Botany, Empire and Deep Time 3: of horses, names, mechanical toys and some loose ends
Walking and asking questions in Bath’s Sydney Gardens with Richard White
Dr Richard S. White, Artist-researcher, Senior Lecturer in Media Practice, Bath Spa University www.walknowtracks.co.uk
Meet at the Temple
Let’s begin again at that replica Roman Temple retrieved from the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, these battered blocks of local stone hold complex stories, tangles of botany, empire and deep time. On another walk we looked at the strange bronze plaque on the rear wall memorialising the empire pageant master who aimed to impress with an unfortunate change of surname. Unlike the captured and enslaved Africans branded with the name of their owner, he took the name voluntarily, and unlike the slave-owning family whose name he adopted, this Lascelles died in poverty in Brighton. I riffed on the associations of the campaign fought in Bath against slavery that celebrated its success in 1834 right here in Sydney Gardens. I shared the story of how at the Great Exhibition of 1851, an event erroneously associated with this building, Josiah Henson, a free black man, made a historic anti-slavery intervention using Black Walnut timber from his farm in Canada.
Henson (1976) later reflected that,
‘Among all the exhibitors from every nation in Europe, and from Asia, America, and the Isles of the Sea, there was not a single black man but myself. There were negroes there from Africa, brought to be exhibited, but no negro-exhibitors but myself. Though my condition was wonderfully changed from what it was in my childhood and youth, yet it was a little saddening to reflect that my people were not more largely represented there. The time will yet come, I trust, when such a state of things will no longer exist.’
We’ll begin and end with the naming of this beautiful and champion tree beside us, the Catalpa. Much of its knowledge is lost for now at least, just one of its indigenous names, Catalpa, is held in the naming system that was rolled out onto the colonised world.
Walk to the Loggia
Walking out onto the main promenade up towards the Loggia we are walking along a path that aligns with a Bronze Age burial site, a mound on top of Twerton Round Hill. The entire Pulteney Estate clusters grandly around this line. From the Loggia in autumn and certainly when the Gardens were first laid out you could see that green round hill in the distance. Looking between pillars architecturally referencing Greek or Roman buildings you can follow that line with your eyes. Through such gestures Georgian architects and city planners sought a connection, perhaps even legitimacy from ‘the Ancients’.
But have you ever thought how strange it is that whilst the white English gentlemen of the Eighteenth century romanticised and re-imagined the long dead culture of the Bronze Age in Britain, their peers were trashing equally ancient but living knowledge systems and traditions on the far side of the globe?
Let’s hold that thought for the eucalyptus tree growing in the grounds of Sydney House while we trace some thoughts about the Loggia and drift across the oceans to Botany Bay. In the heyday of Sydney Gardens there was a Ride around the perimeter on which rode those who had paid their fees and who owned or could hire a horse. It was an exhilarating ride, just look at the rise and fall of the landscape, notice how both the canal and railway cut deeply through it. The Ride survived the slice of the canal but it was already incomplete by the time the army of navvies arrived to carve out the railway. It was the construction of the house behind us that blocked the Ride and ended that rather short tradition of exercising on horseback in the park.
The names of buildings, roads and places hold stories, it is worth noting that the building at the bottom of the sloping promenade before us we now know as the Holburne Museum was original named Sydney House. Built in the mid 1830’s as Bath was awash with the compensation monies paid out to slave-owners, the new Sydney House had its own private entrance to the Gardens through the Loggia. Today the Loggia is a shadow of its former grandeur but that door is still in place and normally locked shut. There are many unanswered questions concerning how the house came to be built across the Ride and how the name was taken from one end of the gardens to the other. Questions about names and naming, influence and the passing of time bubble to the surface.
Sydney House, building in the Ride. A portal at the back of the Loggia.
As Kirsten Elliott (2019) notes, plans were published in 1837 for building on the Ride. By 1837 Stone was already in residence and celebrating his re-election as a councillor with a letter from his Sydney House address to the Bath Chronicle thanking his electors. Stone was later to become Bath’s Town Clerk and the Stone in the Bath law firm Stone King. Perhaps Stone already had a back door into Sydney Gardens and knew that the Great Western Railway was on its way. Two years later construction work began for the railway line into Bath, a project that attracted considerable investment from former slave owners. A deep cutting was created alongside Sydney House and the exclusive Ride was gone for ever. Just as the slave-owners had a back door into retaining their low cost workforce even after the compensation payouts, maybe someone had a back door into the plans for Sydney Gardens? Today the back door into the Gardens remains locked, it looks like a secret door, once it blew open during the recent renovation work revealing green plastic watering cans and the contents of a modern garden shed. A portal or something more banal?
