Tuesday 9th November 1779 - Richard Hall noted "Saw the Lord Mayor's Show by water. Wet in morn'g. was fine at the time of the show, afternoon fair, not cold."

London had a mayor way back in the reign of King John, although there wasn’t a ‘Lord Mayor’ until the fifteenth century. The first mayors were appointed but in recognition of the support given by the good burghers of the City, the monarch granted them the privilege of electing their mayor – but on one condition: once a year the mayor had to present himself at Westminster to pledge allegiance to the Crown. And so it was that the new mayor, with his retinue of supporters from the various Livery Companies, made his way upriver from the City to Westminster. And for nearly 800 years each mayor has done the same, with a few breaks for the odd war or civil insurrection.

Nowadays the Lord Mayor is met by the Lord Chief Justice rather than by the monarch in person, but for centuries it has been a pageant, with much finery on display, with tableaux and floats (indeed the name ‘float’ originated form the elaborate displays which were brought up-river on decorated barges)

Some time in the fifteenth century the Lord Mayor , then a draper called John Norman, decided to make at least part of the journey by boat, and the livery companies vied with each other for grand barges to accompany the procession. It became the ‘done thing’ to view proceedings from the water – hence Richard’s reference to it in his diary. It would have been a grand spectacle, with music, singing and great displays.  No wonder Canaletto, on one of his visits to the City, painted a couple of views of the pageant, viewed from the Thames.

London Westminster Bridge From The North On Lord Mayors Day

Just twenty or so years before Richard’s diary entry a decision was made to use a formal carriage to enable the Lord Mayor to make the journey in style. An earlier mayor had fallen from his horse when being barracked by a woman variously described as a flower seller and a fishwife. Maybe she was both, but it was a serious case of lèse-majesté and a coach was accordingly ordered to be made. It cost over a thousand pounds to be built in 1757 – and each of the aldermen had to cough up some sixty pounds  (nearly £5000 in today’s money). It is a wonderful sight, with its side panels decorated by the Italian painter Cipriani.

In Richard’s day all the apprentices would have been given the day off to follow the procession and to see the tableaux and wonder at the sheer glitter of it all. London was indeed a city of huge wealth, just as much as it was a place of grinding poverty.

Historically the show was held on 29 October each year but when the calendar changed  in 1752 it moved on by the 'missing' 11 days to 9th November. Since 1959 it has been moved to the second Saturday in November, and hence this year will be on 12 November.

A REMINDER : from now on most of my blogs will appear on http://blog.mikerendell.com   (this  present site will simply include a few copies from time to time)

Writing in the first week of November 1783 Richard Hall gives a snapshot of what he and his family got up to in their spare time.

On the Tuesday 4th November he "Went with Wife, Daughter (and son Francis who met us later) & Sophy to see Sir Ashton Lever's Collection of Natural Curiosities - and curious they indeed are. Din'd at a Beefstake House. Fine day, mild"

Richard would have been in his element at the museum, also known as the Leverium, and sometimes even as The Holophusicon. Based in Leicester Square the museum opened in 1775 and remained there for over twelve years. Entrance cost half a crown a head and for this visitors could see some 28,000 exhibits (mostly natural history items such as shells, fossils, etc but including various items brought back by Captain James Cook). It is to be hoped that Francis got there in time to share his father's enthusiasm for shells and fossils, and that 'Wife Daughter & Sophy' were not too bored with cabinet after cabinet of exhibits. Good to know that they worked up an appetite and that there was a 'stake house' nearby - a reminder that establishments where hot pies could be bought ('eat in or take-away') are nothing new.

I still have Richard's own collection of fossils and his shells - many of them still meticulously labelled with their Latin names. Richard also kept a little book in which he drew pictures of fossils (here, 'an Ophiomorphite'). Pre-Darwin it was believed that these creatures were in fact long worms, coiled up in death, before being turned to stone. Coming across a dead centipede rolled up in a spiral, I can inderstand the belief.

On the fifth of November there was no mention of Guy Fawkes or bonfires - rather a more serious note of fears over a conflagration which broke out nearby ("Rose early this morning on account of a great fire in Aldersgate Street. Blessed be the Lord who kept me and mine from the like Calamity"). The entry is a reminder that although the Great Fire of London was a century earlier, Richard's home at One London Bridge was only a hundred yards or so from the Monument, marking where the Great Fire started. Fires were a great concern to Richard - his diaries are full of similar reports. No wonder he went out and checked that he had renewed his fire cover with the Bird in Hand Insurance Company, raising the sum assured a short time afterwards...

