High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  In May 1862 Gladstone explained to the Commons that ‘a large majority of the trustees have arrived at the conclusion that it is necessary to separate the collections of the British Museum’: and that the best destination for the natural history collection would be South Kensington.126 He justified the location on the grounds of moderate cost and room for expansion. It would be expensive: ‘But the Government think it would be absurd,’ he continued, ‘to propose to this House any half-measure.’127 The total saving of Kensington over Bloomsbury would be £300,000, satisfying the Chancellor’s iron financial discipline. In the museum in Bloomsbury, Owen had 50,000 square feet of exhibition space. The museum he had planned would have 485,100 square feet. He was not interested in simply attracting serious scientists. He wanted to popularise natural history, and open it up to the middle classes and the autodidact – ‘the local collector of birds, birds-eggs, shells, insects, fossils etc – the intelligent wageman, tradesman or professional man, whose tastes may lead him to devote his modicum of leisure to the pursuit of a particular branch of natural history’.128

  When the matter of funding was discussed in the Commons, Richard Monckton Milnes reflected that:

  If you are to have a great first-rate museum of natural history, you must not have any strict limitation for want of space; you must allow the exhibition to be commensurate with the present state of science. The old idea of a museum of natural history was the exhibition of a whale, a tiger, and a few birds of Paradise, what are called specimens interesting to the public in general. Such an exhibition could not now be passed off as a museum. Every day science is becoming more and more clearly defined; every day distinctions, imperceptible to the public and even to well-informed men, open to the minds of men of science new regions of discovery and new realms of thought. Look at that great work, the publication of which last year formed the commencement of a new era of science in England—Mr Darwin’s work upon the Origin of Species. It is clear that a museum, to be complete, must include many specimens which, although of the greatest importance to the man of science, are of no interest to the mere visitors to the institution.129

  This was a minority view: the intellectual revolution in science, and its consequences, were beyond the comprehension of many of Milnes’s fellow parliamentarians. He used a forceful analogy: that London wanted something as eminent as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris: which no one thought of combining with the Louvre. A serious scientific institution was necessary to the nation and to the cause of science; but it would be expensive, wherever it was built. The House decided the economic question, not the intellectual one. It defeated the motion by 163 to 71. The Queen was ‘greatly annoyed’ by the outcome, ‘knowing as she does the interest the Prince took in the question.’130 She felt it was a deliberate attempt to thwart Albert’s vision, and took it as a personal insult. Grey, her private secretary, was shocked by the defeat, telling Bowring that ‘had I had the least idea that it was likely, I wd have tried to keep some of the Opposition Leaders straight.’ Disraeli and Northcote had voted against, which had caused particular grief. Gladstone admitted to the Queen that a ‘mistake’ had been made in seeking so large a sum, and the matter would be considered again.131

  Rather than find another Royal Engineer to execute Fowke’s plan after his sudden death in 1865 – as happened at the Albert Hall, for which he also won the commission – a new architect was recruited: Alfred Waterhouse, one of the towering men of his profession in the generation after George Gilbert Scott, but then only in his mid-thirties, and little known. Waterhouse was a Gothicist and, like Scott and Ruskin, had formed his ideas of the Gothic from extensive European travel. He had had his own practice in Manchester since 1854, when he was twenty-four, and had made his name with the new Assize Courts in the city. He moved to London in 1865, hoping – in vain, as it turned out – that he might win the competition to design the Law Courts in the Strand. He came to the attention of the Establishment via the First Commissioner of Works, William Cowper, an aesthete, friend of Ruskin, and patron of some of the leading architects and designers of the day. It was Cowper who asked Waterhouse to take on the Natural History Museum.

