Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer

by Gibson, Miles

  George glanced up at Kingdom Swann and wiped his nose on his hand. ‘What’s the time, mister?’ He grinned hopefully and waggled his scissors in the air.

  ‘But they don’t have to slave for coppers!’ shouted Swann, turning his rage on Ethel. ‘Good God, don’t I provide for them?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Ethel, dropping a curtsey.

  ‘Don’t I dress them and feed them and keep them warm?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Ethel, dropping a curtsey and this time falling down in a heap and pulling her apron over her face.

  ‘Damn!’ shouted Swann. He had grown so red in the face and was blowing so much steam that the children now jumped from the table and ran to comfort him, clutching at his arms and legs and pulling on his sleeves. Ethel trembled on the brink of tears.

  ‘It’s a force of habit, sir,’ said Alice. ‘Old Mrs Spooner says she wants to pay for her lodgings.’

  ‘You’re a lovely, lovely gent, Mr Swann, a very lovely gent!’ shouted old Mrs Spooner, smacking her gums. ‘And here’s me lodgings for the week,’ she added confidentially, as she pressed a shilling into his hand.

  ‘But you shouldn’t have to make them work,’ said Swann, trying, in vain, to return the coin. ‘You could be sending them out to school. Don’t you want them to have a proper education?’

  Old Mrs Spooner looked shocked. ‘I don’t believe in it, sir. There’s too much reading and writing in life. And once they’ve learned you how, why, you just can’t stop yourself doing it. But does it make a man happy? Does it make a man healthy and wise? No, sir! I’ve known educated men. Wilfred’s father was an educated man …’

  ‘And they hanged him,’ said Alice.

  ‘You’re a lovely gent, Mr Swann, but I wouldn’t want no reading and writing to break an infant’s heart.’

  ‘But Ethel can read and write,’ argued Swann, pulling in fury at his beard. His dream of recruiting a governess was rapidly evaporating.

  ‘She gets that from Gloria and she’s full of the airs and graces,’ snorted Mrs Spooner indignantly.

  ‘I never meant no harm!’ honked Ethel, blowing her nose. ‘I wanted to take them from under your feet!’ And she burst, at last, into floods of tears.

  ‘You can’t stop ’em working their trade,’ shouted Alice, folding Ethel into her arms. ‘They was born to it, Mr Swann.’

  Swann shook his head. ‘Damn!’ He turned around and, with Grace clinging to one leg and Wilfred biting the other, waded from the room.

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  He had become a factory owner. He was mortified. Every morning before he left for the studio he would creep downstairs and peek through the scullery door as if he were stealing a view through a peepshow machine. The children worked from dawn until dusk, cutting and sticking the paper skirts, while the mother pecked at the pegs with her paint brush. Two dots and a dash. Two dots and a dash.

  He bought the children expensive toys and made a nursery in the attic, purchased a set of tiny armchairs and painted the walls with jungle scenes, teeming with panthers and parrots. He found a rocking horse and a phonograph and a set of improving picture books. He collected jigsaw puzzles and a long line of clockwork novelties including a mouse with a tambourine and a pig that played the trumpet. When he had finished he made them sit in the little armchairs and tried to teach them how to be children. He crawled around on his hands and knees making farmyard noises and laughing at the mouse with the tambourine. But they treated his efforts with suspicion. They slept in the nursery, too tired for games, curled into balls like a litter of puppies. They lived and worked in the scullery.

  When his plan to save the children failed he turned his attention to old Mrs Spooner and tried to ruin her with drink. Finding she had a taste for beer he stacked crates of stout beneath the table, hoping to soften her brain and spoil her aim with the paintbrush. But the mother could drink like a sailor, thrived on her rations and only seemed to work faster.

  Finally, as if he wanted to shame them or perhaps because he could not believe the evidence of his own eyes, he took down a camera and photographed them. This created a small commotion and work was suspended for a few minutes while old Mrs Spooner combed everyone’s hair and took care to hide her own grey shock inside a large poke-bonnet.

