Teapots to Break Up the Daily Routine

Are you sticking to a routine at the moment? I’m trying to; I think it helps me to cope with all this uncertainty. 10:30am is tea break time, though I don’t drink tea (I don’t like it, the only time I have it is when I’m offered it at someone’s house and have to accept for the sake of good manners) but I do like all the paraphernalia around it. I love teacups and saucers, tea caddies and milk jugs and in particular I love teapots. It might be the Bedfordian in me, afternoon tea was invented in the county (Anna Russell, the 7th Duchess of Bedford started the trend) so maybe it’s been brewed into my DNA.

We have lots of beautiful teapots in the collection. Most were collected by Cecil Higgins himself from private house sales, auctions and antiques dealers. My favourite from his collection is the monkey teapot. The lid is the top of the apple and tea would pour out of the baby monkey’s gaping mouth. 

Porcelain teapot by Meissen, c.1735

When I give tours of the decorative art collections at The Higgins Bedford I always point it out and usually compare it to another animal shaped teapot in the same case. This time it is in the shape of a squirrel holding a nut and I show it as an example of how varied Cecil Higgins’ collecting was. That he wasn’t just choosing to buy the most expensive pieces he was buying to tell the full story of porcelain and ceramics.

Staffordshire salt glaze teapot, c.1740

My other favourite teapot is from 1882. Cecil Higgins like many of his generation felt that taste died with George IV so the later items in the collection come from different sources. This one was bought in the 1980s.

Teapot modelled by James Hadley for Worcester, 1882

The teapot is double sided, the hat acts as a lid and the tea comes out underneath the raised hand. It’s very clever and very beautiful but it’s also a bit mean. It deliberately mocks the followers of the Aesthetic movement whose supposed crimes included a love of velvet clothes and an over fondness for poetry, blue and white china and sunflowers. The followers were popular figures of satire, Punch magazine regularly printed parodying cartoons and Gilbert and Sullivan produced a comic opera, Patience, on which the characters on this teapot are based. The mocking tone continues on the base where there is an inscription that reads ‘Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and evolution of living up to one’s Teapot’. This is aimed at the most famous aesthete of them all, Oscar Wilde, who famously said ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Maybe there is reason to be thankful for having to work from home after all, no beautiful china to have to compare myself with.

Written by Victoria Partridge, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art

The Old Warden Mirror

Date: Iron Age. 50 BCE-50 CE

 BEDFM 11720

One of my favourite items in the Settlement Gallery at The Higgins Bedford is an Iron Age mirror discovered at Old Warden in the 1850’s by workmen digging a railway tunnel. The mirror is made of bronze and has a very elaborate swirling design on the non-reflective side created by skillfully etching the design into the surface. In the Iron Age, metal mirrors were rare personal objects and would probably have been treasured items belonging to wealthy individuals, they may even have been passed down as heirlooms.

The mirror has recently returned from loan to a prestigious exhibition in Zurich. The highly acclaimed Museum Rietberg Zurich recently borrowed the Old Warden mirror for their 2019 summer exhibition: “Mirrors-the Reflected Self”. In the beginning when the mirror was away on loan it felt very strange to think that our mirror was on display in another museum, but as I became more comfortable with the situation, I began to feel pleased that the mirror was contributing to something big and different.  Since the mirror’s return, I often stop by the case to admire it; it is like seeing an old friend.

Written by Liz Pieksma, Keeper of Archaeology

Bedfordshire's Breweries - Whitbread Brewery

Samuel Whitbread was born in 1720 at Cardington. At 14 he was sent to London to become an apprentice to a brewer, John Witman. Samuel then went into partnership with Godfrey and Thomas Shewell and by 1750, they started operating a shared brewery site on Chiswell Street. Samuel Whitbread created the first purpose-built mass-production brewery in the UK and over the following years, Whitbread became a household name.  In 1765 Whitbread bought Shewell out and by 1800 the brewery was the largest in London. Samuel Whitbread was a pioneer of new brewing techniques and in 1784 installed the first ever steam engine, designed by famous engineer, James Watt.