  In 1865 Gladstone said that the case for having a larger museum at South Kensington than the British Museum was ‘slenderly and scantily shown’. A revised plan was submitted, and it was agreed that the £195,000 required would be spread over six years.132 However, things again went out of control. Another £463,000 was sought to complete the scheme, way above Fowke’s original, modest proposal. Administrative costs for the Science and Art Department were running at around £275,000 a year and rising. The Department claimed it had to perform the functions of a university, schoolmaster, museum, circulating exhibition, storekeeper, producer, architect, builder, decorator, referee, revenue department, public office and department of control: which was why it was so expensive.

  It was said that ‘the Scientific Men of the Metropolis’ opposed relocation. This was untrue, and prompted a memorial to be sent to Gladstone, as Chancellor, signed by Darwin, Huxley and Fellows of the Royal, Linnean, Geological and Zoological Societies, backing the move.133 They claimed it was ‘of fundamental importance to the progress of the Natural Science in this country, that the administration of the National Natural History Collections should be separated from that of the Library and Art Collections, and placed under one Officer, who should be immediately responsible to the Queen’s Ministers. We regard the exact locality of the National Museum of Natural History as a question of comparatively minor importance, provided that it be conveniently accessible within the Metropolitan district.’

  It had been intended that Waterhouse would execute Fowke’s plan. However, the plan was put on hold during the Conservative administration of Derby and Disraeli, between 1866 and 1868, and when it was revived shortly before the election of 1868 Waterhouse was told he could, if he wished, revise Fowke’s ideas. His new blueprint was dismissed as too expensive. When Gladstone came to office in 1868 enthusiasm for the museum came with him, and with Henry Layard, a renowned antiquarian and aesthete, when he became First Commissioner of Works. Layard was reminded by P. L. Sclater, a zoologist who had signed the 1866 memorial, of the strength of professional opinion behind opening a separate museum.

  In Layard’s papers is an estimate by Waterhouse, made in March 1869, for £1,895,000 for the cost of the Natural History Museum alone.134 Waterhouse wrote shortly afterwards: ‘I always intended to propose the use of brick and terracotta and my estimate was based on the assumption that these materials would be employed.’135 By this stage the debate on relocation had been going for well over a decade, slowed by the absence of an Albert-style figure to force the issue. The commissioners had told successive governments that they would make land available, and at a very reasonable price; but governments, sensing the likelihood of massive demands on the public purse, had been sluggish in their response. In June 1869 Gladstone complicated matters by authorising Layard to consider ‘placing the Natural History Collections on the Embankment.’136 Layard’s office discussed this with Waterhouse, who wrote on 16 July 1869: ‘I do not like naming a sum which I am not tolerably sure the building can be done for; but I should like Mr Layard to understand that if it had been anywhere else than on the Embankment my estimate would hardly have exceeded the £500,000. The site seems to me to demand a magnificent building. If, however, the Historical Commission are willing to forego magnificence and be content with a respectable building I think I might venture to promise that the accommodation described could all be secured for the half million.’137

  It was not until Acton Smee Ayrton succeeded Layard that the decision to proceed as planned, at South Kensington, was taken. Ayrton was the polar opposite to Layard, lacking in aesthetic sense and obsessed with not spending public money. Luckily for Waterhouse, Ayrton was also preoccupied with the construction of the Law Courts, and with making the life of George Edmund Street, their architect, a complete misery: so he had relatively little time and e
nergy to interfere with Waterhouse. However, he cut the budget from £500,000 to £330,000: so Waterhouse redesigned his building, constructing enough to house much of the museum, but leaving space for side and rear ranges to be built when funds allowed. They never did. Parliament then delayed building for two years during which costs rose. Waterhouse had to make further economies, shortening the height of the entrance towers and reducing the ornamentation.

  He was guided by a plan made by Owen in 1859. The exterior was Romanesque, a variance from Fowke’s original idea, which had been Italian Renaissance. It was, however, more in keeping with Waterhouse’s pedigree as a Gothicist, being the style from which the Gothic had developed. The great concession Waterhouse made to the Renaissance was the symmetry of the building, a trait found in other works of his (such as Manchester Town Hall) but not admired by other Gothicists. The effect of the regularity of the 680-feet-long facade, with its rows of round-arch windows, is mesmerising: of the Gothic, but not quite Gothic.

