Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk
Pioneers of Photography on and around Wandsworth Common, 1845–1875
Welcome everybody — welcome not only to our members but also to guests from the Barnes History Society and from the Putney School of Arts photographic club, for whom history and photography combine very nicely in tonight's talk. It's my great pleasure to introduce Philip Bye. Anything he doesn't know about Wandsworth Common isn't worth knowing — and if he doesn't know something, he will find out about it. Philip will talk for about an hour, and there will be time for questions and answers at the end.
I should say at the outset that this talk is not about the technologies of early photography — daguerreotypes, calotypes, turpentine paper printing and so on. What it is about is the images those technologies produced, and the people who made them. As it happens, all of the individuals I will be discussing were also great scientific innovators who spent a great deal of time working on the technologies, the lenses and so forth — but that is not my subject tonight.
I have called the talk "Seeing and Believing" because the question comes up over and over again: are photographs real? Do they truly show things you would otherwise have no idea what they look like? Can you trust them? As we will see, the answer is not always straightforward. I publish a monthly feature called Chronicles on my website, historyonwandsworthcommon.org, covering what happened on and around the common in any given month.
The first person I want to talk about is not chronologically the earliest of my subjects, but he is the one who first got me interested. His name is Jeffrey Bevington, and he died at a very young age — born 1838, died 1872. He lived at the north end of Wandsworth Common, as we shall see.
My interest was sparked at one of the very first meetings of the Heritage Group, several years ago, when I read out a passage by John Buckmaster — a science teacher and author who lived in the area from the 1840s through to the 1880s. Writing about Wandsworth Common in the 1850s, he described how the common was fast melting away: private owners were constantly enclosing portions of it, the railways had taken acres not provided for in their enabling acts, and — this is the line that fascinated me — six acres had been enclosed for a telescope which was never put up.
So I started looking for information about this telescope. The absolutely fabulous source turned out to be a website run by Greg Ramsbottom: www.craigtelescope.co.uk — an extraordinary piece of research. The Craig telescope, had it been completed, would have been the largest refracting telescope in the world in the 1850s. It was to be built on what is now called The Scope, on the other side of Trinity Road, and the site was chosen because Wandsworth Common was elevated, not too far from London, and — crucially at that time — not affected by light pollution, since there were very few houses around. That changed very quickly, as did the telescope's prospects: the great lens was ground too hastily and the optics proved terrible.
An engraving published in The Illustrated London News in 1852 is captioned significantly: "Our engraving is from a photograph by Beard" — showing that even in the mid-nineteenth century, when photographs could not be printed directly, they were already being used as source material for illustrations. Then, in 2004, following a search by the Time Team for the telescope's physical remains and a resulting wave of public interest, an email arrived on the birthday of Greg, the project director, to say that an actual photograph of the telescope did exist. It had been taken by Jeffrey Bevington in the mid-1850s. Despite being only 60 millimetres on a side, it shows remarkable detail, right down to the individual bricks.
Bevington lived at Ivy House, a substantial property with a large garden at the north end of Wandsworth Common near Trinity Road — the site now occupied by a block of flats called Alexandra Court, the original houses having been destroyed by a V1 in the Second World War. His family firm, Bevington and Sons, was the largest leather factory in Europe for many years, based in Bermondsey. To make leather soft, vast quantities of dog excrement — known in the trade, with characteristic Victorian euphemism, as "pure" — were required; pure-finders were employed to collect it from the streets of London, a trade vividly described by Henry Mayhew.
Bevington produced a remarkable series of photographs documenting every phase of leather production, probably dating from around 1860. These are highly valued in American and international museum collections, though they remain little recognised in Britain. He also photographed his garden, his family, still lifes, and scenes on the common — including a memorable croquet scene on the lawn at Ivy House.
The question of who actually took his photographs is an interesting one: he is always credited as the photographer, but somebody had to remove the lens cap. His brother was older and apparently uninterested; he had no sister. I suspect the answer lies in his neighbour Peter Lenie Foster, who lived just fifty yards away on the north side of the common in Lake Terrace. It was almost certainly through Foster that Bevington acquired his photographic skills.
The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an album of Bevington's work — a magnificent object, described as being like a great family bible — containing some 653 photographs. When I first looked at the V&A's online catalogue I found 653 blank placeholders: they simply hadn't digitised the collection, apparently not considering it important enough. I visited in person and photographed as many pages as my battery allowed, though the results were very poor quality. The collection deserves proper digitisation; it would certainly contain many images of the common and its surroundings.
