A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

DEDICATION

For David

EPIGRAPH

She did not have to be told … that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Paramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part 1: Earth

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part 2: Air

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part 3: Fire

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Notes

A Note on Currency

Select Bibliography

Index

Appendix

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for A Thing in Disguise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Just after 7 p.m. on Monday, 30 November 1936, a small fire started under the central transept of the Crystal Palace in south London, the greatest glasshouse ever built.

Preparations for The National Cat Show to begin the next day had just been finalised. A choir was rehearsing in the garden room, birds ruffled their feathers in the aviaries. Otherwise the Palace – with its nave of 1,608 feet and main transept larger than the dome of St Peter’s in Rome – was still. Its enormous frosty surface, made up of over 1,500,000 square feet of glass, glittered and, as the moon emerged occasionally from the cloud, it struck the statues in the formal, terraced gardens spreading out below the building. In the surrounding boroughs, families prepared their evening meals and planned their Christmases.

The two Palace nightwatchmen on duty that evening were rather slow on the uptake. Their first call was made to the Penge Fire Brigade just before eight o’clock, by which time the flames could be seen clearly from outside the building and street fire alarms were being activated all over the area. At 7.45 p.m. Police Constable Parkin, passing on a bus, was one of many who also called the brigade. They arrived at 8.03 p.m. with their one, slow fire engine. Beckenham Fire Brigade followed within a couple of minutes, and soon a call went out to all the brigades in London to join them. On the great ridge, a fresh force 5 wind from the north-west fanned the fire like bellows and drove it down the giant south nave. Within 30 minutes, all the central parts of the building were ablaze – wild waves of flame battered relentlessly against the glass and leapt right up to the roof. Encouraged by the wind, the fire devoured the great stage and organ, the 20,000 chairs stored underneath and the floors themselves. It fed on the figures in a waxwork exhibition, the plants and trees, the stuffed animals and the various exhibits. It reached such an astonishing intensity of heat that the iron framework glowed white, buckled and, one by one, the vast glass panes began to explode.

As armies of fire fighters and fire engines with their bells clanging arrived from all over London, the practising choir was evacuated, the exotic birds in the aviaries freed from their cages to fly up into the smoke and take their chances. The gas company worked fast to dig a trench to cut off the main gas supply Air forced through the organ pipes caused it to groan accompaniment. Motor pumps and turntable ladders were set up on the wide parade. Precariously balanced firemen turned scores of hoses on the fire and the new hose-lorry of the London Fire Brigade, which could reel out 1½ miles of hose at a speed of 15 miles an hour, was used for the first time after being demonstrated only the afternoon before. However, the brigade could do little but delay the inevitable. High on the hill the water pressure was simply not strong enough. Using the five million gallons of water available in the upper reservoir, still the hoses had negligible effect. Just short of an hour after the fire began, the entire building was in flames and the firemen had to retreat to 100 feet beyond the glowing mass.

Clouds of smoke stretched for miles. An exaggerated, orange glow took over the sky. It was seen in eight counties – as far as Devil’s Dyke near Brighton, about 50 miles away – causing hundreds of thousands of people to converge on the high ground of the South Downs at Epsom and on Hampstead Heath across the Thames. Tens of thousands more swarmed by every means to the Palace itself, hampering the emergency services in their race to the hill. One newspaper later reported that a parked car, used as a grandstand by hordes of onlookers, collapsed and was found the following day with its tyres burst and its wheels splayed at each corner. Many hundreds of bicycles were deserted as it became impossible to ride or push them through the dense crowds.

Throughout the 82 years it stood on Penge Hill, the Palace and its gardens had become London’s most famous resort, renowned above all for its music and for the great organ with its 3,714 speaking pipes. Over one million people visited each year to attend the Saturday festivals, wander through the historical courts or gaze at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ giant dinosaur replicas. Here they enjoyed the firework displays, tightrope walkers and wild animals and cheered at cricket matches and dirt-track motorbike races. It had become a national monument for old and young well before it became national property in 1913.

Even the Duke of Kent joined the crowds to watch the fire. From every window, every tree and every available railing, people were mesmerised by the destruction of their poor old palace. One enterprising man in Hillside Road, Streatham, hired out field glasses for twopence a look. In Parliament, MPs and Lords packed the upstairs committee rooms and terraces for a view of the angry sky.

