Podcast #1: The First Giraffe – featuring Alexandra Loske

Art historian and curator Alexandra Loske is researching her thesis and curating the upcoming Regency Colour exhibition. But she also uncovered the story that I’ve found perhaps most exciting so far.

If you know anything about my music, you may know I’ve had an obsession with giraffes for years – used them in songs, written about them and run photo streams of them. Meanwhile Alexandra, tasked with looking through a collection of old satirical cartoons, discovered several images of George IV including a giraffe, as if it was one of his toys. She started to research this and uncovered the first ever known giraffe in Britain, which was given to King George as a diplomatic gift by the Pasha of Egypt (the same fella who gave Britain the gift of Cleopatra’s Needle).

‘Twould puzzle a conjuror. Print, 1827.

I couldn’t pass it up. I interviewed Alexandra in the recently closed History Centre, to get her to tell this incredible story. It’s a doozy… for me, it felt like the best episode of In Our Time ever, although I do a horrible impression of Melvyn Bragg. What a way to kick off the podcasts.

Here’s a link to the audio podcast via Soundcloud. There will be more – and in the next few days I aim to publish podcasts to iTunes, which will enable you to subscribe – but I’m not quite there yet technically.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

Down In The Tunnels

“You see down at the bottom of that shaft there, right? Yeah, just there. Biggest rat I ever saw in my life, it’s down there right now. Dead. But it’s huge.”

The workman holds his hands up apart like he’s saying he caught an enormous fish. “This big, I swear.”

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle, who is in charge of conserving all these historic buildings, including the work being done in the Royal Pavilion Gardens, nods his head in agreement. He saw it too.

This week I was lucky enough to join Tim’s (very rare, months in the persuading) internal staff-only guided walk along the secret tunnel that links the north end of the Royal Pavilion to the basement of Brighton Dome, going right underneath the Royal Pavilion Gardens.

One section is scaffolded.

None of it’s really safe yet but most of it feels exactly like I’d imagined; ancient air, uneven tread, with alcoves for artworks or (more likely) lighting.

Along the length there are five vertical shafts from the ceiling poking up 3-4 feet to the surface, which would’ve let in air and light. Originally these had round glass tops and in fact, just a few centimetres down in one of the flowerbeds in the gardens, one of these original shafts remains untouched.

The Dome was George IV’s ridiculously luxurious stables; horses living in far greater comfort than many local people, housed in a circle around the edge of the main dome building, with a common area in the middle. So the Dome is older than the Royal Pavilion – he built the stables first. Apart from bringing mistresses in and out through the tunnel, George also used it to go between the two buildings incognito, after he got so fat he was embarrassed to be seen by his subjects. Everything is connected in this town – our grubby seaside party atmosphere entirely inspired by our time as host for errant triple-x, heavy banquetting royalty. By the time George gave up on Brighton and retreated to a shack in the gardens of Windsor Castle, he was obese, gout-ridden and surrounded by his exotic pets, not long from death.

Currently you can’t exit both ends – even if you walk all the way to the Dome end, it’s still locked: I snuck downstairs at the Dome end to get this dim pic of their entrance. Dome staff store their bikes in the entranceway.

The ultimate goal (obviously) is to enable public tours down this tunnel. However, quite apart from making it structurally safe and protecting the tunnel itself long-term, they also need to figure out logistics of how to let people in, since neither exit is anywhere near a public area of Dome or Royal Pavilion buildings.

I’ve been obsessing about tunnels since I first arrived. Here’s my first photo (from a few weeks back) of when it was first revealed from above by renovation work. Even though it’s obvious – with hindsight – what this is, I loved that it’s not marked and many people are walking by this repair work every day with no idea what they’re looking at. I’m so glad I stumbled on it by chance, rather than being told by experts.

They’ve now added layers of protective polystyrene and soft pipe covering, as well as a side wall to help take the load (big trucks park in this area because of concerts and productions in The Dome)… and today it’s all been waterproofed as well.

When they finish working on this section, they’ll dig up the next section – nearer to the Royal Pavilion – and continue until they’ve preserved the whole lot.

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence

Royal Pages at Brighton Pavilion

The Silver Tea-Pot

A silver tea-pot by Robert Garrard, made in 1817, recently came up for sale at the Bonham’s Auction House, London. On the base was the following inscription:

Gift of HRH Princess Elizabeth to Joseph Ince,

Page to His Majesty George IV

Princess Elizabeth from an 1831 mezzotint. Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London.

The tea-pot was bought by Huon Mallalieu, who wrote about it in Country Life, (February 20, 2013, p. 92), which was how I first found out about it. The tea-pot fascinates me, not only as an object of regency elegance and taste, but because it was a trace of a life, now largely lost to us.  Sadly, my enquiries about its provenance came to nothing. The tea-pot arrived at Bonham’s as the result of a house clearance and the trail seems to stop there. But in spite of that, its appearance on the market aroused my curiosity and spurred me on to find out more about the role of George IV’s royal pages, who certainly would have worked here at the Royal Pavilion. Who were the royal pages and what did they do? And who was Joseph Ince? Here are my findings.