On the sixth Richard noted that it was fine in the morning and that his son "William returned from his Sussex and Kent journeys, through mercy, in safety".

The entry reflects the fact that the Hall haberdashery business was expanding - rather than simply waiting for clients to come to Town for the season, family members would take it in turns to tour the Home Counties, no doubt armed with swatches and material samples and examples of new fashions, drumming up orders before 'returning to base' to have them made up, ready to be returned at the next visit. Indeed the only reason Richard was up in London was to provide 'cover' at the shop at One London Bridge. He stayed up for the Lord Mayor's Show the week afterwards and then returned to his home in the Cotswolds. It "remained fine, but very cool".

I like Richard's final entry on this page. It looks as though he started to say that he' took tea' before remembering that tea was off the menu, and instead he records that he "drank milk and water with Wife and Daughter at Mrs Reynolds". No explanation is given as to why there was no tea, but my guess is that Richard's digestive system was playing him up and a diet of milk and water was called for. Either that or Mrs Reynolds had committed the faux pas of failing to send the servants out for new supplies of the precious leaves....

(THE ABOVE IS A DUPLICATE OF THE BLOG POSTED AT MY NEW SITE AT http://blog.mikerendell.com  - the new place to go to for witterings, musings and oddments of 18th Century tittle-tattle.)

Today marks the anniversary of a man who has gone down in history as ‘The Butcher’ – a name oddly enough bestowed on him by his elder brother the Prince of Wales, for political reasons. The two did not get on…  

  To give him his actual name, William Augustus was born on 15 April 1721 in London and was the third son of George II and Caroline of Ansbach. The title ‘Duke of Cumberland’ was bestowed on him as a five year old. He became a soldier and achieved great popularity for his bravery in the (successful) Battle of  Dettingen (1743), where he was wounded in the leg by a musket ball. He was immediately made a Lieutenant General and within two years was placed in command of the combined British, Hanoverian, Austrian and Dutch forces. His inexperience was demonstrated at the Battle of Fontenoy, where he was comprehensively beaten by France's Marshal Maurice de Saxe on 11 May 1745.

 The 'martial boy' had been depicted as a great military general in this 1744 engraving (shown courtesy of the British Museum): 

                                             

Later in 1745 Cumberland was recalled to England to oppose the invasion of England led by ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie' (Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, grandson of the deposed king James II). His appointment was hugely popular, particularly with the army. Up until then the rebel army had been highly successful in making use of ‘the Highland Charge’. At the Battle of Prestonpans in September 1745 and the Battle of Falkirk in January 1746, the Highland Charge caused havoc against the English army.

It was with this background that Cumberland marched up to Edinburgh and  headed towards Aberdeen and then Inverness. By now he had insisted on the army being trained to combat the Highland Charge. The first row of infantry were to hold their fire until the enemy were just twelve yards away. While the front rank re-loaded, the second rank fired their guns. By the time the third rank had fired their guns, the first rank were ready to fire again.

Some of the English infantry had the benefit of using the more modern firelocks instead of the older matchlocks which were slow to re-load. Some of their guns had bayonets with which to dispatch any Scots who got too close – no match on their own for the Scottish broadsword but effective when used in conjunction with this style of fighting.  

When the forces met at Culloden Moor near Inverness on 16 April 1746, the Highland Charge failed to make its mark. Some one thousand Scots died. After the battle Cumberland was purportedly in his tent playing cards. When he was asked for orders he wrote "No quarter" on the back of the nine of diamonds -  a card still known to this day as the 'curse of Scotland'.

How Richard Hall noted the victory at Culloden.

The resulting hunting-down and indiscriminate killing of men women and children in the Scottish Highlands left deep scars in much of Scotland – although interestingly the good burghers of Glasgow were so pleased with him that they promptly awarded Cumberland  an honorary degree. The Highland Scots reviled him, and re-named the Common Ragwort (a noxious weed which gives off an unpleasant odour when bruised) as ‘Stinking Billie’. It is however quite wrong to attribute the naming of the flower ‘Sweet William’ to Cumberland by the English (as many have suggested) since the plant ‘Dianthus barbatus’ had been known by that name for several centuries.

  'Sweet William' popularly but erroneously thought to have been named after Prince William.

