Bedford Park 150 anniversary project turns up new information about its history

Image: Workers in copper and silver at the Chiswick School of Arts and Crafts, 1898; courtesy of Dave Marshall

Bedford Park Society’s research project turns up new material about the history of the communities who lived there

Bedford Park is celebrating 150 years. The Victorian developer Jonathan Carr bought the land near the newly built railway line to develop the first ‘garden suburb’, offering a healthy alternative to living in the filth and stink of London.

Members of the Bedford Park Society have carried out new research on the suburb’s history and have turned up a considerable amount of new information about it, which they have made into a special exhibition to mark the anniversary.

The focus of the 150th anniversary exhibition is on the communities of Bedford Park rather than its architecture. Much has already been written about the history of Bedford Park; there are a number of books on the subject which were the starting point for the research for the exhibition.

Image: Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita

Curator Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita told The Chiswick Calendar:

“We had always felt we needed to do something for this anniversary. It has been written about by several competent and very hard-working historians and when we were talking to people about it there was a feeling it would just be ‘all the usual stuff’.

“That stuck a pin into us, and we were determined it shouldn’t be.”

Nicholas and his team of 12 volunteers set about finding new material to astound the nay-sayers, and by following up leads through the internet and then in person, they have unearthed quite a bit of new material from libraries, antique dealers and private collections.

Image: The exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary was launched in the Boston Room of George IV on Wednesday 7 May

Bedford Park’s first residents were free-thinking radicals “ahead of the world”

The exhibition is titled The Community at Bedford Park 1875-2025 – “Ahead of the World in Everything?” a reference to the more free-thinking, more radical types who were the first occupants of Bedford Park.

Jonathan Carr’s decision in 1875 to buy the first part of the 113 acres he would eventually acquire near Turnham Green railway station made the new suburb attractive to ‘a middle-class market less wealthy than those grown rich in business, who had already started to settle in suburbs elsewhere,’ Kate Bowes, one of the organisers of the exhibition, told The Chiswick Calendar.

“These younger, radical and liberal residents included professionals and artists. In their sociability, social campaigning and interior décor they sought to be ‘ahead of the world’ in breaking with the earlier Victorians’ social and aesthetic convictions.”

Accordingly, the exhibition focuses on the Bedford Park Community’s enthusiasm for ideas and behaviours which challenged contemporary norms, not just artistic but political.

“It was a place where women took action to create their own careers,” Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita told the audience in the Boston Room at George IV, introducing the exhibition.

The Bedford Park Gazette wrote in 1885 that ‘Bedford Park is itself a unique institution and wants to be ahead of the world in everything.’

“Was Bedford Park ahead of the world in everything? It was socially progressive,” Nichols told me. “They were interested in Home Rule for Ireland and Women’s Suffrage, and the residents embraced a certain informality in their social life.”

It was very un-Victorian to drop in on neighbours without a calling card, but ok in the trendy new suburb of Bedford Park apparently, where anything went. John Ruskin noted that in Herne Hill, where his parents lived, neighbours would not have dreamed of just dropping in, but it was perfectly acceptable in Bedford Park.

Image: Olivia Freeman at the exhibition launch

The Calumet Club

Olivia Freeman, who had trained as a librarian in her professional life, was given the Calumet Club to research, a discussion group started in the 1880s which met informally and often continued their discourse until two or three in the morning in each other’s houses.

Starting in the local history section at Chiswick Library, her research led her to the British Library, where she was able to read WB Yeats’ letters from Bedford Park and find out more about the members of the Calumet.

Panel three (out of nine) in the exhibition describes the early Bedford Park as a radical community and highlights the members of the Calumet Club:

‘The Calumet Club founded in 1882 by Moncure Conway was a private club open to 12 invited members who met in members’ homes on alternate Sundays. Moncure Conway was an American author and pastor and a resident and enthusiast of Bedford Park.

Images: (L to R) Portrait of John O’Leary by John Butler Yeats, National Gallery of Ireland; WB Yeats by Henry Marriott Paget, 1889, Ulster Museum; Sergei Michailovich Kravchinskii, known as Stepniak; Henry Fox Bourne

‘The Calumet was named after the North American Indian ceremonial pipe and was apparently still meeting in the 1920s under the chairmanship of the Fabian vicar the Rev Jacob Cartmel-Robinson.