The ferocity of the fire was awe-inspiring. By 8.35, the ribs of the vast central transept roof had become a stark black skeleton against the white blaze, visibly bent and twisted. With a roar and an explosion of sparks that carried for miles, they collapsed. Just before nine o’clock, the modular arched girders of the south transept began to fall like hoops, one by one in a macabre reversal of their construction. The halls, the great organ, the immense library of Handel Festival music were gone. The vast stone steps to the terraces were shattered by the falling face of the transept, molten glass dropped from the great girders. The firemen were dwarfed against the great bowl of flame, as streams of molten glass poured down outside the building, forcing them back. Explosions rocked the neighbourhood as the fire reached the boilers in the basement, frightening a carpet of rats that streamed out across the park. The water in the central fountain inside the building boiled and the fish perished.

At either end of the Palace stood Brunel’s magnificent towers, each 282 feet high, built to house the water tanks that fed the elaborate fountains in the park. As the fire sped south down the building, the alarm was raised that the south tower was under threat and a great race was on to save it. The tower was close to the houses on Anerley Hill and contained 1,200 tons of water and material used by the Baird Company in their television researches; if it collapsed, it would take many hundreds of lives with it. Locals were evacuated from their homes – one newspaper reported that a woman was not allowed to get her coat but was told to wrap herself in newspaper to keep warm.

By 10.30, the buildings near the south tower had burst into flames but the tower appeared safe. The fire meantime worked against the wind and attention now turned to the north tower. By 11.40, flames were breaking through the roof of the northern end of the building but, luckily, a large section of the north wing had been lost after the gales of 1861, creating some distance between it and the tower. By midnight the fire was burning itself out with no further threat to Brunel’s great engineering achievements. Only the two towers, the south wing and a portion of the north wing’s roof still stood, all enveloped in flame, white-hot. By three in the morning, though small fires continued to burn, the firemen packed up – over five hundred of them, more than a third of the city’s brigade.

The following day, hoarding was erected to keep out the crowds, though sightseers continued to stream to the hill. The Daily Sketch estimated that there had been over a million visitors to the site within the first two days – the number of visitors to the Palace in a normal year. One family travelled overnight from Yorkshire. In the City, shares in Madame Tussaud’s, Olympia and White City soared.

The biggest blaze in living memory, caused perhaps by a cigarette stub, perhaps by a broken flue pipe from the boiler in the office at the front of the Palace, had left only a tangled wreck of buckled iron and molten glass, with here and there the broken arm, head or leg of a statue, lodged at fantastic angles. Amazingly, not a single life had been lost. The Christmas shows were cancelled and the booking agents were in chaos. There was concern that a major venue for the May Coronation celebrations for Edward VIII had been lost.

The general manager of the Crystal Palace Company, Sir Henry Buckland, made it clear that he did not believe the Palace would be rebuilt unless the government stepped forward with at least £5 million. He dispelled reports suggesting that the building was fully insured, and confirmed that insurance was only purchased to the value of £110,000. Eighty-four years before, it had cost £1,350,000 to build.

With blind optimism, three days after the disaster, the first sod was cut for a new road-racing circuit on the lower terraces as the burnt-out hulk of the Palace loured in the background. But national and international events were to take precedence that week. As the fire had raged on that Monday night, Madrid had been severely bombed, fuelling concern about the escalating civil war in Spain. On Thursday that week, Edward VIII sparked a constitutional crisis by asking Baldwin to sanction a morganatic marriage to Mrs Simpson. A week later the King had abdicated and Mrs Simpson, the most talked-about woman in the world, was fleeing across France, chased by the world’s press.

The weekend after the fire saw the first snows of winter. The Observer called the site ‘the very genius of December’. The naked, straggling trees were mimicked by the curious masses of twisted metal, odd twigs of ironwork and fantastic growths of remnant glass. ‘The vitrified palace had become a petrified forest.’

Two months later, in The Architectural Review, Le Corbusier articulated the essential attraction of the glass building which, by some miracle, had remained as a last witness to an era of faith and daring: he wrote ‘one could go there and see it, and feel there how far we have still to go before we can hope to recover that sense of scale which animated our predecessors in all they wrought’. Before the fire, like many millions before him, he had not been able to tear his eyes from ‘the spectacle of its triumphant harmony’. His definition of architecture as a way of thinking, of achieving order and of expressing contemporary problems in terms of materials, was epitomised by the achievement of Paxton’s miraculous building – the first in the world to be constructed of mass-produced standardised parts and the first to use glass and iron on such a scale. The Architectural Review carried its own obituary to the building, describing this ‘colossal crinolined birdcage’ as no fossilised museum piece, but instead a precept as ‘inspiring as the Parthenon … as important as Stonehenge’. The building, it said, had liberalised architecture and provided the ‘first structural renaissance of architecture since the middle ages’.

