The year: 1661

The season: high summer

The place: Upper St James Park (now Green Park)

The occasion: a few drinkies on the Terrace to impress  friends, courtiers and ambassadors.

In attendance: King Charles II , knocking back a few vol au vents and ostentatiously clinking his glass to draw attention to the ice rattling round.

Picture courtesy of http://www.andybrain.com/

Ice in the summer? Yes, thanks to the ice house which the king had commissioned to be built immediately after his return to England the year before. In this he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather James I who had built an ice house in Greenwich in 1619 and another at Hampton Court five years later. But  come the revolution and fripperies like iced drinks, chilled sorbets and summer ice creams went out of favour with those killjoy Puritans, and it was left to the new King to revive the tradition.

 It certainly impressed the poet Edmund Waller  in 1661 when he eulogised:

ON ST JAMES'S PARK (As lately improved by His Majesty)

Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up,
Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup,
There ice, like crystal, firm and never lost,
Tempers hot July with December's frost;
Winter's dark prison, whence he cannot fly,
Tho' the warm spring, his enemy draws nigh:
Strange! That extremes should thus preserve the snow,
High on the Alpes or in deep caves below. 

The King’s subjects were also  mightily impressed (with the ice house, if not the poem) and went back to their stately piles determined to emulate the royal example. Over  the course of the Eighteenth Century many ice houses were built, often to the same basic design. The King James’ version was little more than a well, 30 feet deep and 16 feet wide, brick-lined and covered with a thatched structure. In the winter ice would be collected from ponds and lakes and piled into the well and then covered with straw. Later versions were commonly brick-lined, domed structures, constructed mostly underground. They were often conical or rounded at the bottom to hold melted ice, and more elaborate ones were paved at the bottom, with a drain to carry away the melt-water.

Ponds were often created artificially, close to the gated entrance of the ice house, to enable the labourers to load the structure during the deepest part of winter. It must have been a thoroughly unpleasant and arduous task man-handling sheets of ice and shovelled snow into the dank, dark structure, alternating it with layers of straw. Some of the structures had successive chambers linked by passages to a central ice vault, and apparently they could be extremely efficient, with the majority of the ice making it through to the summer so as to be used for ice sculptures, chilling drinks, making sorbets and so on.

By the end of the Georgian era many ice houses were being constructed  on the basis of the design of John Buonarotti Papworth. He was one of the founder members of the Royal Institute of British Architects and published this icehouse design in 1816.  

 Papworth's Design

    

I have always loved Georgian (and Victorian) boxes: be they sewing boxes, tea caddies, writing slopes, jewellery cases, make-up boxes or whatever, preferably ones with all the original contents! I am fortunate enough to have a small collection – none of them actually belonged to my ancestor Richard Hall, but some of them are right for his period (late Eighteenth Century).

Occasionally I come across a box which is a real delight – I may never get to own anything like it but it is worth a detailed look for the information it gives us about the period. One such item is the splendid antique apothecary’s box featured by Hampton Antiques at their site at http://www.hamptonantiques.co.uk/

The item shown here was manufactured in 1800, is English made from wood, tin, zinc and glass and is in a lovely condition. It has double opening (lockable) doors with a working lock and tasselled key. Open it up and what a treasure trove of delights – something that even a hypochondriac like Richard Hall would have marvelled at! There are 25 separate glass bottles inside, along with a glass pestle and mortar, a stirring stick, brass and iron scales with various weights, and a number of hinged boxes made of tin.

In this cornucopia of delights the apothecary would no doubt have all sorts of potions, lotions, unguents and pills. There would doubtless have been ground harts-horn, and Jesuits Bark (otherwise Quinine).There would no doubt be opiates to calm the nerves, perhaps extract of viper oil to calm and soothe, extract of rhubarb for that upset stomach, and cures for everything from sprains and bruising to a hacking cough.