  The terracotta Waterhouse required was for models of flora and fauna to adorn the exterior; these were designs by Owen himself. It became increasingly hard to obtain these materials in the quantities required, which caused the contractors to go bankrupt in the summer of 1879.138 The building was not finished until 1881, but the delay had its advantages. The Disraeli administration allowed the towers to be built to their planned height, in order to accommodate water tanks for hoses in case of fire. When opened to the public in April 1881, the museum at last gave Albertopolis the world-class scientific institution of which the Prince Consort had always dreamed, and a public increasingly interested in education, inquiry and self-improvement had a peerless resource.

  X

  The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens – whose tortuous conception and birth are described in the next chapter – was only one part of the capital’s remembrance of the Prince Consort. It was strongly felt that the achievement of his other vision, the much-discussed Central Hall of Science and Art, would be the ultimate tribute. It was driven, like the memorial, from the Queen and the Court, and like the rest of Albertopolis was the result of an initiative by Cole, who saw another opportunity to extend his empire. Cole had first suggested a massive concert hall, built by subscription, in 1857. He had hoped it could be built as part of the infrastructure for a Great Exhibition of 1861, to be held to mark the tenth anniversary of the original, and had asked Fowke to come up with something. The exhibition had to be postponed from 1861 to 1862 because of the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, and there was insufficient money to build such a hall.

  The land directly south of the Albert Memorial and north of the Horticultural Gardens, considered as the site of the National Gallery, was the obvious place if the money could be found. Sir Charles Eastlake formally suggested a memorial hall to the 1851 commissioners in June 1862. At the same time, at the height of the Queen’s grief and of her determination to have Albert commemorated as spectacularly as possible, Cole had secured an interview with her at Windsor where she gave her approval to a hall, provided it was built in conjunction with, and not instead of, a separate memorial. However, money was again the obstacle. Having had to subsidise the memorial, the government was unwilling to part with more public money for this extravagance, particularly so long as Gladstone was Chancellor.

  Cole would not be thwarted. He drafted a prospectus in late 1863 inviting public subscriptions for a great hall. He said it would be ‘the finest in Europe for hearing, seeing and convenience’, and it would accommodate 12,000 people.139 He sought £200,000, which he proposed to raise by selling 500 ‘perpetual free admissions’ at £100 each, 500 ‘life admissions’ for £50 each, and corporate arrangements for use of the hall on what we would now call a time-share basis. However, the commissioners saw no reason to grant land for this purpose. Their fear seemed to be that sufficient finance would not be forthcoming, and the plan would have to be aborted, or finished with State funds granted reluctantly, if at all.

  So Cole tried to find a way out of the impasse. Having enlisted both Fowke, who had scaled down earlier plans for a 30,000-seater hall, and General Grey, they decided to target the cream of society (comprising people of rank or wealth, and in many cases both) to subscribe. It was hoped this would convince the commissioners that the project could not fail. Cole had one more trump, which was to persuade the Prince of Wales to become the hall’s president. This would encourage society to invest but would also put huge pressure on the commissioners to give in to Cole’s entreaties. Grey, shrewdly, advised the Queen to ask the Prince to take on the role, an offer he could not refuse.

  Travelling the Continent for the purpose of acquiring objects for the South Kensington Museum, Cole also inspected concert halls: though it was a visit with Fowke to the Roman amphitheatre at Nimes in 1864 that most profoundly affected the Albert Hall’s development. The proposed building would, however, be more than just a musical venue: the great learned societies so revered by Albert, and whose presence in South Kensington he had always believed vital, could hold their meetings or conventions in it. It could also house future exhibitions: the Crystal Palace, after all, had long been in Sydenham, and the widely execrated building for the 1862 exhibition was already on the way out.

