The £150 cottage

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Affordable housing, Cottages, Letchworth

It’s always nice to find something of local interest among the books and pamphlets of the Tower Project, and so I was fascinated when I came across a book entitled The book of the Cheap Cottages Exhibition which featured a map of a model housing estate at Letchworth.

Interested in how, and indeed why, anyone could organise an exhibition of cottages, I investigated further, and found that, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a dearth of cottages for agricultural laborours in rural districts. The solution must be simple, I thought, just build more!

However, it turned out that the building of new cottages had been made much more expensive by stringent building bye-laws designed to improve the safety and health of the cottage dweller. The expense of the construction of new cottages made land owners reluctant to build new housing for agricultural laborours because the rents the labourers could afford to pay did not make it financially viable for them to do so. Meanwhile, old cottages were becoming more dilapidated and the lack of affordable housing was driving agricultural workers into the towns, thereby depriving the countryside of a much needed workforce.

Therefore, in 1905, a competition was launched to find the perfect £150 cottage, for which a labourer could pay an affordable annual rent of approximately £8. A large number of architects and builders took part. Letchworth Estate, which had already been selected as a site for one of the new Garden Cities in the previous year, was chosen as the perfect place for the designs to be trialed. Most importantly for the buidlers and architects, the Garden Cities were protected from many of the building bye-laws, so that they had a much freer hand in design and use of materials.

The Exhibition was a great success: 60,000-80,000 people visited it, and it resulted in a temporary station being contructed at Letchworth on the London-Cambridge line. The exhibition was so popular that another was organised two years later.

Whether the aim of the Exhibition was in fact reached is another matter: it is uncertain if labourers ever lived in the cottages. One of the criticisms uttered by the judges was that many of the cottages seemed to be more suitable to the needs of middle-class families who wanted a weekend cottage than those of the labourers for whom they had supposedly been designed. However, the exhibition certainly showed new building techniques and materials to the masses and proved that the building bye-laws were often more of a hindrance than a help to those attempting to construct housing for an ever-expanding population.

While the identities of the inhabitants of the cottages may remain uncertain, the fate of the cottages themselves is clear: 124 of the 131 cottages built for the 1905 Exhibtion are still standing today.

For more information on the Cheap Cottages Exhibition of 1905 and recent pictures of the surviving cottages see these websites:

http://www.exhibitioncottages.info/index.html

http://www.tomorrowsgardencity.com/1905

Arthur Rackham, illustrator extraordinaire

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Arthur Rackham, Fairy tales

I have loved Arthur Rackham’s illustrations ever since the first time my mother read The night before Christmas to me when I was about three years old. From this point on the reading of that book (and the examining of every detail of the wonderful illustrations) became a yearly Christmas Eve ritual. 

"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!" - From The Night before Christmas by Clement C. Moore

Later, I discovered that the illustrations I so loved as a child were only a minute part of the complete work of Arthur Rackham. He began his career as a newspaper illustrator in a time before the improvement of photographic reproduction resulted in photographs taking the place of pen-and-ink sketches. As newspaper illustrators began to be less in demand and his own success grew, he was able to devote himself full-time to the whimsical, dream-like fantasy pictures at which he excelled. 

From Arthur Rackham's book of pictures

Rackham illustrated a wide variety of books from Rip van Winkle to The Wind in the Willows. My favourite illustrations have to be the ones from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for although his pictures are often grotesque and vaguely creepy, they show an understanding of the fairy folk that chimes with the tales told of them, in which they are often superficially beautiful but essentially other, unpredictable and often cruel. In the picture below, taken from Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, the goblins try and tempt a young girl to buy their wares, knowing that once a mortal has tasted fairy fruit, she is doomed to waste away and die as mortal food becomes like ashes in her mouth.

From Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

For more information on Arthur Rackham’s life and his weirdly beautiful (and beautifully weird) illustrations, see the Tower Project web pages: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/towerproject/featuredbook.html

A truly malevolent cat - the alter ego of an evil witch from Grimm's Fairy tales

Valentine Season

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Chapbooks, romance, Valentines

Over the course of the blog we seem to have been mildly obsessed with identifying would-be lovers, beautifying ourselves for them and secretly communicating with them. But as valentine season approaches it might be time to start thinking about how to actually win their favour!

If the amount of 19^th century chapbooks on valentines writing is anything to go by, a sentimental verse is just the thing. So too apparently is a massively over-adorned and fussy card. Valentine’s Day was celebrated with gusto in Victorian times and the popularity of card giving, meant the festival became a highly lucrative industry. Cards started to be produced commercially in the tens of thousands; they were adorned with lace, feathers, glass, dried flowers, mirrors and ribbons. They were embossed and in the case of our examples 3D [1] [2].  

