When Barking was a fishing port; the Hewett family, St Margaret's Churchyard and Rippleside Cemetery, Barking

This simple chest tomb covers the Hewett vault in St Margaret's churchyard

It is almost impossible to imagine today but for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Barking was the most important fishing port in England. On a High Street now dominated by McDonalds and Dixie Fried Chicken, Poundland and Paddy Power back in the 1860’s ‘there were six sail makers, five mast, pump and block makers, five shipwrights and boat builders and four rope and line makers…. four marine store dealers, four slopsellers and two ships chandlers, as well as makers of specialized products such as ship’s biscuit, sea boots, kegs, casks and nets. A former inhabitant reminisced “how fragrant Heath Street and Fisher Street smelt of tar and pitch, how well the stores were supplied with sou’westers, oilskins, big-boots, guernseys, red caps, hawsers, ropes and twine.”’ (Richard Tames “Barking Past.”)   The fishing industry has been around the area since the middle ages and by 1724 Daniel Defoe described Barking as a large market town but one now dominated by fishing and “chiefly inhabited by fishermen, whose smacks ride in the Thames at the mouth of the river Roding, from whence it (fish) is sent up to London to the market at Billingsgate, by smaller boats.” The industry reached its apogee under the Hewett family whose Short Blue fleet became the largest private fishing fleet in the world.

The Hewett tomb inscription

Scrymgeour Hewett

The fishing dynasty started when the Scot Scrymgeour Hewett came to Barking (which he said was the prettiest village he had ever seen) and married a local girl, Sarah Whennel, at West Ham in 1797. Scrymgeour’s father, a doctor, had died when he was 8 and his mother brought him and five of his siblings to London. Before showing up in Barking he had spent several years in the West Indies where presumably he learned to sail. His father in law owned two fishing boats and soon Scymgeour was buying his own vessels, the first of which was the Liberty’s Increase, shortly followed by the Fleming, Matchless and Fifeshire. At the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars Scrymgeour obtained himself letters of marque to sail as a privateer with crews of local bruisers who were more than happy to exchange hauling nets for licensed theft against the French. When Scrymgeour returned home from his spell of officially sanctioned piracy he found his second son Samuel had run away to sea. Scrymgeour brought him back and put him to work as an apprentice on the still growing Short Blue fleet. Within five years Samuel was mastering his own vessel and by the time he was 25 his father had effectively turned over the running of the fleet to him. Samuel turned out to be almost a genius in matters of business. By 1850 the fleet numbered 220 vessels directly employing 1370 men.  The transformation of the business was accomplished by the introduction of two simple

Samuel Hewett

innovations that with hindsight seem almost banally obvious. The first related to the wicker creels in which the catch was transported back to market. Traditionally these were round ended baskets called peds which were not calculated to make the best use of the storage capacity of the fishing boats. Samuel Hewett altered the shape to a simple box and at a stroke increased the carrying capacity of his smacks by up to 30%.  His second innovation was to reduce the amount of time his smacks spent in sailing back to port to deliver the catches. He organised his fleet into two classes of smack. The fishing smacks stayed out on the open sea, sometimes for weeks at a time, hauling sole out of the newly discovered Great Silver Pits on the North Sea. Smaller faster vessels shuttled between the smacks out in the fishing grounds and Barking and Billingsgate taking 18 tons of ice, food and supplies out to the men on the boat and bringing back 40 ton catches of fish.

In 1862 Samuel took the decision to relocate his fleet to Gorleston in Norfolk. The arrival of the east coast railway gave the resourceful entrepreneur a cheaper and quicker method of getting his fish to market in London and he wasted no time taking advantage of the opportunity.  His employees and competitors were quick to follow him either to Gorleston or to Grimsby and Barking’s days as the premier fishing port of England were effectively over. The family connections with Barking however remained as strong as their links to fishing.