Names reveal stories if you follow the threads they offer. Let’s step into this portal.
Sydney House, like Sydney Gardens was named after Thomas Townsend, the first Viscount Sydney, an associate of William Pulteney. As Home Secretary, Sydney had been responsible for devising the penal colony system in Australia, we dont know if Pulteney had any speculative ambitions in the antipodes but these gardens and the city of Bath hold traces of that colonising expedition. This indeed is the same Sydney as the city in Australia. The first fleet of convict ships set sail for a place the English adventurer James Cook had named as Botany Bay. Of course the bay had other names but rather than respect the languages and traditions of a living culture tens of thousands of years old Cook imposed a name resonant of their expedition. On board his ship, ironically named the Endeavour, Cook was accompanied by Joseph Banks who was to later found the British Empire network of botanic gardens founded on Kew in London and Daniel Solander the star pupil of Carl Linnaeus. By the end of the Eighteenth century Linnaeus’s Latin system was becoming the dominant naming system of European botany, Solander was a key player in its promotion. Between these three men they held a common purpose embodied in the roll out of a system of colonial extraction and exploitation the legacies of which continue to resonate to this day.
Sydney’s convict fleet was fitted out by Banks to carry plants on the outward journey and return with living specimens extracted from the colonised lands. The destination Botany Bay sank into popular culture and is forever linked to the brutality of transportation in convict and settler songs surviving from those times. The fleet disembarked and Australia’s first penal colony was set up elsewhere however, as when they arrived at the place Cook had named Botany Bay, it was deemed unsuitable. The fleet, captained by former East India Company adventurer Arthur Phillip, headed north to another bay which he named Sydney Cove. Just like Botany Bay this too had an ancient indigenous name, but Phillip preferred to name it for his patron and thus what became the city of Sydney was founded. Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens is close to the side of their landing….Sydney Gardens Sydney!
Walk up to Sydney Place, left to the front of Sydney House. The beautiful hat tree.
Lets walk past the tennis courts and up the steps to the road, turn left along the pavement to bring us out to the front of Sydney House, here a large tree hangs tall and languid over the railings. Here many of the ideas I am juggling with on this walk come together. There are many indigenous Australian names for this tree, for those that know it could tell us about the properties of the tree and the history of the place where it grows, when it flowers, when to pick its seeds, a vast knowledge and way of knowing evolved over thousands of years embodied in a living plant. The best that the Linnaean system could do was to invent a name from the classical Greek meaning beautiful hat! Banks and Solander had recorded it growing on their ill-fated visit; brought back to England as a trophy, by 1865 there was an eighteen foot specimen growing in Kew Gardens. Looking at the tree as it blows in an English breeze, perhaps picking up a fallen seed and smelling its distinctive healthy aroma, we might be reminded of the ways of knowing Banks and Solander did not value and the misery that came in their wake. The penal colony fleet brought smallpox and worse, indigenous Australians were hunted and exploited, their systems of knowing trashed and silenced and today many bear the brunt of global warming and climate change. Captain Arthur Phillip went on to become the First Governor of the Sydney Colony and New South Wales establishing exclusive trading rights with the East India Company for the colony. He retired in poor health to Bath where he died in 1814, his body lies in Bathampton parish church. There is a memorial stone to him on the wall of Bath Abbey bedecked with dusty Australian flags.
Standing in front of Sydney House if you turn around from the tree you will see a memorialised horse trough: somewhere near here in 1901 one of Bath’s first road traffic accidents took place between a horse and a motor car. The horse trough was erected after the accident by a city Alderman and has no doubt moved back from its original position. There are traffic lights there now, so please use them to cross the road safely. Today the stone trough is a curiosity, dry, unplumbed and few horses pass this way. There are plenty of horses, however, in the rest of this story, beginning as we walk down hill over the canal tunnel and towards the railway bridge.
A horse trough and street names
Close to the horse trough is a sign indicating the current name of this road, Beckford Road. Apart from Beckford the road names around here refer to various relatives and in-laws in the Pulteney inheritance. Darlington Road we passed leading off on your left may resonate with the early steam railway, but here it memorialises another title of slave-owner William Henry Vane, as does the name of Cleveland, Cleveland Pools and the Cleveland Bridge are both nearby. Vane was a third generation slave-owner who inherited a large part of the Pulteney Estate and it is his son-in-law Forester whose name is memorialised in the Forester Estate we are walking towards.Then, perhaps, it was the custom to memorialise your relatives and business associates in street names however sordid the sources of their wealth. It should be an embarrassment, however, for this UNESCO designated World Heritage City to continue to memorialise the atrocity of slave-ownership in modern street names. The developers of the old MoD site you can see from the railway bridge rising to the west had no such shame or sensitivity, we can be pretty sure that their Lascelles Avenue is not about remembering Bath’s Edwardian pageant master!
