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Conserving our legacy at the Royal Pavilion

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by Caroline S in Behind the Scenes, Blogger in Residence, Caroline Sutton, Conservation, Royal Pavilion, Royal Pavilion

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Brighton, Conservation, Gordon Grant, heritage, Prince Regent, Queen Victoria, Royal Pavilion

Gordon Grant with Chinese wallhangings he reproduced in Queen Victoria's bedroom in Royal Pavilion BrightonIt’s a funny thing – a legacy. In the world of museums, there is a lot of work done to conserve the legacies of past generations of artists and craftspeople.

Over the last fifty years, millions of pounds and hours have been invested on the Pavilion to restore it to its original glory as it was perceived by Brighton’s very own party animal Prince Regent.

And yet when does restoration become something else – when does it become a piece of art in its own right?

It was a question I found myself wondering when I talk to Gordon Grant, a conservator at the RP&M for over 40 years. When I first met him, I was told he was the man who painted the wallpaper in Queen Victoria’s rooms. As these rooms are some of my favourites in the Pav, I really wanted to find out about them.

Grant, 63, is not a man to brag about his achievements. In fact, he spent a lot of time telling me about some of the amazing people he’d had the pleasure to work with and learn from, in an attempt to deflect attention from himself.

Yet, it’s clear Gordon has been a huge influence on the look of the Pavilion during his work there, which has been as freelance and on staff.

But his legacy – the Queen Vic’s wall-hangings are works of art in their own right, in my opinion, although Gordon would probably not brag like that.

‘I’m just a tiny cog,’ he says. ‘I’ve picked up the techniques of other artists. I work in the style of.. rather than my own.

‘I suppose my legacy is that this work is designed to last for the long term, a couple of hundred years more because we’re producing at such a high standard.’

Queen Victoria’s wallhangings

The history of the wall-hangings is a complicated one. They were installed by Queen Victoria, who quickly decided she didn’t get enough privacy in Brighton and decamped to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She stripped the place pretty bare, taking the hand-painted Chinese wall-hangings with her to Buckingham Palace.

She later returned part of the paper to the Pavilion and kept one in Buckingham Palace but neither made up a complete set.

In the 1980s Gordon was given the task of recreating the wall-hangings for the refurbished Queen Victoria’s rooms. ‘It was a matter of reconstructing the design again. So much of it exists but it is in bits and pieces. The Chinese style was very fashionable in the late 18th century so there were other examples. I had to travel to ensure I made it as accurate as possible.

‘The colours of the 1980s replica were based on off-cuts of the original paper that had been kept out of the light and so hadn’t faded.

‘The real Chinese wall-hangings would be painted by several people, giving them a charming disconnect and a lack of unity.  I spent months working on the techniques I would use such as the colour washes and paint mixes. On the whole it was extremely enjoyable to be working away for days on end but sometimes I’d wonder if I could face painting yet another leaf, for example.’

Over a two year period, in which he did work on other projects, Gordon handpainted the elaborate scene of lavish flowers, tropical birds and exotic fauna against a bright yellow background. They are now a brilliant, lavish flash of colour which recreate what Queen Victoria would have seen when she woke every morning.

Throughout his career with the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Gordon’s work has involved a range of decorative art, gilding and repairing many of the beautiful items in the collection.

What is conservation?

Gordon explained the difference between conservation and restoration. ‘Conservation is to preserve historic material. The aim is to keep them as they are, although this may involve some intervention, for example to strengthen something which is disintegrating.

‘Restoration is recreating an aspect of an object and space, which can sometimes be seen as “not ethically proper to do.”‘ However, as the Pavilion was left by Queen Vic with very little but bare walls, there has been a lot of restoration in order to show it as it once was.

Gordon’s work though is very much as an artist – although his knowledge is far deeper than those creating their own work. While he says he is ‘no historian’, he clearly has a deep knowledge and love for the Royal Pavilion.

Just walking around the Pavilion with Gordon, his enthusiasm for the building and the artwork is fascinating and his depth of knowledge incredible.

Much of a conservator’s work is out of hours when the public are not in the buildings as a lot of the areas which need the most work are those which are most used by the public.

‘There is a feeling of never getting to grips with the work. It is hard to keep up with everything which needs doing. But it would be a shame to close it to the public to do the repairs and restoration. The Pavilion is a building which has always worked hard as a public space and it should remain so. We’re lucky we’ve always had such a lot of support from the city council to keep the Pavilion open.’

His work involves conserving decorative works with an understanding of painting surfaces, and understanding how the work and the paper will age over time. He had no knowledge however of just how much time he’d end up devoting to Brighton’s museum collections.

‘I thought I’d only be here for about a year,’ admits Grant. ‘I have worked at other places too but I keep coming back here. I’m retired now but come back to work on projects if there is a staff shortage.