Samuel Whitbread II (1758-1815) by John Opie Fp.71

Building on his success with the brewing business, Samuel Whitbread decided to enter politics, and was elected as a Member of Parliament for Bedford in 1768, a seat he held until 1790. The year before his death in 1796, Samuel Whitbread bought Southill Park, a 17th century house, remodelled by George Byng, 1st Viscount Torrington.

Ashtray advertising Whitbread’s Brewery company, Chrystal Collection, BEDFM 2008.42.58

Samuel Whitbread's son, another Samuel (1758-1815), is probably the most well-known member of the family. He was born in Cardington and entered the family brewing business in 1786. In 1787 King George III and Queen Charlotte paid a visit to Chiswell street and according to the newspapers of the day, the King was ‘wonderfully pleased’ with the innovative steam engine.

W H Allens Sports and Social Club Darts championship trophy presented by Whitbread and Co. Ltd, BEDFM 2011.6.22

Samuel entered parliament as member for Bedford, his father's old seat, in 1790. Whereas his father had been a Tory, Samuel junior was a Whig.  A zealous reformer Whitbread campaigned for the abolition of slavery and for a national system of education. He was the leader of the Whig party, the opposition, in parliament after the death of Charles James Fox in 1805. He made the mistake of championing Napoleon's reforms in France and came to be seen as a supporter. During 1814 Whitbread began to suffer depression, which sadly led to his suicide, on 6 June 1815, just twelve days before the battle of Waterloo.

The Whitbread family still live at Southhill Park and continued in the brewing business until it was sold in 2000.

Written by Lydia Saul, Keeper of Social History 

You can read more of our Bedfordshire Breweries series here.

Making COVID-19 History

The Higgins Bedford would like for you to share your experiences of life during the outbreak.

Are you keeping a journal, taking photographs of your daily exercise, posting to social media? Are you running a local business to support local people day to day, or creating a rainbow artwork for your front windows?  Have you volunteered to be part of a community initiative to support those self-isolating or our key workers? Are you a key worker facing the busiest time of your working life?

We are all in the midst of it now, but one day this pandemic will be history. The full impact of the COVID-19 crisis will be important to document and evaluate for future generations looking back at this historic event.

The Higgins Bedford and Bedfordshire Archives would like to recognise all the varied and different contributions that are specific to our local area during this crisis, to be a repository for those stories and items for future generations as a tribute and record of life during the crisis.

Courtesy of Chiara MacCall @CallChiara

Each day of lockdown Chiara is using her daily exercise walk to reach out to someone in Bedford. By arrangement she walks past their house, waves from a distance and takes a photo. It’s not a hug or a handshake, but it’s a safe way of staying connected with people and reminding each other we are not alone.

If you have a story, photographs, video, poetry, letters, journals, artworks, objects or other contributions related to your own response to the COVID-19 crisis you would like to tell us about and potentially offer as a donation following the end of the crisis, please email Lydia Saul, Keeper of Social History at The Higgins Bedford at Lydia.Saul@bedford.gov.uk for further information.

Your suggestions and offers will be placed onto our potential list of COVID-19 collection items. The Higgins Bedford and Bedfordshire Archives will consider them for acquisition into the collections following the end of the COVID-19 crisis and they will get in touch with you for further information. 

Edward Bawden and the Co-Working Cat

Like many of you, I am adapting to life with cat co-workers. Edgar B Partridge and Dulcibella Mopsa have been used to having a quiet house during the week but now they have their 8 year old human sister full time and have also taken on new job roles. Depending on what side of the kitchen table they choose to be on they are either Assistant Keepers or School Cats (providing a welcome head to stroke during the trials of home schooling). So far they seem to be very good at their new roles. 