                Common Ragwort or Stinking Billie   

Cumberland  returned to London  a hero. He was awarded an additional £25,000 per annum i.e. over and above what he already received. His brother the Prince of Wales was alarmed at the popularity of his kid brother (and perhaps miffed because he himself had been denied a military role in the campaign)  and he orchestrated the use of the epithet ‘Butcher’ whenever his brother was mentioned.

Cumberland went back to Flanders, still in charge of British forces, and he led them to comprehensive defeats at Laffeldt in 1747 (War of Austrian Succession) and at Hastenbeck in 1757 (during the Seven Years War). This last battle allowed the French to take over Hanover, and Cumberland was relieved of his role as commander-in-chief of the army.

He returned to England, his reputation tarnished, being met by his father George II with the words "Here is my son who has ruined me and disgraced himself". It was a little hard, since the King had himself authorised his son to agree the surrender terms.

Cumberland resigned from all his military positions and largely retired from public life. He had time on his hands to indulge his favourite hobby, gambling: he gambled at bare kuckle boxing matches and he gambled  at horse races. In 1750 his favourite boxer Jack Broughton was up against the unknown Jack Slack. The Duke placed ten thousand pounds on Broughton to win ( a truly vast sum for a single bout, at odds of ten-to-one ON i.e. staking ten grand to win one thousand) and then watched in horror as his champion was defeated and near-blinded by the young upstart Slack, after a mere quarter of an hour.  

From time to time Cumberland meddled in domestic politics, apparently trying to get William Pitt restored to office. He was however in poor health – obese and never fully recovered from the wound to his leg, he suffered a stroke. His death on 31 October 1765 was sudden. He was 44 years old (the same age at death as two of his siblings). He is buried at Westminster Abbey and his name is especially remembered in the States where the Cumberland Gap as well as the Cumberland River, Mountains, and Plateau are named after him.

 

Richard's cut-out showing soldiers riding in single file.

Readers of the Journal of a Georgian Gentleman will know that Richard Hall never missed an opportunity to talk about the weather; indeed we are fortunate that he found time to talk about anything else at all!

The events of October 1784 presented him with a quandary - his infant daughter Anna (and her cousins) were to be inoculated against smallpox. Somewhere he had to find space to record the progress of her reaction to the  'variolation' as it was called, with the regular updates on the climate.

He started to set the scene on Wednesday 6th October "Began to light a Fire.Very fine day - cool. Began to warm bed"

 (And yes, I still have his brass bed-warmer!)

The next day was "Fine, cold wind" while the following days were either "cool and very fine", or "fine and cool"

On the Sabbath (10th October) he recorded that he went out of mourning for "poor Mr Kearse" (his first wife's uncle) "who has been departed four months this day" before adding that it was "Dull,Cold"

The weather remained that way for several days and on Wednesday 18th October Richard records that "This day poor little Anna, her Cousins Maria and Eliza were Inoculated for the smallpox.May the Lord of his great mercy be pleased to carry safely  thro' and spare them. Dull day, a little rain, cold"

                                                            

Apart from recording that the next few days were cold not a lot happened that week, except that another cousin (Patty Snooke) was also inoculated and on Monday 18th October Richard's wife "Went to sleep at Mrs Snooke's on account of the poor baby" and perhaps to get away from the weather forecasts! By then it was "a fine day, cool"

The next day we are told that "Dear Anna began to fail" (don't forget, the poor mite had just been given a live inoculation of a mild form of smallpox, a disease which was fatal in a worryingly high percentage of cases). It was "dullish in morning, after fine with Sun. Cold."

The next day Richard records that the barometer rose and that "Anna still but poorly, a little rain in morning,cool"  and the day after that mentions that "The smallpox came out in poor Anna and Eliza - may the Lord still mercifully appear & preserve."  It was a "pretty fine day - cold - a frost".

The children's health appears to have alternated over the next couple of days, and on 23rd October Richard noted that the barometer fell, and that it was dullish in the morning, and that in the afternoon there was a good deal of Rain.

Richard's diary for the following week records "snow in the past night" (Sabbath, 24th October). "Frost,Very wet in morning.Some more rain in afternoon.Cold"

The next day saw "a hard Frost, Snow in morning - after, fine, very cold" while noting that it was the day of Stow Fair. The children did get a mention the following day ("children thro' Mercy mending") although they shared the entry with the information that it was "cold, part fine, with sun".

The usual cycle of life in the Cotswolds went on - he began to make a collection for the Poor of the Church (31st October) and he  took coffee at Mr Palmer's two days later.