  Cole sent Grey a plan of action in the summer of 1864. Grey saw one obstacle in particular – Cole’s personal unpopularity – but also realised that his success in South Kensington required his concert hall project to be taken seriously. Derby, then Leader of the Opposition but also a key member of the memorial committee, was prevailed upon by Grey to see Cole and discuss the idea. Derby thought the plan ‘visionary’, but lacked enthusiasm to push it through. That changed miraculously when the Queen, at Grey’s prompting, intimated that she wished such a project to proceed.140

  A prospectus described how the building would be funded. Cole went through his address book and started to round up big names as vice-presidents. Unpopular he may have been, but he had enlisted fifty by the end of 1864, helped by the Prince of Wales’s patronage. And although Scott, as architect of the memorial, was considered the natural candidate to build the hall, and had submitted plans for it, Cole and Fowke understood each other. Cole was unimpressed with Scott as an architect and, as no stranger to jealousy, may have felt he had had quite enough success by securing the commission for the memorial.

  Cole took a model of the hall, made by Fowke, to Osborne to show the Prince of Wales on 29 January 1865, at the first meeting of a steering committee to run the project. It comprised the Prince, Phipps, and Grey. Cole and a colleague ‘attended by command of His Royal Highness’. The committee saw Fowke’s plans from 1859, and the rival submission by Scott. Cole also produced a list of over seventy notables willing to be vice-presidents. He reported enthusiasm among potential subscribers, which meant the Prince could make the following pronouncement: ‘His Royal Highness expressed his desire to see the erection of the Hall carried into effect, as a work recommended by the Prince Consort, for its great public utility, and as a necessary part of the Commission’s comprehensive plan for the promotion of Science and Art.’141 The plan was approved – though the capacity had shrunk again, to 6,000.

  On 29 May the commissioners, led by Derby, agreed to grant not just the land, on a 999-year lease at an annual rental of 1s, but also £50,000 in cash, with the proviso that the rest be raised within eighteen months. They also asked whether the hall might be reduced in size, but the Queen was having none of that. A meeting of the ‘Promoters of the Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’ took place at Marlborough House on 6 July: present was a slice of the highest aristocracy of the land, including six dukes, two marquesses, eight earls and three prelates, the last group led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.142 The Prince spoke of his mother’s deep interest in the project, and of her agreement to become its patron. There was unanimous support at the meeting for the project and the terms under which it would proceed. The Prince explained how the surplus from the exhibition had been exhausted in building t
he memorial, and therefore a public subscription for the hall had been necessary: and he justified the building as something ‘the want of which for various purposes connected with Science and Art has long been felt’.143

  The list of vice-patrons was topped by two royal highnesses (Prince Alfred and the Duke of Cambridge), a serene highness from Saxe-Weimar, a brace of archbishops and seven other dukes. Below them came two marquesses, thirteen earls, four viscounts and nine bishops. Disraeli was among the clutch of MPs on the list, as were the officials of numerous learned societies and most of those who had been associated with the development of the exhibition and Albertopolis – Northcote, Bowring, Dilke, Layard, Owen, Tite and, of course, Cole. He and Bowring joined the provisional committee, led by the Prince of Wales and his brother Prince Alfred, but also including Derby, Granville, Robert Lowe, a leading Liberal, and Grey.

  The statement by the Provisional Committee said the movement for a great central institution in Albertopolis had been ‘arrested’ by the death of the Prince; but the time had come ‘to revive a portion of his project, and to seek the means of erecting a Hall on a scale commensurate with the wants of the Country.’144 The Hall would be available for congresses, conversaziones and exhibitions connected with science and art, and indeed ‘any other purpose connected with Science and Art’; there could be ‘Agricultural and Horticultural Exhibitions’; but, most of all, ‘Performances of Music, both choral and instrumental, including performances on the Organ similar to those now given in various large provincial towns, such as Liverpool and Birmingham.’ The potential utility of the Hall was emphasised by the fact that the area was about to be connected to the Metropolitan Railway.