  There was no artistry in these pictures. He framed his subjects as he found them, hunched at the table, stupid and staring, with the clothes-lines hanging above their heads like so much festival bunting. He spent a long time pretending to fiddle with the camera, making all sorts of small adjustments, not for any practical reason but purely for the pleasure he took in keeping the workforce sitting idle. And when he was finished he hurried off to the studio and ordered Marsh to develop the plates.

  ‘Look at ’em!’ he growled as the prints were set out to dry. ‘You’d think they were living in slavery!’

  ‘It don’t look so bad,’ said Cromwell Marsh.

  ‘It’s the most degrading sight I’ve put before the camera!’ roared Swann. ‘Crazy people! Wasted lives!’

  ‘It could be worse,’ said Marsh. ‘You keep the scullery nice and warm.’

  ‘But look at ’em!’ shrieked Swann. ‘Look at ’em!’

  Old mother Spooner, in her big poke-bonnet, looked like a pantomime dame. The children, caught by a trick of the light, had the tragic air of emaciated gnomes.

  ‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ grinned Marsh and, in a moment of mischief, submitted one of the prints to the New Photographic Club’s London Art Treasure Exhibition.

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  The Peg-Doll Workshop was awarded a silver medal and the Journal of Modern Photography (September 1912) carried a column of fulsome praise for the largely unknown photographer.

  Swann was most alarmed by the news. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ he roared, dragging Marsh from the dark-room. ‘You shouldn’t have done it without my permission.’

  ‘Where’s the harm?’ blinked Marsh.

  ‘What if they want to see more of my work? What are we going to show them?’ He had spent all his time in pursuit of cavorting, full-blown nudes and his single public success was a picture of half-witted infants!

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ said Cromwell Marsh. Thieves and cut-throats. Cripples and beggars. London Low Life by Kingdom Swann. He was full of ideas when he sensed there was money to be made.

  ‘Don’t involve me in your hare-brained schemes,’ said Swann, in a fright. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with it.’ He waved Marsh away and fled up the steps of the wooden stage.

  Marsh shrugged. ‘You won a medal and a mention in the Journal,’ he said, still feeling rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Damn nonsense,’ said Swann.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ said Marsh, pulling the magazine from his pocket.

  Swann shook his head.

  ‘Shall I read it to you?’

  Swan grunted and sat down on a roll of canvas clouds.

  ‘Among the gum-prints, smudge prints, splodges, dodges and plain buffoonery that we have come to expect from the New Photographic Club’s exhibitions, we are pleased to find a welcome return to the grand European traditions of photographic realism. In The Peg-Doll Workshop by Kingdom Swann Esq we witness a triumph of naturalism, both in content and treatment, to rival the great Oscar Gustav Rejlander …’

  ‘Rejlander!’ exploded Kingdom Swann. ‘There was nothing natural in that old fraud. The man was so sweet he farted violets.’

  ‘I suppose they mean by natural them pictures he took of little orphans acting wistful,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘He used to be famous for ’em.’

  ‘They couldn’t stop him!’ shouted Swann. ‘If he found an urchin in the street he’d have it into the studio with a halo on its head before it had time to shout for help!’

  ‘Shall I finish?’ said Marsh, shaking the journal.

  ‘Is there more?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Read it!’ stormed Swann.

  ‘… to rival the great Oscar Gustav Rejlander. Everyth
ing about this prize exhibit is simple and unpretentious; the light bold, the composition dynamic and the artist’s sympathy for the plight of his miserable subject shines through with an absolute clarity. In these days of myopic illusionism we can only congratulate Mr Swann on his fortitude in fighting the decadence and presenting such frank views of everyday life.’

  ‘Is that it?’ said Swann.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Marsh, carefully folding the magazine and pushing it into his pocket.

  Swann was silent for a long time. ‘I’ve spent twenty years taking frank views of life,’ he said at last, staring down on the studio. ‘The nudes are frank. Life’s no franker than Gloria Spooner when the wind is up her skirt.’

  ‘If we sent her out on exhibition we’d both be arrested tomorrow,’ said Marsh. It made him sad. It was such a waste.

  Swann sighed and scratched his beard. ‘They made it a crime to take photographs of a woman’s article of joy, but show her toiling, dirty and wretched and they call you an artist and give you a medal.’

