High Minds
Page 39
Cole was seconded from his work at the Record Office to work full-time, and sought Albert’s approval for a salary of £1,200 a year. Mundays offered to pay it, but Albert insisted that Cole be on the payroll of the Commission.21 This netted him only £800 a year, and Cole was always to be financially pressed, having a large family dependent upon him. Albert also had the role of visionary, though one with an eye to the smallest detail; but he sanctioned Cole to communicate with the other commissioners as he saw fit and to push the plan on.22
Scott Russell and Stafford Northcote, who had been Gladstone’s private secretary, were appointed secretaries to the Commission. Northcote swiftly resigned because of his father’s illness – he soon succeeded to his baronetcy – and was replaced by Edgar Bowring, an official from the Board of Trade. Cole, always ambitious, had hoped to be secretary, but ended up with no formal senior role at all, and at a distance from the Prince, who dealt only with the nomenklatura. Cole was sent to propitiate prospective members of the Commission, most of whom readily agreed to serve. He remained a member of the executive committee of the Society of Arts, which now had an entirely subordinate function to the Commission. He was frustrated by this, and felt slighted. An appeal to Albert for the committee to be allowed in to the Commission’s meetings was rejected: because, it seems, Albert thought that if these men of ideas were allowed in, the commissioners, chosen for their public standing and for the most part with no ideas at all, would begin to feel surplus to requirements.
The Commission met more or less every week. Albert attended meetings assiduously. The project upon which they were working soon acquired the official title of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations. Albert’s patronage ensured the idea caught on quickly among the highest in the land: in February 1850 Wellington wrote to him asking for his name to be entered on the list of subscribers to the project.23 The task of finding guarantors for the cost of the building continued. Barry, consulted about the work, thought that £190,000 would be taken on the door, but that the sale of ‘old material’ afterwards and the proceeds of refreshments would raise another £45,000 and £10,000 respectively, and that these sums would more than cover the costs. Cole, less ambitious, thought the takings would be £50,000: in truth, everyone was in the dark. Grey noted that he had read in The Times that 27,000 people had visited the British Museum in one day: so anything was possible.24
Cole quickly acquired a reputation for being difficult, thanks to his annoyance at being kept from the main decision-making body. Northcote agreed the Commission was ‘unfit for executive functions’, but that Cole and his committee were not of the calibre to command public confidence if they took them over.25 However, he also noted, as he told Grey, that the knowledge men such as Cole had made them indispensable to the success of the enterprise. However, on 8 February 1850 he and his colleague Wentworth Dilke resigned, having heard it was intended to appoint over them Lieutenant Colonel William Reid, ex-Governor of Barbados, to act as link man with the Commission. Cole made it clear to Grey that, given his involvement with the scheme from its earliest times, he resigned with great reluctance: but had no choice because of the slight.26
‘If I were weak enough to consent the Commissioners would despise me,’ Cole noted.27 Grey said the changes to the arrangements proposed had been designed not to disoblige Cole but to make his job easier; but he also warned him that, if he resigned, ‘following immediately on Col Reid’s appointment as Chairman, it would have the appearance of being dictated by jealousy of him, or an unwillingness to act under him’, something he said the public, given Reid’s reputation, would not find ‘intelligible’.28 Added to this was the small matter of ‘HRH’ who ‘would regret your resignation very much’. Grey concluded: ‘I should consider your leaving the Executive Committee under present circumstances injurious both to the proposed exhibition and to yourself.’ After brooding for a couple of days, Cole wrote to Granville, who had become a main patron of his, to say he felt it his ‘duty’ to stay in his post.29 He was reluctant to abandon all links with his brainchild, or to admit defeat: he seems to have been a victim of snobbery, and was perhaps aware of it. His middle-class amour propre seems to have been incomprehensible to the royalties, nobles and notables drafted in to run the show.