Samuel Hewett in old age

Samuel Hewett died at Great Yarmouth in 1871 but he was buried in his father’s vault in St Margaret’s Churchyard. The business was taken over by his son Robert who had inherited his father’s ambition but not his innovative flair. He certainly had ideas but these never quite came off and the business began to struggle. In 1882 he told a House of Commons Select Committee that the Short Blue Fleet totalled around 200 ships, including 82 trawlers, and that the average annual value of the catch was £180,000. 570 men were employed at sea and 107 ashore. In 1885 Samuel opened the Shadwell Fish Market on what is now the site of the King Edward Memorial Park. The market was not a financial success. Other business ventures of Robert’s included an ice plant at the Shadwell Market site and an engineering, boiler making and shipbuilding works at Fisher Street. On Friday 6 January 1899 at 3.00pm there was a massive explosion at the Fisher Street works which killed 11 people and wounded many more. A boiler in the works had been over pressurised according to a later Board of Trade enquiry and had exploded hurling iron plating and pipes for hundreds of yards, bringing down a tall chimney down onto the workshops and wrecking the whole factory. The injuries were horrendous; “Those of the dead whose bodies were taken to the Barking Town Hall Mortuary had been so frightfully maimed as to be in several instances scarcely recognisable. One poor fellow had lost an arm and a leg, another had both legs torn away, and a third was found with the upper part of the head blown off.” The enquiry into the cause of the accident blamed the factory owners and as a result their insurers refused to pay out leaving the Hewett’s responsible for the compensation claims of the dead and injured. The damages added to the losses at Shadwell left the family no option but to sell off almost everything including the ships that made up the Short Blue Fleet.

The devastation caused by the Barking Explosion of 1899

Robert Hewett

Robert Hewett is buried in Rippleside Cemetery on the outskirts of Barking. The pink granite monument has a still gleaming ships anchor and chain. Buried with Robert are his wife and his son Robert Muirhead who took over the helm of the much reduced family business from his father. He was a gold medallist ice skater and a passionate roller skater.  His eldest son, also buried in Rippleside, was Captain Roy Scott Hewett who took his first trawler trip to Iceland in 1897 when he was 11. He inherited his father’s love of skating and became British Amateur Figure Skating Champion in 1911, 1912 and 1914 and also Figure Skating Champion of Great Britain in the English style, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926 and 1927.

For more information on the Hewetts and the Short Blue Fleet see the excellent Short Blue Fleet website 

The Hewett grave in Rippleside Cemetery

Baldassare Viscardini (1830-1896), Freedom Fighter and Cabinet Maker, New Southgate Cemetery

Photo of Baldassare at the time of his Italian war
from Anglo-Italian Family History Society

Baldassare Viscardini was born in Mondello a village in the Como district of Lombardy in Northern Italy. By the time of the 1851 census he was living with his brother and father in Brick Lane, Spitalfields all three listing their occupations as Looking Glass Frame Makers.  When he married at St Dunstans in the West in 1857 he had left the east End and was living in the city, at Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street. His bride was a 19 year old English girl, Rose Hannah Martin, the daughter of John Martin a carpenter. The couple seem to have had no children. Just two years after the wedding Baldassare left his bride and went to fight in the 1859 second War of Italian Independence. The complex and confusing political situation of the time meant that an assassination attempt by an Italian Nationalist on the French Emperor resulted in an alliance between France and the Italian Kingdom of Sardinia against the Austrians (who held territory in Baldassare’s birthplace of Lombardy and Venetia). The Italians provoked the Austrians into an attack and the French army went to the aid of the Italians. The campaign was relatively short; war was declared in at the end of April though fighting did not start until 20 May and by 11 July the French and Austrian Emperors were signing a peace deal at Villafranca.  Baldassare’s career as a freedom would have been short but glorious.

Photo of Baldassare's Viscardini's grave taken by Iain MacFarlaine from
findagrave.com. The picturesque ivy growth has now been completely removed



In 1867, almost ten years to the day from his first wedding, Baldassare remarried at St Andrew’s, Holborn. He was now living in Kirby Street, just off Hatton Garden, and was a widower, his first wife apparently having died in her twenties. His new bride was Eliza Sheppard, 20 years his junior and the daughter of a bootmaker of Gray’s Inn Road.   The couple went on to have 7 children, Florence, Amelia, Baldassare Junior, Bimbina, Giacomo. John and Beatrice. Baldassare changed occupations to wood carver and then cabinet maker and became successful enough to open his own business first at 49 and then at 54 Gough Street, WC1 in a shop that still stands (although it now seems to be a private residence). In his later years Baldassare moved to 15 West View, an address alternatively given as being in Islington or Highgate but which I can’t trace. It was here that he died on 20 September 1898 leaving an estate worth £2461 5s 2d to his widow. 