                        

It would be fair to say that my great-great-great-great grandfather enjoyed ill-health for much of his long life. If it wasn't his gout it was his digestion (and I shall blog another time about that delightful topic of 'oppress'd wind') and if it wasn't that it was his nerves, or his tooth-ache. He enlisted friends to recommend their favourite cures and I have listed some of them in The Journal of a Georgian Gentleman. He invariably jotted down the latest tittle-tattle about illnesses and complaints suffered by the Royal family ('a Worm was voided through the nose of the Princess...!'). He collected prescriptions made out for him by friendly physicians, and, as mentioned in an earlier post, he copied down the apothecary’s symbols so that he knew what they were on about!

  

                                    

So, if you have a few bob to spare do have a look at the excellent Hampton Antiques site. There you will see that Mark and Sara Goodger specialize in antique boxes. Apparently they currently have two apothecary's boxes on their books - so if you buy one for yourself perhaps you can get me the other one as a Christmas present!

Two hundred and thirty years ago this month a heavily laden ship edged its way out of harbour on the west African coast and headed for the Caribbean. The ship, originally known as Zorg but re-named the Zong after it was captured from the Dutch, was under the command of one Captain Luke Collingwood. The vessel belonged to a group of merchants from Liverpool headed by Messrs Gregson and Chase (both of them former mayors of that city). Over-laden and under-provisioned The Zong sailed for two months. Conditions on board were not helped by the fact that Captain Collingwood managed to get himself and his vessel lost, so the journey was longer than planned. Sickness broke out and seven of the crew died of disease.

But that is just half the picture, because 'the merchandise' on board consisted of 442 slaves, manacled and wedged into appalling conditions. 60 of them had died, and of the remainder many were sick, malnourished and liable to die before they could be sold. In any case, they were in such a poor condition that they would not fetch a good price. So on 29 November 1781 the Captain called his crew together and explained that if they did nothing, and allowed ‘the merchandise’ to die on board, the owners would lose money. But if they simply jettisoned the sick they could claim compensation from the insurers at a rate of thirty pounds a head. The justification which the ship’s owners would give to the Insurers was that there was insufficient water and provisions on board to keep the slaves alive.

And so it was that the crew seized 55 of the sick and callously threw them overboard. The next day a further 42 were drowned. At which point the ship encountered rainy weather, which topped up the reserves of water, but that did not stop the Captain ordering a further 26 sick slaves to be thrown overboard on the first day of December. Another ten slaves broke free and deliberately jumped over the side of the Zong, preferring to take their own lives in an act of defiance rather than allow the crew to make that decision for them. In all 133 people were left to drown (in fact one managed to get back on board) in the name of commercial profit. It was indeed a shameful, horrendous episode, and one which scars our reputation for justice and the Rule of Law.

Because, in the eyes of the law, it was not murder, nor even wrong-doing. The Captain was never even tried for it – the court case which followed the massacre was based upon the claim made by the owners against the insurers, who argued that as the slaves had been killed deliberately, they should not have to pay up. The insurers lost and then appealed, pointing out that far from running out of water the Zong still had 420 gallons of water on board when she finally docked in Jamaica just before Christmas.

Unbelievably, when the case went before the Court of Exchequer Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice said 'The matter left to the jury was whether it was necessary that the slaves were thrown into the sea, for they had no doubt that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.”

The words of the Solicitor General are chilling: “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. They acted out of necessity and in the most appropriate manner for the cause. The late Captain Collingwood acted in the interest of his ship to protect the safety of his crew. To question the judgement of an experienced well-travelled captain held in the highest regard is one of folly, especially when talking of slaves. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

I have read and re-read those words, of one of the country's most prominent lawyers of the day, and still find them astonishing. Not just because the slaves were denied all humanity, but because the man who sent them to their death could be held 'in the highest regard', not deserving censure of any kind. But then, it is not the first time that the Law appears to have been written to protect those with property, rather than to safeguard the rights of those who do not! 

The case provoked an outrage, the starting point of a backlash against the slave trade which resulted, 24 years later, in Parliament banning the trade. It was known not as the’ Zong Massacre’, but as the ‘Zong Affair’, because the law simply did not see the killing as unlawful, merely the right of a captain to decide what he did with his cargo.