‘But I worked with a lovely man Roy Bradbury who inspired such loyalty and taught me such a lot, I wanted to stay. And this place is so extraordinary and a wonderful place to work. It’s a pleasure to come here.’

Caroline Sutton, Blogger in Residence

Would you like to help conserve the Royal Pavilion? Become a member, and you can support our work in protecting Brighton’s greatest treasure.

Links

  • Learn more about conservation work in the Royal Pavilion
  • Learn about the colours used in the Royal Pavilion
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Free images and digital assets about the First World War

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Royal Pavilion & Brighton Museums in Collections, Digital, Kevin Bacon, Local and Social History, Open Data, Photography

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Brighton & Hove, creative commons, First World War, heritage, history, ww1

Poster, 1914-18 (FATMP007522.33)

Poster, 1914-18 (FATMP007522.33)

Go here to access the material, or read more below.

This year, we will be marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War with several exhibitions and events. We will also be exploring the subject online, and have recently set up a blog dedicated to the First World War.

But we want to help others tell their stories too. To do this, we have made all of our digital images and other assets about the First World War available to download free of charge. They can be found on the First World War Resources section of our Image Store. There is no need to register or log in to download the material. The only requirement is that any re-use meets the conditions of a BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons licence. This means that the the material can be used for any purpose providing:

  • It is non-commercial
  • Any reproduction of the images is credited to the ‘Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove’
  • Anything made with this material is shared on the same basis

If you have a use in mind for this material, but are unsure whether this will comply with these conditions, please contact us to discuss.

We hope that anyone who wishes to explore the history of the First World War in Brighton & Hove — whether a school pupil, teacher, local historian, or someone who simply wants to print an image to place on their wall — finds these useful.

Photo of Royal Pavilion Indian Hospital entrance, 1915 (HA903302)

Royal Pavilion Indian Hospital entrance, 1915 (HA903302)

What material is available?

At present, over 270 images and other assets are available, and more will be added during the course of the year.

There are four broad types of material:

  • Brighton Graphic, 18 November 1915

    Brighton Graphic, 18 November 1915

    Photographs, including over 100 images of the Royal Pavilion’s use as an Indian military hospital

  • Posters, including recruitment posters issued by the British government
  • Periodicals, such as the Brighton and Hove South Sussex Graphic, an illustrated local newspaper
  • Scrapbooks, which document local stories of the war, such as the Belgian Relief Fund

The periodicals and scrapbooks have been digitised in PDF format, and processed for optical character recognition. Although not complete, this does make some of the content searchable.

Moving forward

Although it’s designed as a site for commercial sales, we are using our Image Store as it handles the large files very well: the material can be compressed to reduce the download size, and they can be emailed to others who may find it of interest.

But the Image Store does not hold much sophisticated data about our collections, and it is only a small sample of our digitised collections. This will be addressed by our new online collections website which will go live very soon. This will provide access to thousands of digitised objects from across our various collections, and images at up to 1000 pixels on the longest side will be available for re-use under the same conditions of the Creative Commons licence described above.

Our new online collections will also use an API which will be available to developers who may wish to produce apps or websites re-using the data. The website will also enable users to add their own tags and comments to objects, and help us learn more about our collections.

Can you help us?

It is important for us to understand how these digitised collections can be used. We are keen to make our collections more open and re-useable, and any information or evidence about how our collections can make a difference will support that process.

We are also curious about the stories that other people can tell with these resources. The First World War transformed Britain, and almost everyone has a point of view or a piece of family history that we can learn from.

Kevin Bacon, Digital Development Officer

 

 

 

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Spring-heeled Jack comes to Brighton

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by Royal Pavilion & Brighton Museums in Authors, Celebrations, Collections, Halloween, Kevin Bacon, Local and Social History, Newspapers, Weird and Wonderful

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Brighton, Halloween, heritage, history, spring-heeled Jack, Victorian

On 13 April 1838 the Brighton Gazette informed its readers that a local gardener had been attacked by a mysterious creature. The attack took place between 9 and 10 pm in what would now be described as the Round Hill area of Brighton. At the time, this area represented the northernmost outskirts of the town, and was largely undeveloped apart from some affluent housing on Rose Hill that had been built in the 1820s.

The attack took place within the garden of one of these houses. A growling beast ‘in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal’ climbed up on the garden wall and, even though the wall was protected by broken glass, ran across it. Before the terrified gardener could escape, the creature leaped down and chased the man and his equally terrified dog. After toying with his victims for some time, the monster abruptly scaled the wall and vanished.

This odd story was published a week after the attack. Although there was no mention of it by the Gazette’s local rival, The Brighton Herald, the story gathered national interest. The following day, the Gazette piece was reprinted in full by The Times. Why did this obscure local story achieve such prominence?