Life masks of the surrealists; Paul (1891-1973) & Hilde Hamann (1898-1987), New Southgate Cemetery

It is unusual to see such an unashamedly erotic nude in a cemetery – such blatant disregard for the proprieties can only mean that the grave belongs to a foreigner, and not just any foreigner, but an artist. Paul Hamann was born in Hamburg in 1891 and studied at the local Arts & Crafts School and in Paris with Rodin. He served in the First World War, returning afterwards to Hamburg where he was prominent in local artistic circles. In the 30’s he left Germany to escape the Nazi’s, initially in Paris where he lived for three years at the Cit矇 Fleurie artists colony, and then later in London. He set up a studio and a private art school in Hampstead in 1938 and became a member of the Hampstead Artists Council.  Before the outbreak of World War II he became a founder member of the Free German League of Culture, helping to organise shows at the New Burlington Gallery of the work of German, Austrian and Czech artists persecuted by the Nazis. His credentials as an anti Nazi campaigner did not prevent him being interned as a potentially hostile alien in the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man in 1940. He spent a year there before being released. He later became a British Citizen.

Paul Hamann taking a life mask of Man Ray (1930)



Hilde photographed in the 70's

Paul married Hilde Guttmann in the early 1920’s. Hilde was born in the city of Breslau in Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland) in 1898 to a well to do mercantile family with Jewish roots. She met Paul when she was a student of his at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts. In 1924 she stayed in Paris for six months where she studied at the studio of Fernand L矇ger. In Germany she painted but in England after the war she became more interested in ceramics and then later in enamels. Her own artistic career took a back seat to her husbands, for many years she worked as his assistant. Whilst Paul was interned she became the principle breadwinner. When he was released it seems the marriage broke down though the couple continued to work professionally together.

An example of Hilde's painting from the 1920's.

Paul Hamann is principally remembered now for his technique of creating life masks. In the 1930’s,  according to the catalogue of an exhibition of his work at the Warren Gallery, he “perfected a substance with which life-masks can be taken subtly and painlessly. His preparation looks like tomato soup and smells faintly of vanilla. … It is the gentlest, kindliest, most coaxing process imaginable. .. And the result, as you observe, is magnificent…. All this will be achieved by you and Herr Hamann if you consent to sit patiently in a chair for forty minutes.” His preparation was so good for the skin that Elizabeth Arden tried to get hold of the formula. Hamann’s life masks were immensely popular in Germany, France and London. Bertolt Brecht had one made and then had himself photographed holding it.

Bertolt Brecht with Hamann's mask

 

In England Hamann’s sitters included Lady Ottoline Morrell, Raymond Mortimer, Noel Coward and Raymond Mortimer.  In Paris the surrealists were enthusiastic; Paul Eluard got Andre Breton interested in death masks and both of them indulged their obsession by having Hamann make life masks for them. After Breton’s death amongst his unpublished papers was an encomium he had written on Hamann and his technique called “Le Masque du jour”. Hamann also made a mask for Man Ray and was photographed in the process of applying his tomato and vanilla mixture to the American’s face. Man Ray loved this life mask so much that he used it in several photographs including the one used as the cover for his book “Photographs 1924-1930 Paris.”

The cover of “Photographs 1924-1930 Paris” with Hamann's mask at top right 

Was Hilde the model? She choose this sculpture to adorn Paul's tomb.

“The case is altered,” quoth Plowden; Edmund Plowden (1518-1585), Temple Church, EC4

Edmund Plowden was a lawyer, legal scholar and author of a famous collection of legal commentaries. He was born in Shropshire and studied law at Cambridge, the Middle Temple and Oxford but was also admitted to practice chirurgery and physic. Under Queen Mary he was appointed as one of the Council of the Marches and became MP for Wallingford, Reading and Wootton Bassett.  Plowden remained a life-long Catholic which hampered his career on the accession of Elizabeth. At one time the Queen was supposed to have offered him the Lord Chancellorship on condition that he swore allegiance to the Church of England but this he refused to do.  Despite being a known recusant (the sheriff and magistrates of Berkshire required him to give a bond for good behaviour and appear before the privy council for refusing to attend divine service) and a defender of persecuted Catholics (he was one of the three defenders of Bishop Bonner) he was allowed to continue writing and practicing law. He died in 1585. His memorial is a splendid example of Tudor funerary art.

