (the top mathematician in the Cambridge examinations) and his even more talented sisters. But it was simply too small: by the end of the century, middle-class families were sending their children to larger public schools, or to local grammar schools such as Battersea Grammar and Emmanuel, which had growing reputations. Hollybrook became more of a prep school and gradually faded. Wandsworth Common had many such prep schools around its perimeter — Highfield, for instance, which fed Emmanuel — and this was simply a broader pattern of the period.
Was there much else in the newspaper reports about the Christmas play at Hollybrook School? The article describes the dramatis personae in some detail and records it as a great success. The school clearly took theatrical arts very seriously — every Christmas they staged a large entertainment with many acts and extracts, and the productions were genuinely impressive.
How was Kalulu treated by the other boys at the school? There are some accounts I didn't have time to cover. Conder himself describes the boys finding Kalulu very amusing — in a good-natured way — and there are several accounts of his participation in sports days, where he seems to have been fully and happily involved. The way Arthur Marston talks about him, and the way Edward Marston describes Arthur's “protectorate” over him, suggests a genuinely happy year. There is no evident racism in any of the accounts. I will share the relevant extracts with those who would like to see them.
A note on Jacob Wainwright: Philip had forgotten the name of the African man who accompanied Livingstone's coffin back to Britain and served as a pallbearer at Westminster Abbey. His name was Jacob Wainwright. After the funeral he lived for a time in Suffolk and travelled the country giving talks for the Church Missionary Society before returning to Africa. He wrote a book about Livingstone's death. His Wikipedia entry is a good starting point for those who want to know more.
Is the Magdalen College archive a good source for local history? Excellent, though they have no full-time professional archivist — only very capable volunteers who understandably cannot always answer queries promptly. If you can visit in person, however, they will make you very comfortable and give you access to an immense amount of detailed material: lease plans, road layouts, architectural designs, and contracts covering a very large area of Wandsworth. Philip has had to work at arm's length because of the pandemic, but recommends a visit when possible.
A huge thank you to Philip — as ever, a quite extraordinary amount of information, and very movingly delivered, especially that final section on Kalulu's death at the falls. I don't think anyone was expecting that. Thank you also to Stephen Midlane, chair of the Heritage Subgroup of the Friends of Wandsworth Common, who chaired the Q&A and whose work on The Wandsworth Common Story has just gone into a reprint — the original 1,500 copies having very nearly sold out.