The reason was that the attack was blamed on a notorious figure who had already been terrifying London in the early months of 1838, and would go on to make unwelcome appearances throughout the 19th century: Spring-heeled Jack.

'Spring-heeled Jack' article from The Times, 14 April 1838

‘Spring-heeled Jack’ article from The Times, 14 April 1838

Transcription:

“Spring-heeled Jack” has, it seems, found his way to the Sussex coast. On Friday evening, between 9 and 10 o’clock, he appeared, as we are informed, to a gardener near Rose-hill, “in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal,” and having first attracted attention by a growl, then mounted the garden wall, covered as it was with broken glass, and ran along it upon all-fours, to the great terror and consternation of the gardener, who began to think it time to escape. He was accordingly about to leave the garden when Spring-heeled Jack leaped from the wall, and chased him for some time; the dog was called, but slunk away, apparently as much as his terrified master. Having amused himself for some time with the trembling gardener, Spring-heeled Jack scaled the wall, and made his exit. The fellow may probably amuse himself in this way once too often.

— Brighton Gazette

Spring Heeled Jack from The Boys' Standard, 8 January 1886. Source: Wikipedia Commons; original source unknown.

Spring Heeled Jack from The Boys’ Standard, 8 January 1886. Source: Wikipedia Commons; original source unknown.

If you have heard of Spring-heeled jack, it is likely that you will have a mental image of a character that is very different to that described by the Brighton Gazette. Later in the century, Jack was often depicted in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and other  forms of illustrated popular literature. Spring-heeled Jack is usually portrayed as a devil-like figure, tall and thin, often wearing a cape, and more human than animal. No two sightings of Jack were ever alike, and he was often described with varying features such as claws, cold and clammy hands, glowing eyes, and even the ability to breathe fire. The only unifying feature among these reports was that Jack could jump unnaturally great heights.

The Gazette report seems to have been the first sighting of Spring-heeled Jack outside of London, but given the conventional descriptions of him, it may seem puzzling that the Brighton case was attributed to Jack at all. However, most of the familiar illustrations of Spring-heeled Jack were produced decades after the Brighton attack. The Gazette story is actually remarkably consistent with some of the earliest reports of Jack.

Origins

The best source of information on Spring-heeled jack can be found in a long and extensively researched article by Mike Dash. According to Dash, the first sightings of Jack date from the autumn of 1837, but they did not appear in newspapers until December of that year. Descriptions of Jack from these early encounters vary wildly, but he was commonly compared to a ‘ghost’, ‘devil’ or ‘bear’. The demonic image of Jack seems to date from reports of two similar attacks on young women in late February 1838: Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. The Alsop case in particular was widely reported, and seems to have been the chief trigger for an outbreak of Spring-heeled Jack panic in London.

The Brighton case harks back to the earliest reports, but it is also in keeping with an unusual intervention by the Lord Mayor of London at the beginning of the year. On 8 January 1838, Sir John Cowan, the Lord Mayor, made public the contents of a letter he had received several days previously. The letter, as reported in The Times the following day, claimed that the recent mysterious attacks were the work of vicious aristocratic pranksters.

‘It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion (name as yet unknown), that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises — a ghost, a bear, and a devil; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman’s gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses. At one house he rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open the door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that, the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses, but, on seeing any man, screams out most violently ‘Take him away! There are two ladies (which your Lordship will regret to hear), who have husbands and children, and who are not expected to recover, but likely to become burdens to their families.’

— The Times, 9 January 1838

Two days later, The Times reported that the Lord Mayor had received further letters confirming the rumour, and in the quoted extracts, the description of Spring-heeled Jack as a bear occurs again. One anonymous writer, who claims to have heard further details about the culprits, fears that ‘the bet is that the monster shall kill six women in some given time’ and that he has been seen ‘in St John’s Wood clad in mail, and as a bear’. Another writer, named ‘J.C’ claimed that:

The villain mentioned… as appearing in the guise of a ghost, bear and devil, has been within the last week or so repeatedly seen at Lewisham and Blackheath. So much, indeed, he has frightened the inhabitants of those peaceful districts, that women and children durst not stir out of their houses after dark.’

— The Times, 11 January 1838

These early reports are consistent with the tale told by the Brighton gardener. The location of the Brighton attack may also be significant. Spring-heeled Jack’s early appearances all took place in the less populous villages surrounding London, and the Round Hill area was also on the fringes of the town. With the London reports still fresh in the minds of the local press, this explains why the attack was readily identified as the work of Spring-heeled Jack. It also explains why the Gazette was so quick to claim that the attack was the work of violent hoaxers. But why, after his early escapades in London, would Spring-heeled Jack have made a trip to the South Coast?

A dark tourist?

