'Bad shoving and deep water’: writers on the Thames

This photograph has puzzled me for some time. A  country church on a steep little hill, with a river beside it; a service of some kind taking place in the open air, conducted by a bishop in front of what looks like a new war memorial near the church porch; the choir lined up on steps leading from the little lychgate. Apart from the clutch of local dignitaries around the bishop and one family at the bottom of the slope but within the churchyard, all the remaining villagers are gathered in the open space outside the wall. Women and children greatly outnumber men. The women, all with hats, are wearing what may be their Sunday best, and the girls have clean aprons. A few boys stand on the grass near the gate, watching proceedings; are those Eton collars round their necks? One of them trails a cricket bat, though this is winter: the trees are bare, the adults all wear coats and hats (of course) and someone is putting up an umbrella. The date can be pinpointed precisely, for written below the photograph are these details: ‘Feb[ruar]y, 26^th 1909, Aldenham’.

Edwardian England, in the year my father was born.  It’s not a posed picture – nobody is looking at the camera – but in its way it is a portrait of a community.  I had assumed that this must be Aldenham in Hertfordshire, but Aldenham Herts. is a small town and it’s not on a wide river. The Colne, which sidles past, is little more than a brook. Ah, the power of the internet! Within hours of my picture being posted on Twitter, I had learned where this was: not Aldenham at all – but Clifton Hampden, a village on the Oxfordshire bank of the Thames. It has doubled in size since the photograph was taken, but still has fewer than 700 inhabitants.

Once upon a time I was fascinated by punts and punting: I collected pictures and books, and took a punt out whenever I could. Forty years ago this year, I even began to keep a punting diary, recording all my outings. It is beside me as I write – and so are some of my most prized punting books. In these, Clifton Hampden features frequently.

The Oarsman’s and Angler’s Map of the River Thames from The Source to London Bridge (London: Edward Stanford Ltd.) is a seven-foot long, linen-backed, fold-out map of the river. My 1927 edition combines a Thameside gazeteer with detailed, if rather condensed, notes on how to punt each stretch of the river from Cricklad Cricklade (Glos.) to  Putney. Thus its entry for Clifton Hampden reads:

Clifton Hampden Br. Station: Culham, G.W.R., 1¼ m. Inn: The Barley Mow on Berks side of bridge. Boatyard: Casey, at Bridge Toll House, will look after boats, and has a few to let.

From Clifton Bridge keep right bank, but to left of reed beds and islands at Burcott: then bad shoving and deep water to lock.

The artist George Dunlop Leslie, whose book Our River (1881) is one long paean to punting on the Thames, knew all about the problems of shoving on this stretch of the river: ‘The punting here is peculiar,’ he declared; ‘mud is a bad thing, but there is such a thing as too hard a bottom, for here the pole rings with a clunk as it strikes the ground, and slips aside without any hold.’ But he admired the view:

At Clifton Hampden, as if to make up for its dullness, the river suddenly comes out in quite a novel aspect. For a short distance it runs over a bed of hard sandstone; the little cliff on the Oxfordshire side, from which the village is named, is of this stone, and quite unlike anything else on the river. With its ivy bushes and small church perched on the top, it resembles some of Bewick’s vignettes very strikingly.

Jerome K Jerome, in Three Men in a Boat (1891) describes Clifton Hampden as ‘a wonderfully pretty village, old-fashioned, peaceful, and dainty with flowers’. He doesn’t mention the church; he’s more interested in the local pub, The Barley Mow, whose ‘low pitched gables and thatched roof and latticed windows give it quite a story-book appearance, while inside it is even still more  once-upon-a-timeyfied.’ Such quaintness comes at a cost, however:

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always ‘divinely tall’, and she is ever ‘drawing herself up to her full height.’ At the ‘Barley Mow’ she would bump her head against the ceiling every time she did this.

John Ruskin visited Clifton Hampden, and if he climbed up to the church he was no doubt horrified by the make-over given it by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Ruskin’s views on church restoration were uncompromising: ‘Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end … It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.’ But Ruskin was more interested Clifton Hampden’s old bridge (originally Tudor, but also – as it happens – restored by Gilbert Scott. Local people kept their punts moored under its arches.)  Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, in The Stream of Pleasure (1891) tells the story of how Ruskin, watching the sunset reflected in the river, was distracted by a small boy he saw suddenly

run from one side of the bridge to the other, and lean far over the parapet with eyes fixed upon the current beneath. Of what was he thinking, this little boy? Was it the hurry of the water, of the beauty of the evening, or had this speed and loveliness already awakened him to higher and holier thoughts? And as Ruskin wondered, a boat drifted from under the arches into the light, and the little boy, leaning still lower, spat upon the oarsman, and dodged quickly and ran away, and Ruskin went home a sadder, if a wiser, man.

I intend to visit Clifton Hampden this summer. I may even call in at the Barley Mow. But I shall definitely climb up to the church, and pay my respects at the memorial to Lord Aldenham, designed by Walter Ernest Tower and unveiled by the Bishop of Oxford on 26^th February, 1909.  If  you want to know why I’m interested, you’ll find the answer in my forthcoming book, Kempe: the life, art and legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe, due to be published by the Lutterworth Press in 2018.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustrations: (i) Clifton Hampden Church, 26th February 1909 (Kempe Trust Archives)
(ii) A stretch of the Thames from the Oarsman’s and Angler’s Map of the Thames.
(iii) G.D. Leslie, ’The Author’s Punt' from Our River, 1881

Venice Inscribed (vi): Mr Ruskin and Mr Street

On May Day each year I open a small book, bound in red calf and with the signature ‘John Ruskin’ embossed in gold on its cover. It belonged to my grandmother and was given to her on May 1^st, 1912, while she was studying at Whitelands College in south London. The date is important. In 1912, my grandmother, about to leave Whitelands to start her career, had been one of the attendants at the College’s annual ‘Crowning of the Queen of the May’ ceremony: my book carries the inscription “This book is given to Vera Dove. Signed Alice, Queen of the May, 1912” A book plate on the inside cover explains that this ‘quaint old ceremony’ had been revived at the College in 1881 ‘at the request of John Ruskin “to give real and elevating pleasure to the young”.’ Ruskin himself, during his lifetime, had presented a cross each year to the Queen of the May, together with ‘many purple calf-bound copies of his books, to be distributed to her subjects’. Both ceremony and book giving continued after Ruskin’s death.