“The case is altered,” quoth Plowden was a 17th century English proverb. According to John Ray’s “Compleat Collection of English Proverbs” (1737) the occasion of the expression was either when a neighbour of Plowden’s asked his opinion on what remedy there was in law against someone who let his hogs trespass on his grounds.  Plowden told him he might have a good remedy but when the neighbour confessed that the hogs in question belonged to Plowden himself he responded “Nay then neighbour (quoth he) the case is altered.” Or says Ray, it arose during a court case when Plowden was defending a gentlemen against the charge of attending a mass. The gentlemen had been entrapped by malicious neighbours who dressed up a layman in priest’s vestments solely with the intention of denouncing him to the authorities.  Cross examining the supposed priest “saith Plowden to him, art thou a priest  then? The fellow replied, no. Why then Gentlemen (quoth he) the case is altered: No priest, no mass.” 

My Lord Archbishop a wencher? Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), Minster of St John the Baptist, Croydon

“Among other discourse, my cozen Roger told us a thing certain, that the Archbishop of Canterbury; that now is, do keep a wench, and that he is as very a wencher as can be; and tells us it is a thing publickly known that Sir Charles Sidley had got away one of the Archbishop’s wenches from him, and the Archbishop sent to him to let him know that she was his kinswoman, and did wonder that he would offer any dishonour to one related to him. To which Sir Charles Sidley is said to answer, “A pox take his Grace! pray tell his Grace that I believe he finds himself too old, and is afraid that I should outdo him among his girls, and spoil his trade.” But he makes no more of doubt to say that the Archbishop is a wencher, and known to be so, which is one of the most astonishing things that I have heard of.”   Samuel Pepys “Diary Monday 29 July 1667.”

Pepy’s cozen Roger was always good for a bit of scurrilous gossip. He was not particularly scrupulous about his sources though and his stories were often slanderous and sometimes just plainly ridiculous.  Gilbert Sheldon, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was the subject here of cozen Roger’s gossip, appears to have lived a fairly blameless life and, far from being a ‘wencher’, was so uninterested in women that he never even married.  

Sheldon was born in Staffordshire in 1598 and was educated at Oxford. He became involved in the church and politics, was a Royal Chaplain to Charles I and was well known as a prominent Royalist in the run up to the Civil War. During the Protectorate he lost his church livings and survived on the generosity of friends and supporters until the Restoration in 1660 when Charles II made him Bishop of London. He became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1663 and Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1667.  He opposed Charles II’s proposed Declaration of Indulgence which sought to extend religious freedom to Catholics and it is said he once refused to give the King communion because of his majesty’s libertine lifestyle. He was one of Christopher Wren’s earliest architectural patrons – Sheldon commissioned and paid for the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford and chose Wren as the architect. He died in 1677 and is buried in the Minster of St John the Baptist in Croydon.

Sheldon’s spectacular funeral monument is by Jaspar Latham (died 1693) a master mason who worked with Christopher Wren. Only four funerary monuments by him are known but the other are not in the same class as this one. The reclining figure of the bishop was once set against a grand architectural backdrop decorated with putti and garlands but this was destroyed in the church fire of 1867. Miraculously the bishop survived along with the chest tomb decorated with a relief panel of skulls and bones and winged hourglasses.  

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford

Latham worked with Sir Christopher Wren as a mason contractor on the rebuilding of St Mildred Poultry and on St Paul’s Cathedral for which, in the 1680’s he received almost £10,000 in regular payments for masonry and carved ornaments. He fell out with Sir Christopher in 1689 when he was working for Wren at Hampton Court and part of the building works he was responsible for as mason collapsed killing two workmen and injuring 11 others.  The comptroller of works William Talman tried to blame Wren for the accident and Latham joined him. The furious architect dispensed immediately with the mason’s services at both Hampton Court and St Pauls and objected ‘against Mr Latham for a madman.’

Gilbert Sheldon’s ghost is supposed to have haunted the church following the fire of 1867 which destroyed his monument. He was generally seen moping sorrowfully around the nave at “about a quarter to six in the evening.” He kept this up until 1960 when the monument was restored and has not been seen since. 