The executive inability of the Commission, however, remained a problem. In March 1850 Peel, a commissioner, complained to Granville about the lack of dynamism among his colleagues, and of Reid’s inertia. Meanwhile, Cole was daily recording in his diary his frustration, while Reid waited for orders that never came. Reid was not quite what had been expected, and Scott Russell, the secretary of the Commission, had made things worse by proving ‘disagreeable’ and ‘insolent’.30 By May 1850 there were signs only of sluggish activity from potential exhibitors. Cole wanted to send a circular to potential exhibitors but Reid, absurdly, was nervous about drawing too much attention to the enterprise in case it became a focus for working-class agitation. Unfortunately, Granville agreed with him. Once more Cole considered resignation; once more, he was talked out of it.
III
Albert devoted enormous amounts of time to the project and engaged with its every aspect: so much so that, for the first time, the Queen began to register concern about his health. He evangelised for the exhibition, notably at a banquet at the Mansion House on 21 March 1850, given by the Lord Mayor of London, to which ‘nearly all the mayors or other chief municipal officers of the corporate towns of the united kingdom were all assembled, and in their robes of office surrounded the chief magistrate of London’, as The Times put it.31 The paper also noted that it was not least because of the modernity and progress advocated by the Prince, and for which the exhibition was deemed to be a showcase, that such a gathering was possible: it was one of the ‘triumphs of modern engineering skill in regard to rapid and convenient transit.’ Also present were ambassadors, the commissioners, various courtiers, nobles and bishops, and Gladstone. The event was the culmination of a campaign to maintain enthusiasm for the project in the provinces that had been entrusted to Lyon Playfair, a professor of chemistry at the London School of Mines, whose appointment Peel had secured precisely because he feared that outside London enthusiasm was waning.
When the Prince arrived he was ‘loudly and heartily cheered in the street’. He entered a hall decorated with paintings of the produce of the various counties, and of ships discharging their cargoes in the Pool of London for exhibition. Once the notables had dined off turtle soup, turbot in lobster sauce, baron of beef, chicken fillets, sweetbreads, veal, capons, lobster salads, pigeons stuffed with mushrooms, trifles, cabinet puddings, tarts, ices and Savoy cakes (to name but a selection of what was on offer), Albert spoke. He said he was gratified that ‘a suggestion which I had thrown out, of appearing to me of importance at this time, should have met with such universal concurrence and approbation.’ He proclaimed that ‘we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end – to which all history points – the realisation of the unity of mankind.’ In that phrase Albert showed either his familiarity with Macaulay, or his instinctively Whiggish outlook.
Once the ‘great cheering’ that greeted this announcement had died down, he talked of what a small world it was becoming: not just because modern transport could shrink distances, but also because scholarship had made almost all languages intelligible, and means of communication were revolutionised too. Knowledge, above all, was being transmitted as never before. He proposed a unity of his three great interests: science, industry and art. ‘Science discovers these laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to the raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge; art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our production forms in accordance with them.’ This brought him to his main argument: ‘The exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of manki
nd has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.’
He concluded with a tactful appeal for funds, that the enterprise might be seen to be the work of the whole nation. He sat down to ‘enthusiastic cheering, several times renewed.’ The French Ambassador, Russell, Stanley and Peel were among those who made short speeches to endorse what Albert had said. If the passion of the evening were a guide, drawing in financial support would not be difficult. At Granville’s suggestion, Cole drafted and published a leaflet about the wonders of the exhibition, designed as propaganda to drum up support. It emphasised the improving nature, both moral and practical, of the exercise: not just more about spears into pruning-hooks, but also the ‘dignity of labour asserted’ and the ‘promotion of universal peace’.32 However, there was still no universal enthusiasm outside the circle of those who had been present at the creation of the idea.
