Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.
Today however we are following Lettice’s maid, Edith, who together with her beau, local grocery delivery boy Frank Leadbetter, have wended their way pleasurably a short distance south-east of Cavendish Mews, through the Burlington Estate, along Piccadilly past the six storey red brick façade of Fortnum and Mason with its six fanlight display windows, across busy Piccadilly Circus with its high hoardings advertising Bovril and Schweppes tonic water and its central fountain surmounted by Eros, and down to Trafalgar Square in the centre of London.
The pair are dressed in their summer best as they enjoy the sunshine: Frank in his Sunday best blue suit and a smart straw boater with a colourful grosgrain ribbon around the crown, and Edith in her blue floral sprigged frock and her wide brimmed straw hat decorated with a gay blue green and red ribbon and artificial flowers in matching colours, yet still holding her old battered black umbrella just in case of inclement weather. Circumnavigating tall Nelson’s Column guarded by his four giant lion statues, the pair blend in with the other citizens of London taking a stroll in the good weather. They laugh and chatter away amicably together as they perambulate across the wide tiled square, all awkwardness of their early courtship long left behind and replaced with a comfort and ease that comes with knowing one another better. They walk between the two ornamental fountains where children play and head towards the sweep of stairs that lead up to the National Gallery of London.
As they walk into the shadow of the tall Neoclassical columned façade of the gallery, Edith shivers and pulls herself more closely against Frank, not because she is cold, but because she is intimidated by the enormity and grandeur of the ediface. She has never been to the National Gallery before, and even as she walks past the liveried guards, she silently worries that she will be dragged away from Frank and thrown out for her impertinence. Yet when they approach one near the entrance to the gallery, he smiles and says good morning to them both.
“You see, Edith,” Frank reassures her, squeezing her forearm just above where her green leather handbag handle sits in the crook of her arm. “I told you there was nothing to worry about. The National gallery is for everyone, not just the wealthy.”
The pair walk through long galleries where the gently diffused light from large skylights above falls onto the artworks hanging in gilt frames along the painted walls around them. The galleries are populated with people of all kinds chatting quietly together in pairs like Frank and Edith or in small groups, all admiring the works hanging serenely about them in the long galleries. Edith’s heels click against the parquetry floors, but she is too amazed by all the beautiful paintings to feel self-conscious about it or feel inferiority because her clothes are not as fine as some of the gallery’s visitors around them. With her right arm linked firmly with Frank’s, she allows him to lead her through gallery after gallery, pointing out portraits of famous people from history, landscapes by the Impressionist painters of France, Italian Renaissance paintings and Dutch masters.
Eventually the pair wend their way to a gallery featuring artwork and furnishings from, or inspired by the Tudor period.
“The Royal Nursery 1538 by Marcus Stone,” Edith reads quietly aloud from the plaque stuck to the red painted wall beneath the large gold framed portrait. “Painted in 1871.” She looks closely at the fine details of the faces of the people in the oil painting and their beautiful Tudor costumes. “Well that’s obviously Henry VIII,” she remarks, indicating to the central figure pulling a toy galleon on wheels, who is unmistakably the Tudor sovereign. “But who are the others?”
“Well,” Frank says peering at the oil painting which has yellowed with age and exposure to the elements. “I’d say that is his son, Prince Edward,” He points to the cherubic child in what looks more like a Tudor torture machine than a wooden walker. “I would imagine that that is Princess Elizabeth who became Queen Elizabeth.” He indicates to a sad looking child standing on her own to the left of the painting with a wistful look on her face.
“How do you know that Frank?” Edith asks with eyes glittering with excitement.
“Well, see,” he points to her hands. “She appears to have been reading before the arrival of King Henry, and Queen Elizabeth was purportedly an avid reader.”
“Oh!” Edith nods and gazes seriously at the child.
“And that may be Princess Mary, who became Queen Mary who caused so many problems between the Catholics and the Protestants here in England.” Frank indicates to the young woman in very grand garb kneeling beside the young prince in the walker. “She was Elizabeth’s older half-sister. I’m not sure who the rest are. Servants maybe, or the king’s advisors.”
“Yes, she looks like a nursemaid.” Edith points to a woman in the shadows to the right of the painting standing by a cradle.
“Of course,” Frank remarks. “It’s all very fanciful, really.”
Edith turns away from the painting after the pair look at it in companionable silence for a few moments longer and spots several high backed chairs with red velvet seats sitting in a cluster in the middle of the gallery’s parquetry floor.
“Do you mind if we sit down for a few minutes Frank? My shoes are beginning to pinch from all the standing we’ve been doing.”
“Oh of course, Edith!” Frank replies with concern. “Lets sit over there.” He nods to the same cluster of chairs that had caught Edith’s eyes.
The pair walk over to the chairs where Edith sinks down with a grateful sigh, whilst Frank sits down beside her, placing his smart summer straw boater on the seat next to him. Edith reaches down to her foot and discreetly slips off her left Sunday best black pump and rubs her heel beneath her slightly rumpled stocking.
Sitting up again, Edith looks back across at the painting. “What do you mean by the painting is fanciful, Frank?”