They also give me exercise by meowing to come inside the house several times a day and as long as they have a chair to sit on and the occasional treat they are quite self-contained. I think Edward Bawden’s cats must have been similar, I can’t imagine he was able to create the huge body of work he left to The Higgins Bedford with a cat that jumped on his lino blocks or yowled constantly for attention.  

Cats appear in so much of his work. Amongst my favourites are the watercolours he made of Emma Nelson, his beautiful black rescue cat who he depicts in different rooms of his home in Saffron Walden. Sadly we don’t have any in the collection but we do have a depiction of one of Emma’s predecessors from Boxing Day, 1981. She can be seen, in the perfect spot for a cat on a cold day, in front of the gas stove, which Bawden has added wheels, a funnel and a cloud of smoke to turn it into a locomotive for the entertainment of his family.

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) Decoration for my Studio on the Occasion of a Boxing Day given to the Family by the Artist. 1981 © The Edward Bawden Estate

In his advertising work, his cats are far more active and mischievous. For Fortnum and Mason's Christmas Catalogue, they drink and dance the night away at cocktail parties. However it’s the illustrations for Christmas card for The Twentieth Century which are my favourite, as the cats are at their most playful. They chase their food around the sitting room, play ‘blind cat’s buff’ with a fish and even play tunes on the the violin!

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) Fortnum and Mason’s Christmas Catalogue, 1956 © The Edward Bawden Estate

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) Christmas card for The Twentieth Century, 1958 © The Edward Bawden Estate

The Twentieth Century was a monthly literary and political journal. As well as Christmas cards, Bawden designed most of the front covers between 1955 and 1961.

Written by Victoria Partridge, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art

Photographing Artefacts on Glass

The archaeological objects on display in The Higgins’ galleries form only one part of the work we do.

Behind the scenes we are carrying on with our programme of collections management work on objects in the store. We monitor their condition, check their details in the database and where necessary photograph the artefacts.

Objects placed on a surface, even when lit appropriately, cast a shadow which shows in photographs, but we were recently introduced to a technique by a visiting researcher who instead placed artefacts on a sheet of raised glass and illuminated them from the sides. Although a shadow is still cast, because the glass is raised the shadow is thrown to the side and the object appears to float.

So, we have since been experimenting with two LED floodlights (the sort used for security lighting), a sheet of glass, and an improvised arrangement of boxes to position things upon, similar to this picture. The lights are easily re-positioned, raised or lowered, or even one switched off, to bring the best out of each artefact.

It’s early days and our methods are still evolving but we have obtained some very pleasing results using this technique. By using a raking light surface detail can be picked out that might otherwise not show and the background can easily be changed if desired by sliding different coloured card underneath, but we quickly found that using black shows every speck of dust on the glass really well! We tend to use a mid-grey background for most things.

The technique works best with single items otherwise the shadow from one object tends to be thrown under another, and this arrangement doesn’t support large artefacts, so it’s horses for courses, but it’s still a useful technique to have in the studio.

As we were processing boxes of artefacts from the Near East at the time that we learned of the technique we immediately tried it on some of the collection’s cuneiform tablets. The raking light brings out the details well on this example which has collection accession number BEDFM 564. Visible are the wedge-shaped writing made by a stylus and also the impressions made by a cylinder seal. Note also the lack of shadow around the tablet. 

Cuneiform writing was invented in Mesopotamia in around 3200 BCE and evolved over the next three thousand years and was used to write in several languages. We hope one day to be able to submit photographs of our cuneiform tablets for translation as we’d love to know more about when and where they were made, what they say, and in which languages.

Written by Keith Balmer, Collections Volunteer

Bedfordshire's Breweries - Charles Wells Brewery

Charles Wells was born in Bedford in 1842. When he left the Commercial School (now Bedford Modern School) at the age of 14, he was determined to join the Navy. In 1856 he joined the “Devonshire” as a midshipman and sailed from London to India. He was rapidly promoted to Chief Officer by 1868 and served on three ships.