How did Jeffrey Bevington come to photography in the first place? I believe the connection runs through Peter Lenie Foster and his old school friend Hugh Welch Diamond, with whom he co-founded what became the Royal Photographic Society.
Hugh Welch Diamond is little known in Britain, though he is well regarded in America and France, where his work tends to be held in art museums. He lived locally from 1848 to 1856, when he was rather ignominiously dismissed, as we shall see. He was superintendent of the women's department at the Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum — what we came to call Springfield Hospital — which had been erected in 1840–41.
Diamond was a humane reformer who believed in the "gentle way": not handcuffing or chaining patients, as had been the practice at Bethlehem Hospital. He was also a phrenologist and physiognomist — he believed that mental illness was registered in a patient's bodily posture and facial expression, and that showing patients objective photographic records of how they appeared could help them understand and reflect upon their condition. He also believed that sequences of portraits could document improvement — or deterioration — over time.
The photographs he made of his patients at Springfield are his great legacy. They are intimate, carefully composed, and often deeply affecting. He frequently dressed his subjects in particular ways — flower circlets, cloaks, items with symbolic resonance — and arranged their hair deliberately. One of the most famous sequences shows a woman in four stages: melancholy on admission, excited, convalescent, and finally well — her recovery signalled, in the visual rhetoric of the Victorian period, by her wearing a bonnet, the mark of a respectable woman fit to appear in public.
Another of his most celebrated images shows an elderly woman in a good hat, hands folded, holding what appears to be a dead wading bird — a snipe or similar long-billed species — cradled in her arms. The meaning is not immediately transparent, but Diamond clearly intended each image to tell a story, each one accompanied by a written case description.
Because photographs could not be reproduced in print, Diamond's images had to be given to engravers, who would make engravings from them — a process that introduced subtle but telling changes. In one notable example, the engraving of a woman wearing a crucifix reframes her as a "religious melancholic," a label not present in the original photograph.
Diamond was dismissed from Springfield in 1858 after a dispute with the management committee. He went on to run the Royal Society of Arts with great distinction, and on his daily walk to the Strand he passed and photographed what was then being erected on the Embankment — Cleopatra's Needle. He also took what may be the earliest known photograph of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, visible from just 200 yards away, shown standing bare and treeless in its earliest days.
A cautionary note: in the course of researching Diamond, I came across an image online described as a portrait of an unidentified asylum patient attributed to him. It looked wrong to me — like a fake. Persistent searching eventually revealed a discussion thread confirming my suspicion: it was a photograph of an actress hired to portray a character in a historical novel, repurposed and recirculated as authentic. This is a telling illustration of the talk's central theme. The internet can feel like an inexhaustible source of wonderful material — but so much of it can be fabricated, even using quite ordinary technologies, let alone artificial intelligence.
Arthur Hughes, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, lived in Eastside Road just over on the west side of the common. He was fond of painting water — the Black Sea on the common would have been a natural draw — and he returned repeatedly to the subject of Ophelia, the archetypal "mad woman" in the literary imagination. I believe, though I cannot prove it, that he knew Diamond and that conversations about women's madness influenced his choice of subject matter.
Hughes was photographed informally in his garden by Lewis Carroll, who was a family friend and bought paintings from him. Carroll's photographs of the Hughes children — Arthur junior and his elder daughter Amy — are charming and unusually relaxed. One shows Agnes propped against an oddly placed chair: the explanation, almost certainly, is that she needed something to lean against during the long exposure time required.
From the world of the gentleman amateur we now move to commercial photography. By the 1870s and 1880s there was an extraordinary proliferation of commercial studios around the edges of Wandsworth Common and in the nearby streets. One of the most interesting of these photographers was Henry Morris, who operated from Lordship Terrace, Battersea Rise, opposite the Freemasons' School — where the Peabody Estate now stands — near what was then New Wandsworth railway station.
I came across Morris through an unexpected route. Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer famous for his meeting with Dr Livingstone, brought back to England a boy known as Kalulu, and enrolled him at Holbrook School on what is now Earlsfield Road. I found photographs of Kalulu taken in a smart West End studio, and later a portrait apparently taken locally — the boy dressed in clothes Stanley had arranged for him to wear to Dr Livingstone's funeral at Westminster Abbey, where he was given a privileged position.