Dr Lutherburgo Humbugo, healer of housebreakers - Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), St Nicholas Churchyard, Chiswick

In the churchyard of St Nicholas in Chiswick the artist, stage designer, inventor, mason, mystic, faith healer and kabbalist Philippe De Loutherbourg lies buried with his second wife Lucy, once reputed to be the most beautiful woman in England. Their striking chest tomb was designed by Sir John Soane and is now grade II listed. The west facing inscription for de Loutherbourg himself has been obliterated by weathering but the east facing inscription to Lucy is still clearly legible.

Philippe de Loutherbourg was born in 1740, the son of the court painter of Darmstadt in Germany. His father had ambitions for him to become an engineer and his mother a Lutheran minister and he was educated, in Strasbourg, with a future in the church in mind. But his parent’s dreams of respectability were to be thwarted by a wayward streak in their son that would never allow him to settle into bourgeois respectability (despite his love of money).  Philippe wanted to follow his father into the arts and badgered his family into moving to Paris to allow him to study painting. In France the family lost what little control they had over the young Philippe who became, in his own words, “a freethinker and a hothead.” The 21 year old took up with an older but beautiful widow, Barbe Burlat who drew him into a reckless adventure to fleece a married, retired Captain of the East India Company, Antoine de Meyrac.   The ageing but besotted Meyrac agreed to pay Barbe 600 livres to become his mistress. Further gifts, jewellery, expensive wines, luxurious carpets, silk stockings, followed but the promised consummation of the affair failed to materialise. When the furious and frustrated Meyrac refused to part with any more cash Philippe threw him out of Barbe’s house and barred his way back in with a drawn sword. Just a few days later Philippe himself married Barbe. The couple’s outrageous behaviour   became notorious and started to threaten the glorious strides Philippe was making in his artistic career.

Philippe in his 30's.

His first exhibited painting had drawn praise from no less a figure than Denis Diderot. The encyclopaedist did much to promote Philippe’s career although his praise was never totally unqualified and he did not approve of the young artist’s relationship with Barbe or his pronounced mercenary streak. The Meyrac scandal did not stop Philippe being elected to the Acad矇mie Royale but Barbe herself finished his Parisian career when she filed for a writ of separation of her property from his alleging he had used up her dowry and then sold her house to finance his gambling, had run up huge debts, had slept with numerous whores and servants and had physically abused, once so severely as to cause a miscarriage. Philippe did not hang around to answer these charges; he simply helped himself to his wife’s remaining jewellery and fled to London to start a new life, leaving the heavily pregnant Barbe and their four children behind.  

Within a year of his arrival in London Philippe was exhibiting his paintings at the Royal Academy. A friend introduced him to David Garrick who, immediately impressed by this imposing foreigner, took him on as the chief stage designer at Drury Lane at a salary of £500 a year. His productions transformed the English stage, setting new standards of illusion, exchanging a single, often crudely daubed, stationary backdrop for moveable painted flat and drop scenes with integrated scenery, perspective and lighting effects. He took a restlessly experimental approach to his work in the theatre culminating first with a pantomime ‘The Wonders of Derbyshire’ in 1779 which realistically represented the scenery of the Peak District on stage and then, in 1781 when he had left Drury Lane for good after quarrelling with Garrick’s successor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, with his invention of the Eidophusikon.

The Eidophusikon

In February 1781  Philippe held the opening night of the Eidophusikon at  his new house in Lisle Street, Leicester Square.  This was a novel entertainment in which, according to contemporary newspaper accounts “various imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by moving pictures,” were recreated upon a small stage:

“ Here, for a fee of five shillings, around 130 fashionable spectators sat in comfort to watch a series of moving scenes projected within a giant peephole aperture, eight feet by six feet. The darkened auditorium combined with skilful use of concealed and concentrated light sources, coloured silk filters, clockwork automata, winding backscreens and illuminated transparencies created a uniquely illusionist environment.[18] Audiences watched five landscapes in action. Dawn crept over the Thames at Greenwich; the noonday sun scorched the port of Tangier; a crimson sunset flushed over the Bay of Naples; a tropical moon rose over the wine-dark waters of the Mediterranean; and a torrential storm wrecked a ship somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Between scenes, painted transparencies served as curtain drops, and Mr and Mrs Michael Arne entertained the audience with violin music and song.” (Iain McCalman “The Virtual Infernal.”)

