Up On The Roof

I felt curiously unmoved, staring out over Brighton from a new angle, standing on the roof of The Royal Pavilion, despite such beautiful crazy architecture, set off by bright sunshine and few clouds, making it a perfect morning to be mucking about up there.

Partly, we weren’t actually that high up, so the view itself was local rather than city-wide. More interesting was nosing through windows to see inside. Here’s a rare (and sadly blurry) view of the kitchen, seen from through the skylight. Several of these high windows have no way to open or close them, except to send a servant scurrying up onto the roof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And you can’t really make it out in these photos but it was also possible to look down into a few other rooms, through lovely old coloured glass.

Nowadays, even most staff aren’t able to come out here, except on very rare occasions. It’s just not safe. And ultimately, even standing high on the roof, it is still far more striking to look up, not down.

Of course, the onions and towers of the Royal Pavilion are fundamentally illusion – facade – to be viewed from a distance; built onto and extended around a pre-existing (conventional) house. Stunning to see from down in the gardens or beyond, because they were designed that way: a building meant to create an unforgettable, iconic silhouette on the skyline, more than anything else.

Up here, they’re at a far more human-scale.

You can look at the joins and processes that plonked these follies on top of a normal(-ish) working building and you see the sheer effort required to keep it in decent nick, battling rain, wind, gulls, pigeons and the occasional human vandal.

Senior Keeper Tim Thearle (in the green jumper) brought a group of us up here and showed us around, explaining how they maintain the building. It’s a mammoth task.

Here is largest onion surface, viewed from inside.

Through a tiny wooden doorway, like something for Hobbits, we crawl inside the dusty bottom of the biggest onion, under the eaves that have held it up for close to 200 years.

Here there are piles of mostly wooden junk, some of which may be 80+ years old; pieces of carapace and decoration and ornament. Bits of abandoned history deemed not so important as the other bits, yet they’re equally historic.

During last winter pigeons got in here and it took months to get rid of them. There is nothing like piles of pigeon poo and abandoned decorative wood to humanise an iconic old building.

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

The Royal Pavilion: A 19th Century Googleplex?

The more I wander around the Royal Pavilion, the more I’m conflicted about George IV’s hilarious spending. It should be easy just to condemn outright: history doesn’t look kindly on him, especially now, with parallels bouncing around to today’s flashy super-rich; Britain’s great profligate (and useless!) royal spender in a time of war and strife. The harsh critique ought to be a no-brainer.

Yet – filtered through almost 200 years of perspective – the sheer breathtaking scope of innovation: the cutting edge extent of progressive design and ‘making’ going on in George’s Royal Pavilion – stands right in the way of the simple view. Instead, I keep being drawn to a different, more nuanced comparison, one that connects and empathises far better with the desire to create lasting legacy and an expensive-but-quirky HQ with one’s disposable wealth: the 21st century’s leading global tech companies, in particular Google. Not so much their core businesses but their infamous indulgent, progressive office spaces.

Last year I was lucky enough to get an informal tour of Google’s funky London base opposite Victoria Station. This lovely techie guy Daniel took us around and fed us free pizza; showed us the self-serving coffee bar; the games and music rooms; and half a London bus installed on the fourth floor. And more besides, in return for an acoustic gig.

Now, the more I get under the skin of the playful early 19th century tech inside the Royal Pavilion, the more it is exceptionally reminiscent of Google and her contemporaries.

The Royal Pavilion’s Great Kitchen, 1826.

Beautifully decorated pillars in the Royal Pavilion kitchens resemble bamboo at eye level, then weirdly become palm trees just beneath the high ceiling. But who’d decorate a kitchen, when it’s just for busy staff? Well, someone who’d take the rare step of bringing his VIP guests back into that kitchen to show it off. It feels strikingly similar to Google’s fake tree-lined garden full of deckchairs where staff eat lunch. And that’s not just aesthetically but as part of a broader process.

I love the Pavilion’s automatic rotisserie as well, for example. At a time when, in most stately homes, servant boys (‘spit jacks’) would sit in the scorching heat beside the huge fire to rotate the meat spits by hand, the Royal Pavilion has one that harnesses the power of the rising hot air (a ‘smoke jack’) to rotate itself automatically. There are so many examples, many mentioned in the guided tours but many missed out, or not even on display to the public. The sheer number of flush toilets, compared to any other stately home of the period. The underfloor central heating. Beautifully decorated pillars in the middle of large gallery rooms that are actually waste pipes.

People definitely indulge the tech world’s ‘office-as-playground’ trope (hugely influential over a whole industry; who now ride around their open plan warehouses on plastic tricycles, or try to eat their lunches on bouncy castles) because of its sheer outstanding quirkiness. Yet it is criticised as a kind of passive imprisonment (providing employees with everything they could possibly need, so they never leave the building) or a distraction from ‘real’ terms and conditions (no unions in the tech industry!). But we’re easily tempted to admire the chutzpah first and question the ethics and tax avoidance second.

Just look at the extent to which we collectively turn a blind eye to workers’ rights in China because what they’re assembling is the smartphones we find so sexy and essential.

Anyway, I just love the nuances (for good and ill) in this comparison. So here’s the idea I’m mulling right now, perhaps for Brighton Digital Festival in September. An audio (or even ‘live’) alternative tour of the Royal Pavilion (downloadable as a podcast or MP3 for smartphones, or – imagine this – added to some of their official audio tour devices!) to emphasise innovative design, ‘making’ and progressive geeky thinking that fills the Pavilion and makes it like a 19th century Googleplex.

A point of this kind of heritage is to impact us with the ‘good‘ results of what probably felt horrible at the time, at least enough to ignite these questions instead of immediately condemning King George. So. Was he truly so indulgent, or not? And are the modern equivalents so hip, or will history see them more similarly to how we see George IV?

Chris T-T, Blogger in Residence