I think there are two broad explanations for this. The first depends upon whether the attacks were ever the work of a single being or group of men. Many attacks on young women were attributed to Jack in spite of little evidence to support this, and Dash cites several cases of feeble attempts by copycat pranksters who were caught by the police. It is possible that the Spring-heeled Jack attacks were discrete assaults that had become connected by popular rumour, and eventually inflated by newspapers into an early media myth. But if there were a core number of attacks by one or more people, as the authorities suspected at the time, who was responsible?

Although Jack often appeared in ghostly or demonic form during the 1837-38 attacks, the contemporary press was keen to dismiss the idea that he may be a supernatural being. This was probably deliberate, and may have been a result of political or police pressure to try to prevent mass panic. More recently, Jack has been cited by ufologists as evidence of a visit by an extraterrestrial being, on the basis that his extraordinary abilities, such as leaping great heights, could not have been faked by humans. However, if we accept that more worldly explanations are more plausible, it seems likely that Spring-heeled Jack was the work of one or more hoaxers.

The 8 January letter revealed by the Lord Mayor suggested that the culprits were noblemen, and a wealthy young man with few responsibilities may have had the time and resources to carry out the hoax. A 1977 book by Peter Haining identified the Marquis of Waterford, Henry Beresford, as the man responsible. Waterford was a notorious violent prankster, and is a plausible suspect, but there is no hard evidence to support this theory. Indeed, the identity of Spring-Heeled Jack, like that other infamous Jack of the 19th century, Jack the Ripper, is unlikely to ever be proven. But if a wealthy aristocrat like Waterford were responsible, Brighton is precisely the sort of place such a man may have visited. Brighton’s fame as a health resort since the 1750s had always been closely followed by its reputation as a place of pleasure, and by the late 1830s it remained a favoured town for fashionable visitors. Perhaps ‘Jack’, wary that he might be caught in London, decided to take his props for a trip to an unsuspecting seaside? This is pure speculation, of course, but the repeated assertion that Jack was the work of an ennobled miscreant is consistent with the class of visitors who came to Brighton at this time.

The second explanation is that Spring-heeled Jack’s appearance in Brighton is a reflection of the town’s relationship with London. Although the description of Brighton as ‘London by sea’ is often regarded as a modern phrase, it dates back to the early nineteenth century. The need to accommodate and attract fashionable visitors to the town required the comforts and pleasures of the capital to be replicated in Brighton. As people flocked to the town looking for work and business opportunities, Brighton grew rapidly. In 1801, the population of the town was just over 7000 people; by 1831 it had over 40,000 inhabitants: a fivefold growth in just thirty years. Brighton was changing rapidly in the early nineteenth century, and transforming into a sophisticated urban settlement.

Considered in this context, Spring-heeled Jack may have simply been another cultural import from the capital. It is possible that a strange but vague story from the fringes of the town was reinterpreted according to the spreading legend. The attacker was labelled as another tourist coming to the town, a more sinister sort of fashionable visitor. Spring-heeled Jack’s brief appearance in Brighton may tell us more about Brighton than it does about Jack.

It is also possible that the Brighton sighting was a publicity stunt. The Brighton Gazette’s report is comparatively non-sensational, but we know very little of the origin of the story; the report suggests that it has not come directly from the victim of the attack. It may seem odd that a seaside resort would try to promote itself through the presence of a vicious monster, although we know from studies of dark tourism that sites of death, suffering and tragedy attract visitors. It is certainly curious that less than two weeks after his appearance in Brighton, a rival seaside resort, Southend, claimed that Jack had appeared there. On 28 April 1838, the County Herald & Morning Advertiser ran the headline ‘Spring-heeled Jack comes to Southend’, reporting that a young woman had been attacked on the cliffs by a ‘gentleman’. Dash notes that this case has ‘little… in common with the modus operandi of the “real” assailant,’ and that it was ‘a good indication… of how far the general panic had spread,’ but does it also hint at an expression of rivalry, perhaps even unconsciously, between the two seaside resorts?

Legacy

After April 1838, there seem to have been no new sightings of Spring-heeled Jack in the country for several decades. A further spate of appearances occurred in London, Aldershot and Sheffield in the 1870s, and he was reported in Edinburgh and Liverpool in the following decades. He receded from memory in the first half of the twentieth century, although the myth was revived by the growing ufology movement from the 1960s onwards. The memory of Spring-heeled Jack is still occasionally invoked in reports of mysterious leaping figures, such as this Surrey Comet story from February 2012.

Spring-heeled Jack has never returned to Brighton since his encounter with the Round Hill gardener. But Jack has left one legacy in our collections. Take a trip to the Wizard’s Attic in Hove Museum, take a look around the display cases, and you will find box of spring-soled children’s shoes called ‘Spring-Heeled Jacks’.

Kevin Bacon, Digital Development Officer

 

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