BEDFM 2003.243, Portrait photograph of Charles Wells

All of this changed when he was on leave and fell in love with Josephine Grimbly in 1870. Her father approved of the match, but he did not want Charles to marry his daughter whilst serving in the Merchant Navy. He felt it was too dangerous and Charles would be away from home too often. Having left the Navy, Charles married Josephine in 1872. In December 1875 the Horne Lane Brewery was put up for sale at auction and sold for £16,000 to Charles. The Horne Lane Brewery was situated alongside the river Ouse with wharves, where malt and hops could be unloaded and beer dispatched.

(Left) BEDFM 2008.42.250, Charles Wells bottle with starfish design, Chrystal Collection
(Right) BEDFM 2006.328, Charles Wells model toy vehicle, c.1993

Charles threw himself wholeheartedly into the business and was successful. His early beer bottles carried the starfish design, chosen by him because of his love for the sea and the naval career he had given up to marry Josephine, and pursue his new business venture. In 1881 he bought 9 pubs for £4,486 and by 1889 he had paid off his loan. In 1890 the brewery owned 80 pubs and traded 12,552 barrels per year. Charles’ personal fortune amounted to £120,000.

BEDFM 2008.42.385, Commemorative Plate celebrating 

100 years of brewing for Charles Wells, 1876 – 1976, 

Chrystal Collection

Charles was in poor health for several years while running the business with help from his sons. He died on 18th April 1914, survived by Josephine, 5 sons and 3 daughters. He is buried in Foster Hill Cemetery, Bedford. His obituary in the Bedfordshire Times stated; "All who knew Mr. Wells, whether in business or private life, regarded him as one of the straightest men that ever breathed. There was about him all the brusqueness, candour and honesty of the British manner".

Written by Lydia Saul, Keeper of Social History

You can read more of our Bedfordshire Breweries series here.

Edward Bawden's Imagined Gardens

At last the sun is out, and I feel incredibly lucky that I can enjoy it safely distanced in my own garden. As parks and gardens become even more precious to all of us, I thought I would write about Edward Bawden’s love of them. Grand parks, small back yards, plants and flowers are the subject of much of his work, in fact there maybe even more horticultural references than there are cats.

Every day he would spend an hour in his own Great Bardfield garden before starting work upstairs in his attic studio. It could be a dangerous hobby, the top joint of his index finger had to be removed after he caught it on a rose and it turned septic. It didn’t slow him down; he was starting to write legibly whilst still in the hospital. My favourite Bawden gardening story though is from the Chelsea Flower Show, to which he apparently advised prospective visitors to take an umbrella and secateurs for covert clipping!

For this blog, as so many of us are without access to a garden, I thought I would share a couple of Bawden’s imaginary gardens from the 1920s. The first is from when he was a student at the Royal College of Art in 1924, ‘Francis Bacon’s Garden’. He was asked to contribute to a book on imagined architecture and although the book was never published, Harold Curwen at The Curwen Press editioned Bawden’s work as a lithograph. The print is based on Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Gardens’ from 1625 and follows the text closely, condensing the 30 acres Bacon suggests for a perfect garden into miniature, populated by lords and ladies promenading and the occasional gardener at work. Bacon’s banqueting house is there in the centre, so are the side gardens with their shaded alleys, plenty of fruit trees and at the bottom honeysuckle and sweet briar selected by Bacon for their ‘delightful’ scent.

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) Francis Bacon’s Garden, 1924  © The Edward Bawden Estate

An equally formal garden is the ‘King’s Garden’ from ‘The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins’ by Robert Paltock. Published in 1928 Paltocks book is similar in plot to Daniel Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’, the major difference being the inclusion of Glumms and Gawreys; flying humanoid creatures who inhabit the island on which the hero Peter is stranded. 