Pages, it turns out, were not simply pages. There were different types of page with different titles and different duties. There were Pages of the Backstairs, Pages of the Presence and Pages of Honour.

Pages of Honour

Pages of Honour were young aristocrats from some of the wealthiest and most influential families in the nation. Appointed at around the age of eleven or twelve, these Pages often went on to take up positions in one of the Household regiments. Highly sought after, these posts paid well at £120. Pages of honour did not live in the royal palaces and had no official duties in the royal household. They were just required for formal ceremonial occasions, when they would attend in full ceremonial livery. The next phase of my research will involve trying to establish exactly what they would have worn and if any of these garments survive. I’m off to visit the experts from the Royal Dress Collection at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace.

Pages of the Backstairs

Pages of the Backstairs were less well born and in the middling ranks of the royal household. Six pages of the Backstairs were employed and worked in rotation. Historically, they would have waited outside the doors of the King’s Apartments but by the early eighteenth century they had moved within the Chamber.

The Royal Bedchamber was a suite of the King’s private apartments where access was restricted to a select few. The most important duty of the Page of the Backstairs was to guard access to the Royal Body by policing access into the private apartments via the Back (private) stairs. Other duties of Pages of the Backstairs included serving the King’s private meals, attending to his royal needs, assisting with dressing and looking after the Bedchamber apartments.

Roles within the bedchamber were strictly defined. For example in the reign of Queen Anne the Page of the Backstairs would fetch the basin and ewer for washing but it was the woman of the Bechamber would set it before the Queen. And whilst it was the the Page of the Backstairs who would reach for the glass and pass it to the  Woman of the Bedchamber, it was the high-born Lady-in-Waiting who would actually hand it to the Queen. We cannot be certain that by the time of the Regency that these rigid rules were still strictly adhered to but the royal household is marked by a longstanding tradition of continuity and it is unlikely that roles would have been radically different.

Ground Floor Plan showing Servants’ Stairs used to Access King’s Private Apartment

The Pages of the Backstairs had bedrooms close to the King’s chamber so that they could be called on as necessary. On the floor plan illustrated a page’s bedroom can be identified close to the King’s Chamber in the north part of the building (on the left of the plan). There were at least two other page’s bedrooms close by. One Page of the Backstairs would be in waiting in the King’s Chambers and two would be in attendance upon the King during dinner.

So although not high-born like the Pages of Honour their power lay in their ability to restrict or admit access to the monarch and in their potential influence on the monarch by their close contact with him. In 1817 they were paid £200 a year.

Pages of the Presence

Pages of the Presence, (Joseph Ince was one), had the lowest status of the three types of page. The main role of a Page of the Presence was to wait on the aristocratic Gentlemen or Lords in Waiting who were the King’s close companions and attendants. Pages of the Presence would also wait on the King’s visitors at meal times. They worked in more public areas and were not permitted access to the Bedchamber at all which meant they would have to liaise closely with the Pages of the Bedchamber is order to arrange for a visitor or member of the Royal Household to see the monarch in his private apartments. In 1821 first class pages earned between £230-£260, and the second class between £140-£170. They worked in strict rotations on a month-on, month-off basis. During their months off they would be paid 7 shillings (35p) a day for board and lodging.

Joseph Ince 

Joseph Ince was a Page of the Presence for 23 years, whilst George IV was Prince of Wales and then Prince Regent. But he may well have worked for the Prince of Wales before that, in the kitchens. There was a confectioner employed between 1790-96 and a cook between 1799 and 1803.  They are both named Joseph Ince. It seems very likely that these might have been one and the same.

A marriage between one Joseph Ince and a Victoire Lantonne took place in 1784 at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Seven years later on 17 February 1791 a son Charles was baptized in the same parish.  In 1816 a Charles Ince is  appointed as ‘Purveyor of Wine to the Prince Regent in Carlton House’. The baby son born to Joseph and Victoire Ince would have been 25 years old by this time. Son following father into the Royal Household perhaps?

In October 1820, a few months after the accession of  George IV, Joseph Ince retired. He received a ‘compensation’ payment of £47.10s a quarter, making a total of £190 per annum, not a bad pension by any standards. Thirteen years later on  6 April 1833 Joseph Ince died.

Quite why Princess Elizabeth gave Joseph Ince a tea-pot we might never know. If anyone out there can shed some light on this please do get in touch. But the tea-pot and the inscription upon it is a poignant reminder of the life of a servant, who once climbed the stairs of the Royal Pavilion in the service of the Regent. The tea-pot should be valued, as much for the traces of the lives that keeps alive, however shadowy, as for the understated elegance of its form.

Tracy Anderson, post-doctoral researcher