Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lady Frances Kniveton

Last week I did a post about St. Giles-in-the-Fields, a church that I had never stopped to examine.   But I was unable to get in.   This week the doors were open and I was able to study not only the well preserved early eighteenth-century interior during what was supposed to be evensong, but also admire the tomb of Lady Frances Kniveton which must have been preserved from the earlier church and was tucked by Flitcroft into one of the side windows.   The tomb was commissioned by her sister Anne from ‘Mr. Marshall, a stone cutter in Shoe Lane’ and cost £120:-

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Will Crooks

I found the tomb of Will Crooks moving:-  A COOPER BY TRADE HE BECAME A GUARDIAN OF THE POOR A BOROUGH COUNCILLOR A MAYOR OF POPLAR A LONDON COUNTY COUNCILLOR A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, and particularly the inscription below HE LIVED AND DIED A SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE.   I didn’t know about him and no doubt should.   As suggested by his tombstone, he was a local boy, son of a ship’s stoker, educated in a Poor Law School and apprenticed as a cooper until he was sacked as a political agitator.   Mayor of Poplar and MP for Woolwich, he was responsible for Island Gardens and the Blackwall Tunnel:-

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Tower Hamlets Cemetery

I have done posts on Tower Hamlets cemetery before, but never when it has been covered by bluebells, so that it is a curious mixture of the melancholy memorials of old East Enders, multicultural even in the nineteenth century, together with rampant spring:-

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Bonner Primary School

I was walking through Mile End Park when I spotted in the distance what looked like unfamiliar turrets above the rows of standardised terrace housing to the east of the park.   It turned out to be an early Board School at the junction of Ropery Street and Southern Grove, part of which was designed by E.R.Robson, but the bulk of it by T.J. Bailey, who had worked previously as Draughtsman and then as Assistant to Robson in the London Schools Board.   A pretty grand piece of Edwardian Tudorbethan, it shows the ambition of the Schools Board:-

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Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary

Just north of the Bethnal Green Road is Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary, which first opened in 1850 following a cholera epidemic in 1849 and acquired a grand new building in 1866 designed by Lee & Long in neo-Renaissance style with a bust of Queen Adelaide in the pediment:-

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Bethnal Green Road

Years ago, I went to a talk by Anthony Burton, the then Director of the Bethnal Green Museum, about the Bethnal Green Road.   He treated it as a foreign country.   Since I have been forced to think carefully about the cultural consequences of a vote for Brexit (I’m on a podium about it on Wednesday), I thought I would take a walk down it to see how the Bethnal Green Road has changed.

I had my first cappuccino in Jonestown, a neo-1950s, new wave coffee bar:-

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Burlington Gardens

It’s a while since I’ve been on a tour of our building project in Burlington Gardens.   A lot has happened in the intervening two months.

The scaffolding is up:-

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67-69, New Bond Street

I have become negligent in writing about buildings between Stepney and Burlington House because the number of those that I haven’t already written about inexorably shrinks.   But yesterday I was walking up Bond Street and saw a building that was shown in a presentation last week and which I didn’t recognise.   It’s towards the north end of New Bond Street (I was also encouraged to differentiate between New and Old), known as Medici Court.   I assume from its name that it must be the building which was originally occupied by Joe Duveen, no less, and commissioned by him from the architect W.H. Romaine-Walker, who himself belonged to a family of art dealers.   It’s in the style that I realise lots of people hate, but adds pomp and ceremony to Bond Street:-

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Lettice Ramsey

This should probably be the last of my blogs about the firm of Ramsey & Muspratt, but I have now had a chance to read two books, Karl Sabbagh’s Shooting Star: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey and Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War, which together help to explain Lettice Ramsey’s life and character and put it into context.

Not long after the episode with Margaret Pyke (unconsummated as Karl Sabbagh has pointed out), Frank Ramsey met Lettice Baker, who was an old Bedalian (this may help to explain her liberal approach to sex).   She had read psychology at Newnham, worked for a period in vocational guidance in London and then returned to Cambridge to work in the Psychology Library.   They met in G.E. Moore’s rooms in Trinity.   Not long afterwards, she describes how she went to dinner at King’s and ‘decided to go to bed that evening.   I saw no particular reason to put it off longer & Frank was very impatient to do so.   He was far too nervous to copulate in King’s so we went round to my rooms in Trinity Street’.

They married, but he was quite quickly unfaithful to her and insisted on telling her the details of his affair, which may have encouraged her to be unfaithful to him, which he bitterly resented.   Their mores are those of Bloomsbury, but neither were initially associated with Bloomsbury and Frank’s relentless truth-telling was presumably much more a result of him being an Apostle.

At the time that she set up Ramsey & Muspratt, Lettice was having affairs with both Julian Bell, then an undergraduate at Kings, and Richard Braithwaite, a Fellow.   So, she was indeed, as she described herself to Helen Muspratt, very well connected.

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Frank Ramsey

I suppose it was inevitable that, in wanting to find out more about Lettice Ramsey, I should have got interested in Frank Ramsey, her short-lived husband, who translated Wittgenstein’s Tractato Logico-Philosophicus into English, having learned German in nine days, and is now regarded by philosophers as having contributed as much to the subject before he died aged 26 as Wittgenstein himself.   What intrigued me was a passage from his diary which records a holiday with a girl called Margaret Pyke, ‘One afternoon I went out alone with her on Lake Orta and became filled with desire and we came back and lay on two beds side by side she reading, I pretending to, but with an awful conflict in my mind. After about an hour I said (she was wearing her horn spectacles and looking superlatively beautiful in the Burne Jones style) ‘Margaret will you fuck with me?’   Isn’t this a slightly unusual chat-up line for a Wykehamist and brother of a future Archbishop of Canterbury ?

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