There was also a market in verses. For those unable to compose their own were aided by a whole trade of sentimental verse production. This had started in 1797 with The Young Man’s Valentine Writer. Though printers had begun to produce cards with messages, writing aids were still the vogue in the late 1800’s and these we have a wealth of [2]. Verses were tailored to suit ‘all ranks and conditions of lovers, and would-be lovers’. Varying dispositions, circumstances, trades, humours and ages were all covered. The books we hold have example poems from gentlemen, ladies, cooks and housemaids, tailors, drovers, sailors, doctors, blacksmiths, even from a person with bad teeth and creepily from an intruder … All however are brilliantly cheesy:

 From an engineer:

Wilt thou vouchsafe to smile, my dear

On your subsequious engineer?

My heart is burning, without doubt,

No engine can the flame put out.

Verse books also provided answers to those receiving cards from the above groups, and were both favourable and unfavourable.

 From a fishmonger:

Thy skin is a whiting, thy eyes

As bright as the scales of my fish

My turtle, my sole, thee I prize,

Accede then, I pray to my wish.

Favourable answer:

Ah me! You’ve caught me in your net,

And from your bait I can’t get free

Well then remember don’t forget

You are the valentine for me.

Unfavourable answer:

Sir, as a flounder, I am flat

And have been so through all my life

So flatly tell you – worthless sprat

I never will become your wife.

Some tried to discourage and ward off and were, I feel, a little harsh. 

From a lady to an anti-reformer:

A sordid griping tyrant you are known,

No generous feeling’s by you ever shown …

Enslaved by vice, for plunder still you pine

Rather I’d die than be your valentine.

And of course there were tricky puzzles to crack

To a lady: Fles sih evol resim eht tel,

                      Tra erusaert ym uoht,

So if you’re feeling a little lost for words this Valentine’s rush down to Rare Books, request a chapbook, and tell that special some one … a poem that they may find a little weird … Just beware of the reply.

Ode to… a tram accident

Perhaps one of the best known disaster poems is William McGonagall’s infamous “The Tay Rail Bridge Disaster.”  In fact he seemed to rather specialise in writing about calamities, but he was and is by no means alone.  Poems have been written about the Titanic, Hillsborough, the 2004 tsunami, Aberfan, the Challenger space shuttle explosion… you name it, someone, somewhere has been moved to immortalise the occasion in verse.

My eye was caught by “A memento of the tramcar accident at Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, Tuesday, October 15^th, 1907” [1908.8.1039].  This is a simple piece of card with a rather unexciting photograph, showing a northern cobbled street with a lot of people standing around; an overturned tram just visible in the background.    Underneath there is a six verse poem by John Crossley, which describes the incident.

 Turning the card over, there is an acrostic poem eulogising about Halifax, followed rather soberingly by lists of the killed, seriously injured and less seriously injured.  At the bottom, looking rather strange to modern eyes, is the phrase “With good wishes from….”  Clearly this rather tragic memento was designed to be sent to one’s relations and friends, although with what purpose it is hard to say.

 Anyone who rushed to be first to send the news to their acquaintances would have been a little premature though, as within days a second edition was published, necessitated by one of the “less seriously” injured, an 18 year old apprentice planer called Arnold Thornton, having subsequently died.  Naturally the relevant line in the poem is also adjusted to reflect the additional casualty.

 This does seem to have been a particularly nasty incident; one of the worst tram disasters in Britain.  As the open-topped car, packed with at least 60 people, neared the top of Pye Hill, the electric power failed, causing the vehicle to roll backwards all the way down again, gathering speed as it went despite the best efforts of the conductor to apply the brakes.  At the bottom it jumped off the rails and overturned before smashing into a shop frontage, ultimately killing five and injuring 35 others.

 The 32 year old conductor, Walter Robinson, seems to come out of this as some kind of hero, perhaps being viewed romantically because he died in the line of duty, being killed when part of the tram fell on him.  He gets a four line poem to himself on the card, being described both as “the brave conductor” and a “heroic soul.”  Furthermore £3 10s 7d of the memorial fund went to his widow – a benefit that was withheld from any of the other relatives.  Most of the money, over £19, was spent on a memorial in the grounds of the Mount Zion Chapel at Ogden, with the remaining £2 or so being used to prepare the vault in the same chapel.