The photograph is in the National Portrait Gallery, attributed only to "H. Morris." Reasoning that a photographer based near the school would be the obvious choice, I identified Henry Morris. His carte-de-visite backs advertise "new cameo vignettes taken with patent apparatus," listing him as "artist and photographer" — the word "photographer" notably printed larger than "artist" — and include the intriguing line "by appointment to Her Majesty's Government." I believe this relates to his having photographed the inmates of Wandsworth Prison in 1872–73, a remarkable collection I unfortunately omitted from this evening's presentation but which will appear in a future edition of Chronicles.
Morris's studio portraits of local residents — some twenty or thirty cartes-de-visite have come to light — are fascinating. With one exception, none of the sitters is named: they are stock poses, formal and occasionally rather stiff, but full of incidental detail about dress, furnishing, and the conventions of self-presentation in the 1870s. There are family groups with the look of an Adams Family portrait; vignetted single figures with a hint of a smile; severe faces that may reflect the absence of teeth rather than the absence of good humour. We will probably never know who most of these people were — but they lived and were photographed on the edge of Wandsworth Common in the early 1870s, and that is something.
Q: Could you remind us what the Black Sea and the windmill were?
A: Wandsworth Common was chiefly famous in the mid-nineteenth century for a very beautiful lake — rather larger than the lake we have now, and in a different location. Before 1871, when the common was saved by Act of Parliament and the present lake was specially dug, there had been a large natural lake in what is now roughly the Spencer Park area, extending as far as the long path that runs from the railway bridge. It originated perhaps as a quarry, then became a reservoir of good clean water, and was subsequently beautified. Botanists and naturalists loved the common because it was notoriously wet — all manner of creatures and plants could be found there that existed nowhere else within several miles of London.
When the railway line from towards Sheffield was cut through in the late 1830s, it severed the water supply to the lake, which began to empty. The man who owned the lease on the land adjoining it — a very wealthy man, the owner of Price's Candle Works — loved his plants and loved that water. He eventually moved away and purchased what became Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society's garden; if you visit Wisley, the abundance of water and the general character of the landscape make sense when you know it was created by a man who grew up beside Wandsworth Common. He sued the London and South Western Railway for cutting off the water supply, and forced them to pay for a pump — the windmill — which was not a grain mill at all, but a water pump, raising water from below the railway line to continue feeding the lake.
Q: Following your discussions with the V&A, are there any plans to digitise the Bevington album?
A: The V&A never quite answers my emails, or answers them in rather opaque ways. I think they would certainly welcome someone coming along with a decent camera and photographing every page — it probably wouldn't take very long. I took poor-quality photographs of practically every page until my battery ran out; it never occurred to me it would be possible to do it properly. They are unlikely to prioritise it themselves, as they don't consider it important enough — but for anyone who lives on or near Wandsworth Common, it would be enormously valuable, since there will be countless images of the common, the houses, and the local people. The sitters are identified only by initials, but I have a fair idea who quite a few of them are.
Q: How was the telescope mounted, and who actually used it?
A: The lens was so poorly ground — only 1/5,000th of an inch out of true, but that was enough to cause fuzziness across part of the field of view — that useful observations were very limited. The telescope sat in a great cigar-shaped tube that ran on a kind of circular railway track so it could be rotated, very slowly. The main difficulty of astronomical photography at that period was that the sky appears stationary to the naked eye but is constantly moving, and the more you magnify it the more obviously it moves. Tracking a moving object with such a massive instrument, without any judder, was essentially impossible — which is why most of Diamond's photographs with it were of the Moon, when a long exposure happened to be feasible. Craig did claim to have discerned the number of Saturn's rings, though whether the optics were really up to that is debatable. Craig bankrupted himself in the enterprise and the enclosure was not returned to the common until 1871. Do look at Greg Ramsbottom's website — it is technically extraordinary, and gives a very vivid sense of how the instrument must have worked.
Philip will be returning at the end of the month to deliver Part Two of this talk, which will focus on Paul Martin, an internationally recognised photographer of the 1890s who lived in several houses in Battersea and Wandsworth and opened a studio on Bellevue Road — the finest building on that road, a striking red brick structure — in partnership with a photographer named Doret. Part Two will also include the material omitted from tonight's talk: a remarkable collection of photographs of Wandsworth Prison inmates taken in 1872–73, which Philip believes were made by Henry Morris. It will additionally feature photographs of Edward Thomas and his family, taken at the Doret-Martin studio — some quite precious images of a much-loved poet.