The book is Ruskin’s A Joy Forever. When I inherited it, a red silk bookmark led me a page where I read this striking declaration:

It seems to me that one of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking. If it would only just look at a thing instead of thinking what it must be like, or do a thing instead of thinking it cannot be done, we should all get on far better.  

The disease of thinking - this seems at first an odd complaint from one of the great thinkers of the Victorian age, ‘the sage of Brantwood’. But Ruskin was a man who hated muddle, and muddled thinking aroused his wrath. When I recall Matthew Arnold’s definition of the aim of criticism – ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ – I think of Ruskin. In his own paintings and drawings, whether of mountains, rocks or architecture, Ruskin was always concerned to see and record as accurately as possible: he was, after all, both scientist and artist: the principles of observation by which he classified geological specimens were no different from the way he classified the different types of arches in Venice. Painstakingly, first by clambering up ladders to inspect, record and draw arches at eye level, then by identifying their particular similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses, Ruskin was able to establish what no one had attempted before: the evolution and characteristics of six distinctive orders (types) of the Venetian arch, which unlocked the sequence of Venetian architectural development.

It was hard work, and Ruskin was scathing about the ‘mischievous tendency of the hurry of the present day’. He had spent, he complained, ‘two long winters’ in the drawing of details on the spot, and yet

I see constantly that architects who pass three or four days in a gondola going up and down the Grand Canal, think that their first impressions are just as likely to be true as my patiently wrought conclusions.

The particular object of his contempt here is George Edmund Street.  Street, architect of the Law Courts in the Strand, and one of the most prominent architects of the mid-nineteenth century, strikes me as an unlikely enemy: he would become an early and vocal member of William Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) of which Ruskin was the presiding spirit; he would also proclaim himself a committed opponent of ‘those destructive works of church restoration which I suspect I deplore more than my critics, and of which an instance carried out under my direction will be looked for in vain’.

Neither Street nor Ruskin suffered from self-doubt. Though there was something of a rapprochement later on, (both men meeting in Venice in 1878, lamenting together the damaging effects of growing prosperity on La Serenissima), twenty years earlier Ruskin had been unsparing:

Mr Street glances hastily at the façade of the Ducal Palace – so hastily in fact that he does not even see what the pattern is, and misses the alternation of red and black in the centre of its squares – and yet he instantly ventures on an opinion on the chronology of its capitals, which is one of the most complicated and difficult subjects in the whole range of Gothic archaeology. It may, nevertheless, be ascertained with very fair probability of correctness by any person who will give a month’s hard work to it, but it can be ascertained no otherwise.

I can’t help thinking Ruskin was less than fair to Street here, and to those other architects going up and down the Grand Canal in their gondolas. He himself advocated using a gondola to get close to the architectural details on the façades of the waterfront palaces. Here he is, in The Stones of Venice, praising ‘the precision of chiselling and delicacy of proportion in the ornament and general lines’ of the palaces between Casa Foscari and the Rialto. He urges the traveller ‘to stay his gondola beside each of them long enough to examine their every line’; but Ruskin immediately continues with this warning :

… observe most carefully the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the conception of their ornament, which mark them as belonging to a period of decline, as well as the absurd mode of introduction of their pieces of coloured marble.

I admire Ruskin greatly, but there are times – this is one – when he surely protests too much.  I wish he’d get back in his gondola and think more carefully about what he is seeing.  He occasionally admitted he was prone to contradict himself, as I think he does here. Is it really possible simultaneously to admire ‘the precision of chiselling and delicacy of proportion in the ornament ‘ of Venetian Renaissance palaces yet to condemn ‘the peculiar feebleness and want of soul in the conception of their ornament’?  I doubt it.

Adrian Barlow

 [References: the Ruskin quotations from my grandmother’s book are in A Joy for Ever, 1880 edn., London: Geo. Allen and Unwin, p.188. Ruskin’s outburst about the ‘peculiar feebleness’ of the decoration (on the Palazzo Contarini delle Figuri) comes from The Stones of Venice, vol. III, §1. Quotations from, and references to, G.E. Street in Venice are taken from George Edmund Street, a Memoir, by Arthur Edmund Street (1886).

[Illustrations: (i) Palazzo Ducale – the courtyard, with the domes of San Marco behind; (ii) the decorative pattern on the façade of the Palazzo Ducale, which Ruskin claimed George Edmund Street had not studied with sufficient care.

Text and photographs © the author.

You can access my previous posts about Venice here:

Venice at the Edges

Venice Inscribed (i): Donna Leon

Venice Inscribed (ii): Joseph Brodsky

Venice Inscribed (iii): Ruskin and E.M. Forster

Venice Inscribed (iv): Henry James

Venice Inscribed (v): Jan Morris

World and time: In Venice - La Biennale

World and time: (still) in Venice