November 5th sees the entry "Through the goodness of God, my Wife and Anna returned from Mrs Snooke's. The Dear Baby through great mercy finally recovered from Inoculation....dull day,not cold. Preston came to be with us" (Preston was the maid, probably intended to help Mrs Hall with the baby-minding duties).  

The weather stayed miserable; the week afterwards the wind got up "Thursday November 11th wind very high with rain in the past night...exceeding wet and windy in the afternoon and evening.Not cold"  He refers to "A pretty deal of rain" on the following day. Indeed it rained all weekend until Tuesday "A very fine day with Sun.Not cold. Mr Clifford came from Stow about 10 o'clock at night.Saw lightning & heard Thunder - pretty loud"

And so the entries for the week continue until Thursday 18th November - when we see "A very wet day - not cold. Trouble and affliction; but Man is born to trouble - and the Lord won't lay upon Man more than is right" (No, I have no idea what sparked that off!)

A hard frost is mentioned for most of the next week, but by Tuesday the family all set out by chaise for Evesham. "Din'd at the Crown, drank coffee at Mr Dune; Lay at The Crown.Fine in morning - turned Foggy."

All in all, quite an eventful month...

  

                              

                             Gillray's ' Raw Weather'  © National Portrait Gallery, London  1808

'Mrs S.' was Richard Hall's short-hand for his sister-in-law (and next door neighbour) Mrs Snooke. She lived at the Manor House at Bourton on the Water and was evidently a keen gardener. The fashion for greenhouses grew throughout the century. Earlier, in 1712,  J James had translated the Frenchman Le Blond's  "Theory & Practice of Gardening; wherein is fully handled all that relates to fine gardening, commonly called pleasure gardens". In it James explained that 'greenhouses are large Piles of buildings like Galleries... for preserving Orange Trees, and other Plants....during the Winter'. By 1754 Philip Miller had published his Gardener's Dictionary, to include a plan for a greenhouse. These would have been stone or wooden glazed structures  - the huge iron and glass masterpieces like the ones we associate with Kew Gardens were not to appear until the next century.

Richard Hall mentions making a gift to Mrs Snooke of geraniums and myrtles, but there is no other record of specific plants (except 'groundsil' - which I always thought was a weed!)

A painting entitled 'Rubens with a Geranium' by the Eighteenth century American artist Rembrandt Peale, of his brother.

It does however give me a chance to show a couple of paintings which I like, with a greenhouse theme:

                            Stanley Spencer, (English painter, 1891 – 1959) The Greenhouse 1938

The Le Blond book specifically mentions growing oranges, and certainly no country home would be complete without its orangery, but equally the fashion for growing exotica grew throughout the 1700s with an increasing awareness of the huge range of plants available to the discerning gardener. 

                         Edward John Poynter  (English painter 1836-1919) entitled 'Hot-house Flower'

 

"1761 Bought my Weather-glass"

 

 

When Richard Hall mentioned the purchase of a weather glass he was referring to a barometer, but not the ones with which we are familiar today i.e. an aneroid barometer. The aneroid (from the Greek ‘without liquid’) model was not invented until 1843, by the Frenchman Lucien Vidie.  Richard’s model would have been a Torricelli or mercury Barometer, named after its inventor Evangelista Torricelli.

According to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research:

"In a 17th century laboratory in Florence, Italy, Evangelista Torricelli- physicist mathematician, and assistant to the astronomer Galileo - filled a long glass tube with mercury and turned it upside down into a dish forming a vacuum so that the mercury remained held within the tube. To his amazement, he witnessed that the mercury was not the same height everyday. The changes in its level were caused by changes in the atmospheric pressure. Torricelli had not only created a vacuum, but also a very important weather instrument - the barometer."

                                            

Torricelli had been born in 1608 and died in Florence of Typhoid Fever at the age of just 39 on October 22, 1647.  

Writing in 1643 he famously stated in a letter: "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air" (which, let's face it, is a rather neat way of describing atmospheric pressure). 

                      My own Torricelli barometer, no doubt similar to the one Richard bought.

Richard's brother in law, farming in the Cotswolds, also bought a barometer, noting the cost on 10 May 1768 "Barometer Tube five shillings. Case one shilling"

That´s what I love about the 18th Century - they had the same pre-occupation with the weather as we do today, but without the reliance on  people on TV standing in front of a map of meaningless symbols, reciting from an autocue. There is no substitute for tapping the glass of your own barometer, which has done the job perfectly for centuries, and making your own personal forecast for the day.*

 

 

*And as I have just arrived in Spain, it has to be: "sunny, followed by sunshine. Maybe some sunny spells later"

 

 

In 1799 Richard noted down the cost ('five shillings in board') and title of a new book he wanted to buy: "A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire". The book was written by Thomas West, who lived between 1720 and 1779. 