JMW Turner Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on (The difference of course is that with the Zong there never was a typhoon coming on...)

As a Georgian Gentleman I have a healthy disdain for all things French, but will graciously give credit where credit is due: today we propose a toast to a Frenchman, one Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, born this day in 1725 in Lorraine and attributed as being the inventor of the first self-propelled motor vehicle known as a 'steamer'. I say 'born this day' but in fairness Wikipedia says his birth date was 26th February, not 25th September. I prefer Encyclopædia Britannica...

Cugnot was a military engineer who in 1765 started making models of steam engines designed for transporting large heavy items like cannons to the front line.

He based his design on the massive two-wheeled tractor used for that purpose by the French army, known as a fardier. Cugnot added a third wheel at the front, where the horses would normally be harnessed, and this wheel supported a steam boiler and drive mechanism. The contraption was steered from the rear using a rack and pinion. A small version of the fardier à vapeur was constructed in 1769  at the Paris Arsenal by the engineer Michel Brezin and Cugnot moved on to a full size version the following year. Reportedly it carried four passengers and could travel at a break-neck speed of just over two miles an hour.

There were one or two design problems with the steamer: the contraption had to be stopped, the fire re-lit and steam raised again every quarter of an hour or so. More significantly, it had a lousy weight distribution meaning it was hopeless on rough terrain. Reportedly the 1771 version ran out of control and knocked down a section of the Arsenal wall where it was undergoing trials. The whole thing had a weight in excess of two tons, so stopping the monster cannot have been easy. Cugnot can however be credited with being the first person to cause an automobile accident. Some would argue that his countrymen have been celebrating this ever since…

A contemporary print showing the  vehicle hitting the Arsenal wall

 Over the next few years experiments were carried out with the vehicle between Paris, Vincennes and Meudon but they proved unsuccessful. One problem was the inability to cope with different terrains. Another was the lack of speed - it needed to be able to keep pace with a marching infantryman. One of Cugnot's patrons died, and another went into exile. Finally the army abandoned the whole idea of mechanical vehicles. Louis XV nevertheless rewarded Cugnot with a pension of 600 livres a year and the fardier was kept at the Arsenal until 1800 when it was moved to its present home at the Conservatioire National des Arts et Métiers.

Come the Revolution and Cugnot high-tailed it out of France to Brussels where he lived in straightened circumstances. Napoleon Bonaparte invited him back to Paris, and he died there on 2^nd October 1804.

Cutaway drawing showing the steam boiler at the front (illustrations courtesy of Wikipedia).

Cugnot left others to pick up the baton of steam powered vehicles: his fellow countryman Onesiphore Pecqueur (they don’t make names like that any more!) improved the machine and added differential gears; the Cornishman Richard Trevithick  built a road carriage powered by steam in 1801 (more of him in a later post); and between 1820 and 1840 a number of steam-powered stage coaches were in service in England. The fact that they were subsequently banned from the roads gave an enormous fillip to the country’s nascent railway system.

                                                 A print entitled 'The Leader of the Luddites' published in 1812 (courtesy of Wikipedia).

I sometimes use the word ‘Luddite’ against myself and was amused to see that the name probably derives from a real person, Ned (or Edward) Ludd who was a weaver in Anstey in Leicestershire in the second part of the Eighteenth Century. Little is known about him save that he lost his temper at work in 1779 and smashed a couple of weaving machines to smithereens. Breaking up factory equipment became known as ‘doing a Ludd’ and  a common cry of anyone denying responsibility for such an act was ‘it wasn’t me – it was Ned Ludd’. There is however nothing to show that Mr Ludd was a political idealist, or that he consciously wished to be seen as a sort of ‘Robin Hood saviour of the oppressed’ which he soon became in popular folklore. He is described variously as King Ludd, Captain Ludd or General Ludd.

So it happened that Ludd’s name was lent to a movement which started in the 1770s but did not really get going until after the Napoleonic Wars. War had caused huge food shortages, inflation, and hardship amongst the poor. This was aggravated by the fact that people engaged in the weaving industry were particularly affected by the use of newly introduced machinery in factories, which resulted in widespread redundancies. The poor were like cornered rats.