 Walter has his own memorial cross on his grave at the chapel, where he was a Sunday school teacher.  This reveals further tragedy in his life: his baby son died at 8 months, followed less than 3 weeks later by his wife.  His second wife lived to the ripe old age of 94, dying in 1973, but sadly they enjoyed less than a year of married life before Walter’s untimely demise.  Perhaps she took some comfort from the fact that he was hailed a hero. As he tried desperately to bring the runaway tram to a halt, he shouted warnings and stopped passengers falling off (although some of them deliberately jumped off to save themselves).  His monument states that he was “striving to the last to save the occupants of the car” and survivors later spoke of his calm command in a terrible situation.  His widow, “faithful until death,” never remarried.

 The accident must have had a huge impact on the local community at the time, but is doubtless all but forgotten now, save for these rather sad poetical greetings cards.  But then this is one of the pleasures of the Tower collection – finding pieces of ephemera and discovering the stories behind them.

An ode … to toast?

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John Crossley, longevity, poetry, toast

Could you write a poem about this? John Crossley could. (Image from Sikachu!, Flickr)

Toast is well-known for its restorative powers; but is it the stuff of poetry? Well, according to John Crossley, it is:

There’s nothing much nicer for those who are ill,

Than plenty of tasty, well-Butter’d toast;

When it pleases the palate it very soon will

Refresh the weak system; this is no boast.

I think we can take it that Mr. Crossley liked his toast. He wrote lines of verse for several foods of which he approved, including celery, lentils, peas, eggs, cabbage, cauliflower, and, my personal favourite, the orange:

O, range where you will, the orange will still

Refresh the thirsty soul;

’Tis good for the healthy and sick,* poor or wealthy,

Where’er Time’s tide doth roll.

*When palatable.

Essayist, composer, health guru, and poet, Crossley was a man of many and varied talents. (Actually, “talents” may not be the right word. Let’s say, “interests”.) Over a period of about ten years towards the end of the nineteenth century, he produced a number of hymns, essays and poems, which have now all been catalogued by the Tower Project. Despite the fact that he never reached a wide audience – everything we have by him in the library was self-published – he was not exactly plagued by self-doubt: he declared of his pamphlet, How to live 1,000 years healthily, happily, & wisely (1888.5.167), that

The contents of this leaflet are a good and perfect benefaction to the human race; a Precious, Beautiful, and Brilliant Cluster of Mental Diamonds … For Variety, Brevity, Usefulness, and Sense combined there is probably no publication which surpasses it, except the Bible.

That’s … quite a claim. Apparently, if you want to live to be 1,000, you should “Perceive, Practise, Preach, and Propagate Purity Persistently”, and if you’re unmarried, then you “should use Sugar very moderately; as it is an extremely Amative food, and tends to make people impure and lustful”. To be fair to him, he realised that smoking was bad for your health, but his way of dissuading people from it was to remind them of the “vast variety of confectionery and sweets” on which they could spend their money instead. Which is fine, but surely inconsistent with his earlier tip to avoid sugar. (Whether he took his own advice and lived 1,000 years has not, alas, been documented.)

Reading through his work, I find myself feeling increasingly sorry for his wife. Not only did she (presumably) have to adhere to his healthy living plan, but when she tried her hand at writing herself, he was a ruthless editor. She contributed “a few lines of verse” to her husband’s Poetry, music & prose (1894.12.104), but he was disinclined to let her take much credit for them: in the poem ‘Memorial lines’, written for their late neighbour, Mr. Crossley noted at the end, “My wife composed the first six lines, and then I revised them and added the last two lines.” In other words: leave the poetry to the expert.

But then, perhaps Mrs. Crossley enjoyed his effusions. She may even have inspired some of them: after all, one of his hymn tunes is named ‘Gertrude’, which I’d like to believe is named for her; and he wrote a poem, ‘Love’, which one can only hope was dedicated to her. Though it really has to be read to believed. The first verse gives you a flavour of his flair for rhyme:

Love’s a passion and fiery,—

Chiding sin, with accents ir’y,

Rousing sinners from their miry

Sins; thus love is strong—untiry.

It hasn’t improved by the final verse: 

Love is gen’rous, never stinty;

Straight of vision—seldom squinty;

Uses money—does not love it;

Values Virtue much above it.

John Crossley is the kind of writer you often come across as a cataloguer on the Tower Project: someone whose work might have been lost entirely, were it not for the legal deposit system. I find it rather cheering that his writings have survived. After all, his poetry might not have much in the way of literary merit, but how often do you read a poem that defines love in terms of how “squinty” it is? Whatever else you could say about Mr. Crossley (and really, you could say a lot), he was certainly original.