The Lascelles family wealth was acquired through the same Empire the imposter Lascelles was celebrating. Like the Lascelles, the Beckfords were also part of a set of intermarried white English dynasties whose wealth was founded on the trade in, and labour, of enslaved people on the colonial plantations of Jamaica, Barbados and elsewhere. The infamous William Beckford of Beckford’s Tower was a fourth generation slave-owner, his father had been sent back to England where he bought his way into power becoming an Alderman and Lord Mayor of the City of London; Beckford’s daughter finally fulfilled their dynastic ambition to become titled aristocracy. The family myth goes that great-grandfather Peter Beckford made his first profits in Jamaica catching horses, training and selling them on. One small ethical step then for the Beckfords, from capturing feral horses to kidnapping and coercing fellow human beings; for them and the other families with such deep roots in the atrocities of empire this seems to remain unquestioned and in fact was robustly defended down the generations until emancipation (e.g Beckford 1790)
Beckford
So why Beckford Road, Beckford Court and Beckford Gardens? On early Pulteney Estate maps Beckford Road is Sydney Place but at some point in the mid Nineteenth century it became Beckford Road. William Beckford lived for some time on Great Pulteney Street so perhaps it is an echo of this. A grand Victorian house named Beckford Cottage is further down the road facing the wall of Sydney Gardens but I have found no connection. I would like to suggest that the chosen association is something to do with the death and funeral of William Beckford. When Beckford died in 1844 the ‘Cottage’ would have been newly built. The local newspaper reports on the gothic spectacle that was presented as the coffin was brought down from Lansdown Crescent through the city and on to the Pulteney Estate; imagine six black horses with black plumes pulling the hearse followed by many more similar decorated horses and carriages draped in black as the bells of the city churches slowly tolled. I was intrigued to read that an R.S. White Esquire was one of the pall bearers! Crowds lined the streets and pickpockets mingled with the elite mourners at the graveyard. Given Beckford’s well known eccentricities the crowd were perhaps more drawn more by the spectacle than the act of mourning. Nevertheless a funeral on this scale would have had an impact, the cortege came along Great Pulteney Street and turning right onto Pulteney Road passed in front of Sydney Gardens. Perhaps following this event the less developed northern section of Sydney Place was renamed Beckford Road.The pickpocketers were caught and punished but some would say that the bigger thieves on that day eluded justice and rest in their graves.
Gathering our thoughts on Beckford and in the distant imagined echo of those tolling bells let’s walk up Beckford Gardens with the railway cutting on our right. The housing estate that now occupies that land on our left is a relatively recent development born of a time when this was really the edgelands of Bath. At the far end of this road is Cleveland Pools well worth a visit but a whole other story, along the river there was a boatyard and a ferry, the ferry is long gone but you can still hire canoes and row boats from the Bathwick Boatman. Between here and there where once there was a pleasure garden things had gone a bit freelance and Captain Forester who had inherited the Estate had it cleared and laid out for building. This included demolishing Bathwick Villa, the hub of the old pleasure ground, Villa Gardens
Villa Gardens and a collection of automata
The story of the changing fortunes of Bath’s many private pleasure grounds is well laid out by Kirsten Elliott (2019). Villa Gardens emerges out of a silk traders fascination for automata. James Ferry and his brother were silk merchants in London with a shop in Bath, in the 1740’s they funded the development of an ornate gothic villa in the middle of what is now the Forester Estate. James got involved in local politics becoming an Alderman and later the Chamberlain of the City of Bath, this would have involved him in the taxes and rates system of Bath. James also collected automata, mechanical toys like the terrifying Tipu’s Tiger I referenced walking with the story of Vellore House and the Sydney Gardens Grotto. In the late Eighteenth century a collection of the finest automata was a version of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ wealthy men acquired to demonstrate their wealth, knowledge, reach and superiority. A key part of this practice was the showing of the collection and in the case of automata its demonstration, this was done to invited guests and may have been a strategy in Ferry’s route to power. Or his fall from power. In 1780 he was removed from office and two years later, in financial difficulties he sold up, everything, including his collection.