Apart from funding, the other priorities were to settle upon a site and a design for an exhibition building. For the former, the Commission soon settled on the southern fringe of Hyde Park. For the latter, submissions from architects were invited, to be considered by a subcommittee under the Duke of Buccleuch. Within four weeks 245 designs had been sent in, including thirty-eight from overseas.33 The two most favoured by the Commission were glazed iron-framed buildings, one by a French architect, Hector Horeau, and the other by an Irish firm, Richard and Thomas Turner of Dublin. As soon as they were shown to the public and, more to the point, the architectural press, the chorus of execration began. Indeed, the building committee soon admitted it found none of the designs suitable. It included architects and engineers, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the country’s greatest engineer, and Charles Barry. They had their own idea, which was soon also the subject of ridicule: a cathedral-like edifice ‘calculated to require between thirteen and nineteen million bricks’.34
Once the public – notably the public within shouting distance of Hyde Park – saw the plans of that building their outrage grew about the effect such a monstrosity would have on the park. The Illustrated London News published a drawing of the proposed hall on 22 June 1850, which sparked a clamour. Although the Commission had said that any building would be temporary, few believed such a monumental construction would be pulled down at the end of the year, but would blight the landscape indefinitely. There were also some who felt sure the project would end in disaster, and the taxpayer would have to rescue it to save Britain from international humiliation. Even Cole had some moments of pessimism, not least because days and weeks continued to pass without the executive committee being asked by the Commission to execute anything at all.
A movement grew up to have the exhibition relocated to Battersea Park, partly because no one of any quality lived nearby who could be disrupted, and partly because – it was argued – there would be greater ease in bringing all the exhibits in by the river. The Times, which had resigned itself to the exhibition happening but not to its happening in Hyde Park – which was surrounded by a heartland of its readers – wrote on 27 June 1850 that ‘the case against the appropriation of Hyde Park . . . becomes stronger as the plans of the projectors are developed. We are not to have a “booth”, nor a mere timber shed, but a solid, substantial edifice of brick, and iron, and stone, calculated to endure the wear and tear of the next hundred years.’35 The paper recoiled from the notion of a dome bigger than St Paul’s, and a bill for £100,000 for the edifice. ‘By the stroke of a pen our pleasant Park – nearly the only spot where Londoners can get a breath of fresh air – is to be turned into something between Wolverhampton and Greenwich Fair.’
It can be deduced that those two last-named places did not harbour a large number of Times readers, or at least would not do so for much longer. The venting of the editorial spleen continued: ‘The project looks so like insanity that, even with the evidence we have before us, we can scarcely bring ourselves to believe that the advisers of the PRINCE have dared to connect his name with such an outrage to the feelings and wishes of the inhabitants of the metropolis.’ Worse even than the horrible aspect of this building was the fear that it might never be removed. Hyde Park would undergo a ‘permanent mutilation’, and the area around it would be choked by traffic during the construction, and during the stocking of the place with exhibits. It added its voice to the call for a site accessible by water, and for Battersea.
The Times lamented further, the next day, that hardly any English architects had put forward a plan deemed acceptable. ‘Are we really so far behind the rest of the world in an important branch of the fine as well as the useful arts as this?’ it asked.36 It also attacked the building committee’s plan for being so at odds with guidelines it had issued before inviting submissions from architects, and said the proposed huge dome on the building, designed by Brunel, ‘dwarfed the rest of the building to absurdity’, would necessitate a still bigger edifice beneath it, and would become permanent. The Commission quickly realised the urgency of giving a solemn and binding undertaking that the exhibition would close on 1 November 1851, and the building would be dismantled.
Some local residents, in the summer of 1850, sought leave to obtain an injunction to have the event stopped, because of the damage to their property; but permission was refused by the Attorney General. This caused an outcry in the Commons: Sir Frederick Thesiger, a former holder of that office and a future Lord Chancellor, told the House on 26 July that twenty of the ‘most ornamental’ acres of the park were about to be blighted.37 He spoke of mature trees that had already been felled, and of many more facing the same fate. He presented a petition on behalf of local residents and demanded justice for them; and later that afternoon the redoubtable Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, the MP for Lincoln, moved an emergency debate.