  ‘Photography beautifies everything,’ said Marsh. ‘That’s the curse of the camera.’

  ‘My solitary public triumph: the view of a London scullery,’ muttered Swann. He prised back the lid of the costume trunk and plunged his arms into underwear.

  ‘It’s an odd world and no mistake,’ said Marsh. ‘These days it’s all views of working life. And the more degraded the work the better they seem to like it.’

  ‘What does it do for them?’ said Swann. ‘What? Does it satisfy some terrible, morbid appetite? It’s disgusting. It gives me the shivers. Why do they want to see it?’

  ‘I’m buggered if I know,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘Poverty and suffering is thought to be very picturesque.’

  ‘There’s enough misery in the world without hanging it on the walls,’ said Swann, as he fondled a silk chemise. ‘You can’t cure human misery by framing it up and calling it art.’

  ‘I suppose they believe they’re pioneers uncovering hidden aspects of life. There can’t be an animal, bird or flower that hasn’t been made a picture postcard. You can buy a view of Abyssinia as easy as buying a bag of sultanas. Kings and queens can be bought by the dozen. Nearly everything in the world has been photographed. Everything. They’ll soon be going to the slaughter house and the lunatic asylum.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Swann.

  ‘There’s nothing too strong that can’t now be brought to public attention by way of the photograph,’ warned Marsh.

  ‘Except men and women engaged in the simple pleasures of love,’ growled Swann.

  ‘True,’ said Marsh. ‘But everything else is thought suitable for intimate investigation. There’s a photographer in Bristol who takes his camera to hospital.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see in a hospital but rows of old men wearing new pyjamas. There’s nothing on view but their suffering.’

  ‘That’s the attraction,’ said Cromwell Marsh. ‘He recently attended a serious amputation.’

  Swann was flabbergasted. He pressed the chemise against his mouth. ‘You mean, I can show a man,’ he said, ‘crouched upon a naked woman if he’s strictly employed to hack off her legs!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ frowned Marsh. ‘I suppose she would still be required to maintain a degree of modesty.’

  ‘And they call that art?’ bellowed Swann.

  Marsh gave out a hollow laugh and went back to work in the dark-room. ‘These days you can’t blow your nose without someone calling it art.’

  The medal, received by Cromwell Marsh on behalf of the aged photographer, was a milled silver piece about the size of a Huntley & Palmer biscuit. It had been embossed with the profile of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and the simple inscription: VENI VIDI VICI. Swann had it pierced for an albert and hung it from his waistcoat pocket.

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  The award was followed by a period of doubt and confusion for Swann. He began to plan larger and more elaborate assemblies of nudes, defying the fashion for views of the humdrum and commonplace. He bought rolls of cartography paper and spent hours at the table, sketching historical melodramas of breathtaking size and pomposity.

  Marsh knew, at a glance, that these extravagant battles and banquets could never be turned into photographs. A Slave Girl Offered to Hannibal on the Shield of a Roman General required thirty dancers, a battlefield and an elephant in armour. Alexander Conquers the Punjab needed a dozen horses and a war machine that was large enough to knock a hole in a castle. But when he tried to persuade the old man to exercise moderation Swann grew frustrated and angry. Retreating from the modern world, where an empty chair was thought picturesque enough to be posed in front of the camera, he’d committed himself to a grand Swann-song in the cause of heroic photography.

  After several arguments with Marsh on the cost of horses and elephants, Swann withdrew his most ambitious proposals and settled, instead, on Vandals at the Persian Gates. An old-fashioned struggle of good and evil to feature a dozen bearded giants, a harem of nudes, a brace of Nubian guards and a leopard.

  ‘Where will I find a leopard?’ cried Marsh.

  ‘I don’t know!’ shouted Swann. ‘Where’s your imagination? I offer you my genius and all you can see are problems.’

  Marsh complained bitterly that even if they found the beast they wouldn’t find twelve giants and if they found twelve giants they would never find the Nubians and if they found the Nubians they would never fit such a troupe on the stage.