Outliving all prophecies of structural disaster, the Victorian Valhalla, Thackeray’s ‘blazing arch of lucid glass’, one of the greatest memorials to Victorian engineering, architectural achievement and popular amusement, had sunk to her knees, all but taking the memory of her creator, Joseph Paxton, with her. Paxton was a gardener first and last but, as a pioneer among Victorian self-made men, he was part of a generation who thought of their own time as one of transition from past to future and who embraced the innovations of the day. His character sprang from the spirit of the age – determined by imagination, unremitting energy, motivation, and enthusiasm – a coupling of enterprise and ambition. Like many of his contemporaries, he appeared to be able to turn his hand to almost any task: an untrained engineer and architect, half-amateur and half-professional, he not only built the most perfect greenhouses in history but became the greatest horticulturist of his day. He was a revolutionary – the Crystal Palace was one of the most astonishing design and engineering feats of the nineteenth century. With his dogged single-mindedness, Paxton typified the bold new men with abundant creative energy who grew out of and formed the age of unparalleled industrial expansion, a quintessentially persevering pragmatist.

Yet, in 1936 a jarring, prophetic note was struck by George Bernard Shaw. Asked by the Daily Sketch what he thought should replace the Palace, he replied, ‘I have no wish to see the Crystal Palace rebuilt. Queen Victoria is dead at last.’ Without its raison d’être, the garden’s magnificent terraces and blaze of flowers languished and fell to ruin. The site has still to be redeveloped. The broken stone steps, one lonely damaged statue and several sad sphinxes witness only the creep of the brambles. A television transmitter towers starkly on the ridge. The sculptured bust of Joseph Paxton, erected in 1869 four years after his death, turns its back to the forlorn, now empty hill, looking away from the vanished glory of his intoxicating pleasure dome.

CHAPTER ONE

Milton Bryant is a small and pretty rural village some 50 miles from London, raised slightly above the Bedfordshire plain, modestly protected from change now, as it most certainly was in the early 1800s, by its position on the edge of the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Estate. At that time the village formed part of the collected farms of the Woburn Estate, containing a manor house as well as a public house, a collection of cottages and gravel pits, a village pond and a Saxon church. Half a mile away is the site of a now vanished mansion, Battlesden Park, and a further 2 miles away is the market town of Woburn and its abbey.

On 17 May 1810, aged 50, Joseph Paxton’s father William, a farm labourer, was buried there three months before Paxton’s seventh birthday. The boy’s family were now poorer than ever. Later in life, when he was wealthy and enjoying a fine dinner, he is said to have remarked, ‘you never know how much nourishment there is in a turnip until you have had to live on it’.

There are few documents relating to the early years of Paxton’s life. It has been suggested that his father was a tenant farmer, rather than a labourer – the disparity in incomes of the two positions was not slight – but his name does not appear in any of the rent books for the Woburn Estates, nor is there any mention of him in the land tax records for the area. William may have farmed his brother’s land or he may have laboured at Battlesden Park, where two of his sons subsequently became bailiffs. Whether he farmed or laboured, he worked on land in a county famed for market gardening, where smallholders cropped wheat, barley and some oats.

Joseph Paxton had been born on 3 August 1803, the seventh son and last of the nine children of William and Anne, who had moved to the village by the time their fourth child was baptised. His parents had been married for about 22 years, and both were in their early forties. By 1803, their eldest child – also William – was twenty and soon to be married and it is likely that five or six of the other children still lived at home. They were John (16 when Paxton was born), Henry (14), James (11), Thomas (9), Mary Ann (7) and Sarah (about 3) – all packed into a small labourer’s cottage.

It was an auspicious year for a future gardener to be born. In 1803 the Liverpool Botanical Gardens opened and the Horticultural Society was conceived; Joseph Banks sent William Kerr to collect plants in China and Humphry Repton was about to publish his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. In the wider context of their lives, England stood on the threshold of great political and social upheaval. On the one hand, the French Revolution of 1789 had heralded democracy; on the other, Georgian aristocracy were still pursuing their lives of privilege. The demand for universal suffrage would grow in fervour right up to and beyond the First Reform Act of 1832, but now the transition from a feudal and agricultural order to a democratic and industrial society was just beginning.