In early 1811 a series of letters were sent to factory owners in the Nottingham area signed in the style of ‘General Ludd and his Army of Redressers’ objecting to the use of machines such as power looms, and in the attempt by mill-owners to reduce wages and bring in unqualified staff. The letters threatened attack. Over a three week period over 200 stocking frames were destroyed.

                                   A Reward poster from 1811

Luddite support gradually spread throughout the weaving heartlands of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicester and Derbyshire, and by 1812 the government of the day forced through a Bill in Parliament making the breaking of frames a capital offence. Rewards were offered for the capture of the miscreants, and 12,000 militia were drafted in to the worst affected areas to try and quell the disturbances.

Attacks on mills using power looms and cloth finishing machinery continued apace. Mill owners were killed and premises burned. In some cases the owners hired their own armed guards to open fire on crowds intent on forcing entry into their factory premises, and many protesters were killed. When protesters were brought to trial the courts responded with savage ferocity, hanging the ringleaders (one of them, Abraham Charlston, allegedly only 12 years old) or transporting them to the Colonies. It seems incredible that the Georgian era’s preoccupation with preserving property rights counted for so much that it could send a young boy to the scaffold, where he cried for his Mother to protect him. But maybe we have grown soft with rioters, and nowadays we have a different price to pay. 

An engraving from 1812 showing Frame Breaking.

The rioters'had their 'weapon of choice' - a long handled sledgehammer, known as an Enoch (after the manufacturer Enoch & James Taylor). This, the Great Enoch, would have been swung as the crowd screamed 'Let Great Enoch take the Van' (i.e. lead the way).

The summer of 1812 saw trouble flare again. Eight men were sentenced to death in Lancashire and another thirteen shipped off to Australia. Another fifteen were executed at York but although there were further sporadic outbreaks over the next couple of years, by 1817 the movement had blown over and the rioting simply became part of on-going discontent about food prices and voting rights.

I rather like the description of the Luddite tactics as 'collective bargaining by riot' Certainly it can be seen in context of later upheavals such as those involving the Tolpuddle Martyrs some twenty years later. 

Now, if only I could find where I had set down my quill pen I could throw this wretched computer-thingy out the window...

London, a magnet for immigrants from all over the country, must have been a real melting pot of accents in the Eighteenth Century. Then, as now, you would not want to be taken for a country bumpkin and would wish to ensure that you pronounced words correctly so as not to be shown up!

 

 

 

With his 'Hartichokes', his 'twaylet', and his 'huzzif' he sounded a somewhat affected person to modern ears, but to him that was the correct way of speaking!

 

Today is the birthday of John Loudon McAdam, born in 1756. His world was one of appalling roads, as emphasised when the Duke of Cumberland travelled with his army meet the Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746. Troop movements were hampered by the deeply rutted and ill-maintained roads, many of which were mere cattle tracks. Up until this time roads had been the responsibility of each individual parish through which the road passed. There was no incentive to have repairs carried out properly, and there was no Highway Authority having overall control. The solution lay in a series of Turnpike Acts, setting up individual companies charged with raising tolls from passing travellers to pay for improvements to the surface. Some sixteen hundred separate Acts of Parliament were passed in the last half of the century, each one authorising a particular company to erect gates or other barriers across the highway in a particular area. Improvements were gradual and piece-meal throughout the second half of Richard Hall’s life. Ironically the solution was to lie with a trio of Scottish road builders – “Blind Jack” Metcalfe, Thomas Telford - and John Loudon McAdam.

Blind Jack, born in 1717 constructed some 180 miles of highway in Yorkshire – despite his blindness – using a three-layered system of large stones, covered with excavated road material, topped with a layer of gravel.  Thomas Telford, born in 1757, raised the foundation at the centre of the road to ensure proper drainage i.e. away from the road surface so that water could run off to the sides. McAdam was born the year before Telford and he went on to develop a system of road construction which became known as “water-bound macadam”. Again, there were three layers, the first two comprising an eight-inch bed of angular broken stones (crushed by manual labour). The top layer was some two inches thick with a maximum crushed stone size of 1 inch. The layers would be watered before being compressed with a heavy roller locking the angular stones together. 