Pablo Fanques will be there
This was not exactly Alton Towers, but the new owner Joseph Marrett was able to build on the reputation of the automata collection. He developed the house and gardens into a ‘Vauxhall’, an exclusive place of entertainment for the wealthy visitors to the city. Villa Gardens was born. Whilst reading up for this walk I followed through Kirsten’s references to an equestrian performance by Mr Jackson the Black and I immediately thought of the song, ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ on the Beatles classic album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. One of the lyrics refers to Pablo Fanques and somewhere I knew that he was a Black circus performer. Could Pablo Fanques have performed at Villa Gardens I thought, there can’t have been many black horsemen in the early English circus. Now we are walking down Forester Lane and the old Villa would have been directly in front of us. I try to imagine the scene as the song about Pablo Fanques rings in my ears. The newspaper listing for November twelth and thirteenth 1789 reads just like the lyrics of the song, listing the acts and what they will do: ….Mr Handy, the Little Devil, Mr Wilkinson and the wonderful little Child of Promise Will go through a variety of New Feats of Horsemanship…. Mr Jackson the Black will ride on his head on a quart… and so on… could it be, could it be?
Sadly not, Pablo Fanques was not even born in 1789, but what a story this is! Marrett had hired a pioneer of what we now know as the circus: showmen Ben Handy and Phillip Astley. They had established the perfect performance space, a 13 metre ring. The circus ring. In this spacde an equestrian performer could stand upright on a cantering horse and perform acrobatic tricks without falling off. Handy had set up his own riding school in Bath and in 1796, his circus in Bristol. That circus site continued well into the nineteenth century and just to complete my diversion into the story of Pablo Fanques, Pablo was the last showman to operate on the site Handy had opened at the back of the Full Moon in Stokes Croft, Bristol. (Circomedia 2018). So, in a way, their stories do cross; but I have still to track down the enigmatic Mr Jackson the Black.
Benjamin Handy and a Catawba princess
For me, Handy’s two shows in November 1789 haunt the fields that the Forester estate was built on, an engraving for a playbill in the British Museum shows Handy with daughter, The Child of Promise, on his shoulders, performing on horse back (Bewick 1792). You can almost hear the shouts of the crowd and thunder of the hooves. It was nearly over in Bath for Marett by the time he booked Handy however, the repeated end of season note in the Bath Chronicle listing, Good fires in the rooms, adds an end of season sadness under the promises of the show. I imagine the old Villa slowly decaying and the memories of that short lived pleasure ground sinking into the soil. Let’s walk back towards Sydney Gardens, look above the porches of the houses on the right hand side and you will see relics of the demolished old house, slightly out of place dressed stone, a gargoyle, an urn. Like these stories of place and the stilled automata, we can activate them; lets walk slowly, look carefully and ask questions, see what moves.
I’ll finish with a bittersweet story of Ben Handy’s circus. Handy had taken his circus to the USA and had hired some indigenous Americans, members of the Catawba Nation, to join the troupe.The Catawba had sided with the British in the American War of Independence and finding themselves on the losing side were forcibly exiled. A year after setting up in Bristol many of Handy’s troupe including his wife, The Child of Promise (their daughter) and many of the performers and all their horses were drowned in a storm whilst crossing from Liverpool to Dublin. Handy had been on another ship. The Villa Gardens billing promises poignantly that …The Child of Promise will Dance a Hornpipe. Mr Handy challenges the whole World to produce another, 5 years old, to dance with her… He must have been devastated. It is recorded that he later remarried the wife of one of the drowned performers, the daughter of a Chief of the Catawba Nation.
Return to Sydney Gardens: tragedy and hope.
Turn right at the end of Forester Road and walk along to the junction where you can cross safely and re-enter Sydney Gardens. We began by the Roman Temple and the champion Catalpa Tree, Catalpa has often been mistransposed as Catawba so let us conclude here by that tree. The mistransposed name, the adopted surname Lascelles, and of course the name Sydney remind us of the stories names hold, conceal and sometimes aspire to, they connect us. Sydney Gardens is full of stories, walking and asking questions, becoming open to other ways of knowing, we may hear them. The gardens are a palimpsest of Empire and colonisation, the trees are grand and beautiful, the land has many voices and many ways. Colonisation extracted much and trashed the context injuring both colonised places and colonised people, today we all sense the consequences. For my part as a white European man I am reaching out in response and empathy, recognising that we must find ways of repair and justice. There is so much tragedy here personal and collective and I feel that Handy and the daughter of that Catawba Chief represent both the loss and its contemporary legacies. Coloniser and colonised, I hope their marriage was kind, equal and a success.
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