“Well, I doubt that even King Henry’s children’s nursery would have looked quite so picturesque as that in Tudor times. Life dirty back in those days, even for kings and queens. Marcus Stone* was a Victorian Romantic painter, Edith, so his image is a romanticised version of what we might have seen.”
“But none of us can truly know what the King’s nursery looked like back then, Frank.”
“Very true, Edith. Mr. Stone was painting a historical scene that appealed to the romantic ideals of the time. Queen Victoria and her family were very interested in history, but a romanticised and sanitised version of it, and she influenced the tastes of all her subjects. She was also a very family-oriented monarch, probably the first since King George III, so domestic scenes were very popular at the time Mr. Stone painted it.”
Edith’s pretty cornflower blue eyes grow wide as she stares in admiration at her beau sitting beside her. “You are so knowledgeable, Frank.”
“Thank you Edith.” he replies proudly sitting up a little more boldly.
“How do you know so much?”
“Well, I do read quite a lot, Edith. You should see my bedroom at my lodgings. There are books everywhere. Mrs. Chapman keeps threatening to fling them all out. She says the weight will make the floors bow.” He chuckles.
“They won’t will they, Frank?” Edith gasps.
“Oh no!” he assures her. “It’s just Mrs. Chapman and one of her ways. I don’t think she has ever been a great reader, and she treats books, and book readers, with suspicion. I don’t think she would have agreed to take me as a paying lodger if she knew I read as much as I do.”
“I don’t know where you find the space in your head to store all the information you gather from what you read. I’m sure I couldn’t. I’m sure I’ll never be as smart as you, Frank.” Edith blushes with embarrassment.
“Rubbish Edith!” Frank retorts quickly. “I’ve told you before, we are all smart in different ways. There are things you know and know how to do that I don’t.”
“Sometimes I think what I know in comparison to you is of no significance at all.”
“That’s foolish talk too, Edith, and I said as much in Hilda’s kitchen that Sunday when we all went to the Hammersmith Palais**.” Frank chides his sweetheart, not unkindly. “You know how to cook, and all my knowledge of painting couldn’t feed an empty belly.” He looks at Edith lovingly. “You know you really mustn’t feel inferior, Edith. I only know what I do because my grandparents used to bring me here when I was, as Gran would say, ‘a wee bairn’.”
“Well, you are very lucky, Frank.”
“I know, Edith.” He looks around the red painted gallery populated with couples, small clusters of people and a few men and women on their own, quietly admiring the Tudor paintings covering the walls. “So, how do you like your first visit to the National Gallery, then?”
“Oh, I love it, Frank!” Edith enthuses. “You know, when we spent New Year’s Eve at The Angel*** and you suggested that we visit here, I had my doubts.”
“I know Edith. I could see them, as plain as day in your pretty face.” Frank chuckles.
“I always thought of galleries as places, well where people like Miss Lettice and her fine friends go, and not for people like me. The way she tries to talk to me about modern art and fashionable trends when she gets a new delivery from the Portland Gallery in Bond Street just leaves me feeling bewildered. Next to her, I feel I don’t even know what art is.”
“Well, those kind of galleries are a bit more avant-garde.” Frank agrees.
“What does that mean, Frank?”
Frank thinks for a moment, looking up to the white painted plaster ceiling above before replying. “Experimental and innovatively modern.”
“Well, I don’t think I am so keen on that kind of art. Paintings that look like blotches and squares of bright colour that I’m told are portraits or landscapes where I can’t see either, leave me feeling unsettled. But here,” She waves her hands expansively around her with a relieved smile. “I can see paintings and sculptures that I understand. That painting says it’s a nursery, and whether it is historically accurate or not, Frank, it looks like a nursery to me. These are like the pictures Mrs. Boothby has hanging above her sink in Poplar, only far more colourful and beautiful.”
“That’s because these are originals, not facsimiles, Edith.”
“Facsimile.” Edith laughs quietly and shakes her head as she rolls the foreign word around on her tongue like an exotic sweet. “And what does that mean, Frank Leadbetter?”
“A copy.” he replies with a slightly embarrassed chuckle of his own.
“Facsimile, facsimile,” Edith quietly recites, trying to gain familiarity with the word. “I like that word, Frank. It sounds very grand and important, and much nicer than copy, which sounds so boring and everyday in comparison.”
The pair laugh together and sigh happily.
“So, you’d be happy to come here again then, Edith?” Frank asks hopefully.
“Oh yes Frank! I’d love that!”
“I’m glad to hear you say that Edith, because there are so many more galleries to see, and the curators of the galleries do change paintings over from time to time, and have exhibitions of paintings brought in especially from other galleries in other countries.”
“Are you wanting to make me as knowledgeable about art as you, Frank?”
“Well,” Frank blushes. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing to expand your horizons, Edith, and I love showing you that there is a whole world of art that you’ve never experienced before.”
“Oh, you are so lovely, Frank.” Edith sighs. “How fortunate I am to have met you.”
“And how lucky I am to have met you too, Edith.”
The couple discreetly hold hands as they sit side by side on the seats and stare lovingly into one another’s eyes, the people milling about them, the sound of footsteps and the quiet burble of conversation drifting away as they focus only on each other.