The method required a great deal of manual labour, but it resulted in a strong and free-draining surface. Roads constructed in this manner were described as "macadamized" and for that reason when bitumen was added the road was described as “tar macadam” – even though the process was not developed until 1854 in Paris and the use of tar had nothing to do with John McAdam. The word “tarmacadam” was shortened to the now familiar “tarmac”.

So, John, we remember you and salute you as we drive along the motorways at what you would have regarded as break-neck speed; even though the tar (asphalt) was not added to roads until nearly twenty years after your death.

 

One of Richard's paper cut-outs showing his stately progress in a coach and four. In his younger days, the journey from London to the Cotswolds involved an overnight stop, and a very rough ride giving rise to thanks for 'Journey's Mercies' at the end of each day. But by the end of the century the coaches were fitted with carriage lamps and were running overnight along the improved roads. Journey times were much reduced and the coach operators could bring down ticket prices because they no longer had to provide overnight accommodation. 

The sign outside gives its name and the date says 1546 - yet the pub was built in the early 1770s. It is situated in the heart of London and yet until recently the drinks licence was issued by Cambridgeshire magistrates. It is close to the jewellery centre of the capital and yet thieves in the area could not be arrested by London coppers and had the chance to escape before the police arrived from Cambridge. It is a tiny gem  of a public house with no TVs, no fruit machines, no music and it closes every weekend of the year bar one. Where is it? Ye Old Mitre Tavern off Hatton Garden.

When Richard Hall was a lad, actually until he was in his forties, the inn was part of the Palace of the Bishop of Ely in Cambridgeshire, used by its servants as a watering hole. The original inn dates from 1546.The area is close to the country’s oldest catholic church, the Chapel of St Ethelreda (otherwise known as Ely Chapel).

  St Ethelreda's Chapel  courtesy of their website at http://www.stetheldreda.com/home.html

Dating back to the year 1291 the chapel was named after a seventh century queen of East Anglia who became a nun and founded the monastery in Ely, becoming its first abbess. The later Bishops of Ely built a huge palace in London to represent their power base and to promote their influence. The gardens of the old palace stretched to 58 acres and included orchards, strawberry fields and vineyards all the way down to the River Thames.

Legends abound – that Queen Elizabeth danced around the Maypole here, and that the cherry tree still visible in the bar area was part of the actual maypole. Another puts the tree as the boundary to the estate of Elizabeth’s favourite courtier Sir Christopher Hatton, in whose favour the Queen persuaded the Bishops to donate some of their land. This was the area which became known as Hatton Garden, famous as a centre of London’s diamond trade.

 This, and  pictures 1 and 4, courtesy of the pub's website at www.yeoldemitre.co.uk

By 1772 the palace and the inn were in poor repair and both were demolished. Shortly afterwards the present pub, known as Ye Old Mitre Tavern, was re-built, using a carved stone mitre from one of the old palace gate posts as a way-mark in the alley leading to it. By some anomaly or other the premises remained under the control of Cambridge until well into the Twentieth Century – hence the oddity about the licensing rules, and the lack of jurisdiction of London’s finest.

The arched alley leading to the pub  is easy to miss – a narrow dark passageway between numbers 8 and 9 Hatton Garden, marked by an old crooked street lamp. Its position gives it a measure of privacy – an oasis of calm in a frenetic part of the City.

The pub itself is ‘small but beautifully  formed’ with two downstairs bars and a function room upstairs. All are oak-panelled and, according to the various pub guides on-line, are cosy, relaxing and with oodles of original charm.

To Richard Hall it was just one of a number of hostelries he frequented in the late 1770s - though he would have seen it as being 'new' rather than  'ye olde'. It remains as a link between the centuries, a business which has stood the test of time.