  ‘Find me a bigger stage!’ roared Swann. ‘Find me an old theatre with wings and drops and all the trimmings. We’ll assemble a living painting. The biggest picture in the whole damn history of classical photography. Nudes of all nations heaped in human pyramids. Furies in the footlights. Angels in the flies.’

  ‘Impossible!’ said Marsh, flapping up and down in despair. ‘You can’t let Vandals loose raping women, bold as brass, on the London stage. We’ll all be arrested for God-knows-what! You might as well put ’em out on a barge and sail ’em naked along the Thames!’

  ‘Cleopatra!’ shouted Swann, his eyes ablaze with inspiration.

  ‘No,’ pleaded Marsh.

  ‘Yes!’ raved Swann. ‘Cleopatra Carried Aboard Her Funeral Barge. Trumpeters and peacocks. Slave-girls and blackamoors!’ His eyes bulged. His beard was flecked with foam.

  ‘It’s not practical,’ moaned Marsh, who was now so agitated he looked ready to burst into tears.

  ‘It would be a revolution!’ cried Swann. ‘Unwrapping God’s most lovely creation in the midst of the natural landscape. We’ll do away with canvas clouds and plaster of Paris pillars. We’ll take to the rivers and meadows of England, work in the glorious light of the sun.’

  ‘Revolution?’ echoed Marsh. ‘We’d most likely cause a full-blown riot trying to follow your plan.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ shouted Swann impatiently.

  ‘We’d have every tinker and tailor in London straining for a view,’ said Marsh. ‘That’s what’s wrong! Imagine the disturbance. Think of the excitement. They’d bring along a barrel organ. They’d be selling nuts and oranges. We’d cause such a riot they’d call out the army, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘We don’t want spectators,’ said Swann.

  ‘Naked women on parade in the middle of the public highway? There’s no avoiding it,’ said Marsh.

  ‘We’ll choose a sheltered part of the river and work behind a tarpaulin screen,’ said Swann.

  ‘We can’t work in a circus tent!’ said the horrified Marsh, beginning to wonder if this were a dream or some peculiar sort of joke. ‘We’d draw the riff-raff from miles around. You’d turn us into a side-show attraction.’

  But Swann had stopped listening. He seemed determined to show his talent the light of day. It was perfect. The barge brimming over with funeral flowers. The water sucking at the blackamoors’ feet. Cleopatra borne aloft by slaves. The wind at her hair. The sun behind her head like a beaten copper plate.

  ‘I’ll leave y
ou to make the arrangements,’ he said.

  So Marsh was sent out to search the Thames for a stately Nile barge. He ventured as far as Stepney before he found a suitable hulk. It was moored at a wharf not far from Limehouse Reach. The owner was puzzled when Marsh expressed an interest since the vessel was old and rusted away and she barely had enough wind in her belly to keep herself afloat. But Marsh was so determined and the owner so pleased to be rid of her that a bargain was struck and arrangements made to tow the barge to a more secluded landing stage.

  As soon as Swann had inspected the craft, and declared her fit for his purpose, they set about her transformation. Carpenters were called to build a raised deck and disguise the worst of the decay with suitable portions of timber. Artists were commissioned to paint her flanks in designs that were generally thought to be most fitting for Pharaohs. Swann provided the working drawings of sacred birds and magic symbols. He selected the colours for his designs and issued written instructions on their mixing and application.

  But the work proved costly and difficult. The carpenters cheated them. The artists were lazy and wasted the paint, fell from their slings in a drunken stupor and had to be saved from drowning. The barge broke loose from her moorings and drifted as far as Greenwich, creating havoc along the way and nearly sinking a paddle-steamer, before they caught her and dragged her home. She sprang her bilge and was patched and the patch sprang a leak and she had to be patched again.

  Marsh begged the old man to forget his flight of fancy for fear it would bankrupt the studio. But Swann remained in a confident mood. His dream was taking shape. He was already trying to order the peacocks and searching for Cleopatra. It wasn’t until the barge fell apart in a storm, and disappeared through the stinking mud, that he lost heart, at last, in the enterprise. Then he withdrew, defeated, and spent all his time in the studio, arguing angrily with himself and walking the empty stage.

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