At length Frank breaks their blissful moment of enjoyment. “What do you think your mum would say to me bringing you here, Edith?” His happy eyes suddenly cloud a little with concern.
“Oh, I don’t think she’d mind, Frank.”
“Don’t you think she would think I was trying to fill your head with ideas that don’t belong there?” he asks glumly, hanging his head as he speaks.
“No, of course she wouldn’t! Mum loves beautiful things too, Frank. I think she thinks the same of galleries as I did until you brought me here, and if she knew that the gallery was open to the likes of you and me, and that it was free, she’d spend a few hard earned pennies catching the tube to come here too.”
“Do you really think so, Edith?”
“Of course I do, Frank. Maybe we could even bring her here one Sunday on our day off.” Edith assures her beau.
“That would be a turn up for the books, Edith.” Frank smiles.
“Look, I know that you and Mum got off to a rocky start together when you first met, but she’s warming to you, Frank. Honestly she is.”
“I’m sure Edith.” Frank squeezes Edith’s hands. “I’m just anxious that we get along, is all. When you and I get married, I want her to be proud of her daughter’s choice in a husband.”
“Frank,” Edith looks earnestly into the young man’s anxious face. “Mum knows that I’m old enough to make my own decisions. I’m not a little girl anymore. She will be proud when I marry the man who suits me down to a tee, and that man is you, Frank.”
Frank blushes red and smiles shyly at his sweetheart who returns it with her own shy smile.
“I do love you, Edith Watsford.”
“And I love you, Frank Leadbetter.”
“Well, if you do, Edith,” Frank looks back at the picture of the Royal Nursery and points. “How many children shall we have?”
“Oh, you are awful Frank Leadbetter!” gasps Edith, her cheeks colouring at the mention of having babies. “None until after the day we get wed!” She releases his hands and playfully smacks him across the knuckles.
“Yes, but then now many?” Frank persists.
“We’ll see then, won’t we, Frank?” Edith laughs. She slips her shoe back on and picks up her handbag. “Come on,” she says, standing up. “We’ve sat here for long enough.” She holds out her hand to him. “It’s time for you to show me some more of the National Gallery.”
“Yes Miss!” Frank says, snatching up his hat and their guidebooks.
Arm in arm the pair begin to move further along the gallery towards the door leading into the next room, their heads bowed towards one another as they chatter happily between them.
*Marcus Stone RA was an English painter. He was born in London in 1840, and was educated by his father, artist Frank Stone, before exhibiting at the Royal Academy before he was eighteen. He is known for his illustrations of books by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. His earlier works were mostly historical incidents, but his later works were more sentimental. He is best known for his painting “In Love” which he painted in 1888. He died in 1921 in Kensington.
**The Hammersmith Palais de Danse, in its last years simply named Hammersmith Palais, was a dance hall and entertainment venue in Hammersmith, London, England that operated from 1919 until 2007. It was the first palais de danse to be built in Britain.
***The Angel, one of the oldest Rotherhithe pubs, is now in splendid isolation in front of the remains of Edward III's mansion on the Thames Path at the western edge of Rotherhithe. The site was first used when the Bermondsey Abbey monks used to brew beer which they sold to pilgrims. It is located at 24 Rotherhithe St, opposite Execution Dock in Wapping. It has two storeys, plus an attic. It is built of multi-coloured stock brick with a stucco cornice and blocking course. The ground floor frontage is made of wood. There is an area of segmental arches on the first floor with sash windows, and it is topped by a low pitched slate roof. Its Thames frontage has an unusual weatherboarded gallery on wooden posts. The interior is divided by wooden panels into five small rooms. In the early 20th Century its reputation and location attracted local artists including Augustus John and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. In the 1940s and 50s it became a popular destination for celebrities including Laurel and Hardy. Today its customers are local residents, tourists and people walking the Thames Path.
Although carefully arranged to look like the National Gallery as it was in the 1920s, this scene is different from what you might think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures from my collection, including pieces from my own childhood.
Fun things to look for in this tableau include:
The paintings on the walls in their gilt frames all come from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop in the United Kingdom. The main painting featured is a copy of “The Royal Nursery 1538”, an oil on canvas by Victorian Romanticist painter, history painter, illustrator and genre painter, Marcus Stone.
The Queen Anne chairs in the foreground are part of a dining room set that I was given as birthday present when I was a child.
1:12 size miniature hats made to exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that one would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, makes them an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. Although not as expensive, Frank’s straw boater is made with wonderful detail and comes from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders miniature shop in the United Kingdom.
Edith’s handbag handmade from soft leather is part of a larger collection of hats and bags that I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.
The black umbrella came from an online stockist of 1:12 miniatures on E-Bay.
The Tudor table beneath “The Royal Nursery 1538” and the Tudor chair you can just see to its right, I bought as part of a lot of miniature pieces from an antique auction when I was a late teenager. The chest to the left of the photo came from Kathleen Knight’s Dolls House Shop.
Edith’s handbag handmade from soft leather is part of a larger collection of hats and bags that I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.