           Map from West's book

In some ways it was an odd choice - Richard was a southerner through-and-through and there is no record that he ever travelled North, or that he would have found the scenery anything other than terrifying in its bleak remoteness. But West's book was in many ways the very first tourist guide to the Lakeland area. He was a Scot by birth and had at one stage been a Catholic priest. He became interested in the English Lakes and wanted to encourage artists to come and view the scenery from 'stations' which he had selected for them.

The book was published in 1778 and was a major success.Seven re-prints followed by the end of the 18th Century. The book marked the start of true tourism in the area - West maintained that the Grand Tour should rightfully include the English Lakes on the basis that they were every bit as picturesque as The Alps and other European mountain areas.

                           

Many lampooned West for his style and for his enthusiasm, as here with Thomas Rowlandson's cartoon entitled 'Dr Syntax sketching the Lake', published in 1812. The idea that painters needed to be told where to stop and what to paint may seem ridiculous today, but in his day West did every bit as much to make the Lakes accessible to the general public as Alfred Wainwright's Lakeland Guides have done for his army of followers in the 21st Century                                 

                                                  

(Post script: For me I don't think you can beat  this gloomy but majestic picture which J M W Turner painted of Buttermere Lake in 1798. Fascinating.The original is in the Tate Collection).

In 1780 Richard notes in his diary that he went to see the pictures at 'the new Royal Academy'. Clearly impressed with the building he bought a print (see above)  showing the 'Back front' (?!) and stuck it on to on old piece of vellum to make a sort of wallet in which he could keep papers etc. It is still in use for the same purpose 230 years later.

It was called the 'new' Royal Academy because the original was housed in cramped quarters in Pall Mall. The Academy had been founded by George III in December 1768 to meet the demands for  the creation of a national school of art with suitable training being given to artists so that they achieved an acceptable standard i.e. in accordance with prevailing notions of good taste. The Academy was also intended to promote annual exhibitions of the work of those artists who were at the pinnacle of their powers. Sir Joshua Reynolds was the first President, and there were 34 founder members including Thomas Gainsborough. Young artists who benefited from the training afforded by the Academy included the likes of  JMW Turner, John Constable, William Blake and  Edwin Landseer. Twenty-five students a year were accepted and were expected to complete a seven year training (raised to ten years in 1800).

Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy by Rowlandson & Pugin, 1808,  from the Microcosm of London

But if the Academy was to succeed in breaking the stranglehold of European painters on contemporary ideas of good taste it needed premises which could showcase English talent - yet in 1771 it moved its base to Old Somerset House, a building severely in the doldrums and otherwise used for storage, for putting up troops, and for housing foreign visitors to the Court. Demolition of the old Tudor building known as Somerset House started in 1775.

Edmund Burke led the cry for a building of national importance to be constructed and in 1775 Parliament passed an Act aimed at "erecting and establishing Publick Offices in Somerset House, and for embanking Parts of the River Thames ....". The Public Offices were to include homes for such diverse bodies as the Stamp Office, the Navy Office, the Public Lottery Office and the Hawkers and Peddlars Office. And so it was that Sir William Chambers was appointed Surveyor-General of Works at the new Somerset House at an annual salary of £2000. 

The work was not completed until after the death of Chambers but the Strand entrance was finished in 1780 and the Royal Academy took up residence.

So what would Richard have seen when he visited Somerset House in 1780? It would have been very different from the art exhibitions at the Foundling Hospital, where William Hogarth displayed his works - and different too from the paintings shown in the supper booths at Spring Gardens (re-named Vauxhall Gardens) which Richard also visited in 1780.

 

At the Academy the pictures were hung with barely an inch between canvasses - a style echoed in most galleries and private houses at the time. 

Rudolf Ackerman's sketch of the Summer Exhibition at the Academy, from 1808
(taken from the Microcosm of London).

In 1837 the Academy moved again, into premises already occupied by the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The two institutions were uneasy bed-fellows because space was limited. By 1868 the Academy was on the move again, into its present premises at Burlington House.

Over the years the Academy has moved its premises five times and changed the way its pictures are displayed - but it has managed to maintain the tradition of a Summer Exhibition in an unbroken sequence since 1769.