Edward Bawden (1903-1989) The King’s Garden, 1928 © The Edward Bawden Estate
Illustration in ‘The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins’ by Robert Paltock

Again, this time I imagine much to his own dismay, Bawden followed the author’s description. Paltock’s gardens don’t have flowers but are instead a court of sculptures. ‘These gardens are in perfect architectural accord with the house they adjoin; nor do the changing seasons play havoc with their beauty’. Just behind this plant-less garden, however, there is a touch of greenery which I like to think was of Bawden’s own invention.

Written by Victoria Partridge, Keeper of Fine and Decorative Art

Bedfordshire’s Breweries - The Higgins & Sons Brewery

Charles Higgins and his family moved to Bedford in the 1820s. He was proprietor of the Swan hotel and founded the brewery on land owned by the Duke of Bedford at Castle Lane. The brewery was built 1838 and Charles built the Higgins family home next to it in 1842. The family business was very successful and they were influential figures in the town for over a hundred years.

Bradford Rudge (1813-1885) Bedford Times Coach © The Higgins Bedford Collection. Charles Higgins standing in the door way to The Swan Inn in the red slippers.

As well as founding the brewery, Charles Higgins (c.1789-1862) was a successful Liberal politician and Mayor of Bedford. During his tenure as Mayor he was presented with a silver salver (now on display in the Mayor's Parlour) commemorating the ‘zeal, ability and humanity extended by him’ during the cholera epidemic of 1849. Following Charles Higgins' lead, the Higgins family remained devoted to Bedford life. George Higgins (1816-1883), Cecil's father, was a Justice of the Peace, a member of the Town Council and a Trustee of the Harpur Charity. Lawrence (1849-1930), Cecil's brother, was also a Justice of the Peace, and Cecil (1856-1941) was a local magistrate for many years.

(Left) Higgins Brewery c.1895 (Right) Plan of brewery site and Higgins family home at Castle Close

Charles Higgins’ son, George, ran the brewery in partnership with Charles and then passed the baton to his second son Lawrence. Cecil, the youngest of the family, moved to London and enjoyed the high life, visiting the opera, gallivanting around in his Rolls Royce, and collecting decorative pieces of furniture for his home. The brewery and house buildings were bought from the Duke of Bedford by Lawrence and Cecil in 1908 for £13,250.

(Left) Photograph of Cecil Higgins © The Higgins Bedford Collection (Right) Higgins and Sons Ltd bottle, BMG.25

The brewery was very successful and the brothers bought over 40 local pubs, including The Case is Altered at Ravensden and the Cat and Custard Pot at Shelton. Eventually Lawrence retired from the operational side of the business and Cecil was given responsibility for the brewery. It remained in the Higgins family for over 90 years until brewing ceased on 5 October 1928 when Cecil Higgins, then over seventy, decided to sell. In 1931 competitors Wells & Winch Ltd. of Biggleswade bought the brewery for £180,000 and promptly closed it down.

Lantern Slide of The Case is Altered, Ravensden, Walter N Henman, 1939, BEDFM 1974.27.599

After the sale, Cecil devoted his later life to collecting fine and decorative art with the aim of founding a museum ‘for the benefit, interest and education of the inhabitants of, and visitors to Bedford’. Cecil Higgins Art Gallery opened in 1949 in the Higgins family home. The brewery became Bennett’s Clothing factory for a time and during the Second World War factory workers made shirts for the military. Later the buildings became a postal sorting office. When this closed in the 1960s the building fell into disrepair and was nominated for refurbishment by the Bedford Borough Council so that Bedford Museum could move into the former Higgins & Sons Brewery building in 1981, housing the Bedford Modern School collection. The brewery and house opened as The Higgins Bedford in 2013 following refurbishment and extension of the buildings as one complete site.

Written by Lydia Saul, Keeper of Social History

You can read more of our Bedfordshire Breweries series here.