Sibthorp was a devout sceptic in the matter of Prince Albert. He had moved the motion in the Commons in 1840 to ensure the taxpayer did not remunerate the Prince too generously. Now, he saw the prospect of an exhibition in Hyde Park as little other than an assault on the rights of the English people. He had already, three weeks earlier, berated the government for allowing the exhibition to proceed because of the trees that had had to be felled, and because it would make Hyde Park a magnet for criminals. ‘The right of enjoyment of our parks was vested in the people of this country, and had been recognised in the reigns of the Charleses, of William III, of George II, of William IV, and in the reign of the present Sovereign,’ Hansard records him as saying. It continues: ‘He believed Her Majesty to be one of the last persons who would desire to do anything or to sanction anything hostile to the feelings of Her subjects, or which could interfere with their rights and enjoyments.’38 Sibthorp had, however, a wider agenda than just the rights of people to have a Sunday promenade.
He felt the exhibition to be little more than a means to undermine the works and devastate the morale of all decent Englishmen, not least by exposing them to malign foreign influences, and quite possibly flooding the country with foreign rubbish that the British people would be bamboozled into buying. He roared that:
Hyde Park was emphatically the park of the people, and it was now proposed to be devoted to purposes which he must hold to be prejudicial to the people in a moral, religious, and social point of view. It was sought to appropriate it to the encouragement of—what? To the encouragement of everything calculated to be prejudicial to the interests of the people. An exhibition of the industry of all nations, forsooth! An exhibition of the trumpery and trash of foreign countries, to the detriment of our own already too much oppressed manufacturers. The Commissioners of Woods and Forests, as trustees of the public, were bound to protect their rights, and not permit them to be robbed and spoliated.39
The Attorney, ignoring fears about the park becoming a den of thieves, robbers and prostitutes, swatted Sibthorp aside: Hyde Park was Crown land, and the Crown could do what it liked there so long as it stayed within statute law. In the Lords at the same time Lord Brougham, a l
awyer of long experience who had been on record from the earliest days of the planned exhibition as opposing its being held in Hyde Park, tried to succeed where Sibthorp had failed; but the government was resolute in not giving way. Albert had told his mentor, Baron Stockmar: ‘If we are driven out of the park, the work is done for!’40 He was playing for high stakes.
There were elements in the Commons that wished Parliament, and the government, to take a strong hand in the running of the exhibition. However, Labouchere, who was both a commissioner and President of the Board of Trade, stressed he did not intend either Parliament or the government to have any hand in the events at all.41 He emphasised, too, that there would be no call for public money to subsidise the project. This was Albert’s particular horse, and he was to be allowed a free rein with it. Albert was also able to use the project not only to further his aims for the development of the arts and sciences, but also to continue his work for the improvement of the condition of the labouring classes. He was determined to arrange a model lodging-house at the exhibition, which he paid for himself; and sought Wellington’s approval, as commander-in-chief, to have it placed by the Hyde Park Barracks.42
The attempt by some politicians to stop the exhibition was fruitless, not least because it gravely misjudged public opinion. All over Britain, and not just in the manufacturing districts, groups met to discuss how they could contribute to the success of the event. It had captured the public imagination, and presented a unifying goal towards which all classes could work. The notion that the event was a way of asserting British excellence above that of other nations without seeking to make war with them was also attractive. Lord Portman, the local landowner and magnate, chaired one such meeting, in Marylebone on 2 May 1850. He announced, to applause from the 200-strong crowd, that the exhibition was designed ‘to cheer the sons of toil and to promote the happiness and comfort of every man who dwelt upon the earth.’43 Even The Times was forced to admit there was now ‘general acquiescence’ in the plan, and that the whole undertaking was ‘very creditable’ to Albert.44