‘Early members included Moncure Conway, James Sime, John Todhunter, Gordon Hogg, Godard Henry Orpen, York Powell, Henry Fox Bourne and Jonathan Carr.

‘Later members included John Butler Yeats, R A M Stevenson and Oliver Elton. John O’Leary, the Irish Nationalist leader, was invited to participate. At some point Joseph Nash, Henry Paget, William Wollen and Stepniak.’ [Sergei Michailovich Kravchinskii, known as Stepniak, a member of groups opposed to the tsarist regime and revolutionary movements in other countries].

Florence Farr and Edward Heron-Allen in A Sicilian Idyll

Dr John Todhunter (1839 – 1916) was a poet, playwright and physician born in Dublin and encouraged by WB Yeats to write. He was a member of the Irish Literary Society founded at Yeats’ house in December 1891.

His play A Sicilian Idyll was produced in the Bedford Park Club, with local residents as actors, including professional actress Florence Farr in the lead role. Local artists provided the scenery.

Godard Henry Orpen (1852 – 1932) was a lawyer and photographer, whose photographs have added substantially to the photographic record of Bedford Park, while Henry Fox Bourne (1838 – 1909) was a journalist and campaigner for the rights of indigenous peoples.

An advocate for the abolition of slavery, he owned The Examiner newspaper, to which the political philosopher John Stuart Mill contributed.

The poet WB Yeats (1865 – 1939) and his father JB (1839 – 1922) are probably the best known early residents of Bedford Park. John was an artist whose wife died in 1900, leaving him living with his four children: William, Susan, Elizabeth and Jack. The author GK Chesterton was a regular visitor and wrote:

‘WB Yeats is perhaps the best talker I ever met, except his old father.’

Irish home rule was a hot topic. John O’Leary, another member of the Calumet Club, had been tried in 1865 for membership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and received a 21 year prison sentence.

‘Subsequently pardoned, be was however obliged to exile himself.’

“There were so many academics and really interesting people,” Olivia told The Chiswick Calendar, some of whom had already been recorded in books about Bedford Park.

“There were women’s societies and men’s societies, and acting society.”

Olivia herself has just stepped down as Chair of the Arts Society Chiswick, carrying on the tradition of Bedford Park’s involvement with the arts.

Wallpaper designs by George Haite (1855 – 1924), who lived on Blandford Rd and The Avenue, and who made designs for textiles and wallpapers throughout his life, of which the V&A has more than 1,000 examples

New finds include a painting ‘hiding in plain sight’ in a Newcastle gallery, journals in an antique shop in Devon, and a menu from the Bedford Park Club in a New York public library

The Bedford Park Society’s labours were particularly fruitful when it came to researching the artistic community which contributed to the Arts and Crafts movement around the turn of the century.

“One person looked particularly at the Art School [no longer there – bombed during World War II and replaced by the Arts Educational Schools on Bath Road]; another looked at the artists working for The Graphic and The Illustrated London News,” Nicholas told me.

“This was before photography and there were all these new forms of creative processes, illustrations had to be engraved, which provided work for artists.”

Image: An opium den in the east end of London – engraving by painter and illustrator JC Dollman, whose studio was in Bedford park; Wellcome Collection 

It was the School of Art which attracted so many artists to the area, he said, they were working artists, not just the well-to-do dabbling at it.

When they came to put the exhibition together, they found 75% of the pictures they used – paintings, illustrations and early photographs of the suburb – were newly discovered during the course of their research, or at least their connection to Bedford Park was newly discovered.

Image: September, Edward Blair Leighton

Edmund Blair Leighton’s painting September is a case in point. It was “hiding in plain sight in a Newcastle gallery,” said Nicholas, “but unless you find out a little bit about the artist you wouldn’t make the connection.

The clues were the Dutch gable in the picture and the fact that Edmund Blair Leighton was one of the earliest residents of Bedford Park. “His house was about 20 yards from an orchard,” and the new development was surrounded by orchards when it was built.

They turned up a menu from a late Victorian dinner at the Bedford Park Club in the New York Public Library and a cache of 50 photographs of one of the houses, interiors and exteriors, in a private collection in Ireland.

Image: Peter Wolton

Chiswick Art Workers Guild

The biggest discovery was of new information about the members of the ‘Chiswick Art Workers Guild’ Peter Wolton, one of the researchers, told The Chiswick Calendar. Starting out on their research, they knew the name, and that they were attached to the Chiswick School of Art, but not much more.