From the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, towns had been growing as labourers moved from the land to work in ‘manufactories’ with their new power looms, the spinning jenny and, by the latter part of the century, steam power. Demand for new textiles and manufactured products was stimulated by the wars that had raged for years with France and by 1815 many of these factories had become great mills. Later, the demand for iron products for roads, bridges and railways would accelerate the migration as people packed into industrial towns like Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, swelling them by an average of 50 per cent. The population of England doubled between 1801 and 1850.

By the time Paxton’s father died, the distress of agricultural and factory workers alike was growing. The Luddite riots of 1811–12, where the workers’ anger was directed not so much at the machines as at the bosses who refused to negotiate with them over pay and conditions, erupted and the perpetrators were, for the most part, deported to Australia. As veterans returned from the French war in 1815, post-war depression and its consequent poverty set in. Crucially, cheap wheat imports were banned by the new Corn Law – a measure which maintained the high price of bread and the increasingly dismal lot of the labourer. By 1816, the price of bread had risen sixteenfold over fifty years.

In the countryside these radical changes were less obvious, though its economic structure was changing, too. The French wars had raised the cost of food and in 1803 many potato crops failed. So there were more people and less food, a distress compounded by the enclosure system, which had begun at the end of the previous century, and which meant that labourers were no longer able to use common land to grow vegetables, forage for firewood or graze animals. Wages were not increased to compensate for the loss of these auxiliary resources – so that, earning only seven or eight shillings a week, most labouring families were subsisting on a diet of tea, potatoes, some cheese and bread. Yet the pace, if not the quality, of life in the country was still broadly as it had been for centuries. Nothing travelled faster than a galloping horse and rural life followed the traditional agricultural calendar of Valentine’s Day, May Day, Summer Harvest, the village feast, hiring-fairs at Michaelmas, Guy Fawkes, late-November seeding and Christmas. Only rarely did events of national importance punctuate their rhythm: in 1814, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, there was mass celebration in Woburn, where houses were decorated with oak boughs and flowers and there was street feasting.

There are several differing reports of Paxton’s schooling. Given the death of his father and the consequent poverty of his family, it is fairly extraordinary that he made it to school at all. Education did not become a requirement by law until as late as 1880; farmers generally opposed the few free schools available, preferring their children to work in the fields for a few pennies, and conservative opinion considered popular education dangerous and undesirable. Some churches introduced Sunday Schools since this was often a child’s only free day, but weekday teaching for the working classes was rare.

There was no school in Milton Bryant until 1853, but there was a free school for boys at Woburn, started by the 1st Duke of Bedford. In 1808 it was rebuilt, reorganised and run on a voluntary subscription. According to a report in 1818, it was ‘large, of stone, three storey in height, containing two large classrooms besides many other apartments’. Working-class schools like this functioned on the pretty disastrous monitor system in which apprentice teachers passed on, by rote, what they may have rather ineffectually learned themselves, while one master supervised the entire school. Few working-class children had more than two or three years of desultory education, and few could do more than write their names.

There are no records of pupils at the Woburn school but it seems likely that Paxton attended, however intermittently, making the long walk from his village twice a day, since he could certainly read and write proficiently by the time he joined the Horticultural Society in London in 1823. In 1808, the Duke of Bedford reported to his friend the Liberal peer Samuel Whitbread that there were 104 boys enrolled there, of whom about 80 attended regularly; the hours were 9 a.m. to midday and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The school was divided into eight classes run by monitors and assistants, with one supervising master; the first class of boys were taught the alphabet by printing on a sand desk, repeated twelve times in a day, and the second class – in which the boys were streamed according to ability – wrote their alphabet on slates and learned words and syllables as well as spelling from cards. In subsequent years the boys learned arithmetic and were allowed to write in copy books once they had mastered joined writing; the monitors read from the Scriptures, while the boys sat in silence with their hands on their laps, and in the afternoon, Isaac Watts’ hymns were sung.

Paxton’s first job in a garden was about to be offered. The 6th Duke of Bedford was one of the most important patrons of horticulture (the science of the culture of plants). His garden was his great love and had become a centre for innovation and experimental gardening. Designed by Repton – the most fashionable landscape designer of his day, who worked widely in Bedfordshire between 1804–9 – the Duke’s garden had begun to receive some of the botanic treasures being introduced by collectors from around the world. More significantly for Paxton, in 1808 the immensely rich and possibly insane* Sir Gregory Osborne Page Turner also employed Repton to lay out his gardens at Battlesden Park. The elaborate series of watercolours of the completed garden which he commissioned from George Shepherd shows iron conservatories, luxuriant flower gardens and great groups of trees.