“There were annual exhibitions at the Albert Hall by guilds from all over the country, and the pre-eminent one was the Chiswick Guild, heavily influenced by William Morris. Their work was shown in British newspapers and the articles were syndicated, so they had almost a national reputation.”

Image: Bookbinders working at the Chiswick School of Art; courtesy of Dave Marshall

“Nick was very good as the director of the research. He gave us very specific areas to look into.”

Peter scoured the British newspaper archive for information about the Guild, which led him to an antique dealer in Newton Abbott in Devon, Dave Marshall, who had copies of journals with information and photographs of its members.

“He shared them with us out of the goodness of his heart, because he was an enthusiast. They did copper work – fire screens, jugs, things like that – furniture, book-binding. “The Chiswick Art Workers Guild had a big reputation and it attracted people to come here.”

Image: Jenny de Montfort and Alison Watson

A strong sense of community 150 years on

One of the quotes highlighted in the exhibition is a comment about Bedford Park from The Illustrated London News in November 1881:

‘I found Bedford Park a very charming place, inhabited by a smiling and cultivated community.’

The exhibition describes how the early residents got together for ‘fancy dress balls, dinners, children’s parties, plays, exhibitions and lectures and debates on social and political issues,” traditions condinued today in the Bedford Park Festival and the Chiswick Book Festival.

Image: Fancy dress ball at Bedford Park Club, from the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 17 July 1880. Engraving by John Jellicoe; Image provided by London Borough of Hounslow Local Studies and Archives Service

Whether or not Bedford Park is still radical and forward thinking, there is still a strong sense of community, everyone I spoke to told me. Jenny de Montfort, currently in the throes of organising Green Days for the start of the Bedford Park Festival, said:

“I feel it’s largely down to the church. St Michael & All Angels is the heart of it.”

Alison Watson, who set up the Art Society Chiswick ten years ago, added:

“We’re proud of our community, proud it’s got to 150 years. People work very hard on the heritage and people will continue to do so.”

Image: Paul Walker

Paul Walker, a lawyer, thought he and his wife would be buying in Chelsea until his wife found their house in Chiswick. Seeing it in the dark for the first time, his only comment was “it’s rather large,” (five bedrooms) but over more than 40 years he’s come round to the idea:

“You can always get home, wherever you are, and it has everything you need in walking distance.

“Bedford Park is full of lawyers. When Mavis Cheek’s book, Parlour Games, came out, it was set in Bedford Park and the suggestion was that all the lawyers were having affairs. We sat around debating it into the early hours trying to decide whether it was defamatory. We decided it wasn’t, in the end.”

Because having an affair does not lower a man in the minds of ‘right thinking members of society’? Or because truth is a cast iron defence for defamation, I wondered.

Jane Blanckenhagen moved to Bedford Park from St John’s Wood.

“I told everybody I was moving to the country, because that’s what it felt like, only a bit more interesting!”

Her contribution to community life, or one of them, has been to start a book club 20 years ago which is still going strong, and she thinks the decision to make community the focus of the exhibition was a great idea.

“It’s what Bedford Park is all about.”

Image: Canapes served in the Boston Room of George IV to celebrate the launch

Libby Bassett, treasurer and co-chair of events for the Bedford Park Society, said they would like to take the display into schools and involve young people in the heritage of the area.

She thanked Hounslow Council’s Thriving Communities Fund and estate agents Whitmans, Savills and Knight Frank for sponsoring the exhibition which will now go on show in St Michael & All Angels Church in Bath Road from Friday 9 – Monday 19 May between 9am and 5pm, and will then be shown at Chiswick Auctions in the Barley Mow centre from Tuesday 10 – Friday 20 June.

The members of the Bedford Park Society who carried out the research for the exhibition were: Professor Michael Ball, Derek Chambers, Cahal Dallat, Jenny de Montfort, Olivia Freeman, Wes Henderson-Roe, Tony and Julia Mooney, Emilia Sharples, Andrew Wells and Peter Wolton.

To mark the 150th anniversary The Chiswick Calendar is publishing a series of personal accounts from some of those who have lived in Bedford Park, about what it was like growing up there, in association with the Bedford Park Society and Torin Douglas, from St Michael & All Angels Church.

READ ALSO: Bedford Park 150 – Sybil Pearce remembers her Edwardian childhood

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READ ALSO: Julian Borger remembers his sixties childhood

Read more stories on The Chiswick Calendar