One visitor to Lisle Street was the 21 year William Beckford.  In December 1781 he was planning a spectacular 3 day Christmas party for which, on the strength of the theatrical sets and  the Eidophusikon, he commissioned de Loutherbourg to supply the illusions that would transport him and his guests from an English midwinter in an 18th century Palladian mansion in Wiltshire to a magical oriental fantasy world. Beckford wrote to his 34 year old mistress Louisa, (who was married to his cousin) urging him to come to “Fonthill, where every preparation is going forwards that our much admired ….. Loutherbourg …. in all the wildness of his fervid imagination can suggest or contrive – to give our favourite apartments the strangeness and novelty of a fairy world. This very morning he sets forth with his attendant genii, and swears…that in less than three weeks…[to] present a mysterious something that the eye has not seen or heart of man conceived (his own hallowed words) purposely for our own special delight and recreation.”

The young William Beckford

There are no detailed descriptions of the Christmas spectacular created by de Loutherbourg, but Beckford was pleased with the result. “I seem even at this long distance,” he later wrote “ to be warmed by the genial artificial light that Loutherbourg had created throughout the whole of what appeared a necromantic region, or rather, one of those fairy realms where K[ing]s’ daughters were held in thrall by a powerful Magician – one of those temples deep below the earth set apart for tremendous mysteries…at every stage of this enchanted palace tables were swung out covered with delicious consummations and tempting dishes, masked by the fragrance of a bright mass of flowers, the heliotrope, the basil and the rose – even the splendour of the gilded roof was often masked by the vapour of wood aloes ascending in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the floor in salvers and jars of Japan. The glowing haze, the mystic look, the endless intricacy of the vaulted labyrinth produced an effect so bewildering that it became impossible for anyone to define exactly where at the moment he was wandering…It was the realization of a romance in all its fervours, in all its extravagance. The delirium in which our young fervid bosoms were cast by such a combination of seductive influences may be conceived but too easily.”

Beckford’s most favoured guest at these Christmas revels was the thirteen year old Viscount William Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon, with whom he was besotted. Louisa unashamedly helped her young lover seduce the even younger ‘Kitty’ Courtenay. Beckford later fondly reminisced (calling him ‘she’ in apparently timeless high camp fashion) “does she love to talk of the hour when, seizing her delicate hand, I led her, bounding like a kid to my chamber?” The scandalous affair remained secret for a further 3 years but in 1784 Beckford’s letters to Kitty were intercepted by the boy’s uncle who advertised them in the newspapers and forced Beckford to flee the country for several years of self-imposed exile while the resulting contretemps died down.  The most immediate and enduring effect of de Loutherbourg’s three day Christmas fantasia was to inspire Beckford to compose one of English literature's minor masterpieces,  his oriental fantasy ‘Vathek; An Arabian Tale.’

The second Mrs de Loutherbourg, Lucy Paget 

Guiseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro

In 1773 de Loutherbourg met Lucy Corson (nee Paget) a beautiful young widow (at 28 she was 5 years younger than him) from Kingswinford in Staffordshire. Although he appears never to have been divorced from Barbe he married Lucy at St Marylebone Church in May the following year. His bride was considered by some to be the most beautiful woman in England. Despite her money the marriage seems to have been a love match; the couple lived together until de Loutherbourg’s death in 1812 and were buried together when Lucy died in 1828. Lucy seems to have shared her husband’s interest in all aspects of the occult from mesmerism to the kabbalah. In 1787 the pair both fell under the sway of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo who was paying a second visit to London under his better known alias of Count Cagliostro. The two were both Masons and it is probable the brotherhood brought them together. The London visit was a difficult one for Cagliostro and he departed unexpectedly in May for Switzerland leaving his wife Seraphina behind in the care of the de Loutherbourgs. Once the Count was settled in Switzerland  he sent for Seraphina and Philippe and Lucy accompanied her after being promised a programme of physical rejuvenation that would restore them to the physical and sexual prowess of their youth. In the Swiss town of Bienne where the de Loutherbourg’s moved in with the Cagliostro’s there were immediately problems between the two couples. The promised programme of rejuvenation was slow to start and there was no sign of a loan made by de Loutherbourg to Cagliostro in London being repaid. Adding to these tensions Philippe developed a ‘leering interest’ in Seraphina (who did not reciprocate, being much more interested in her husbands young secretary) and Lucy appears to have contracted a unreciprocated passion for Cagliostro himself. The two husbands eventually quarrelled and the de Loutherbourg’s moved out. Philippe immediately launched a court case for the return of the 170 louis he had loaned Cagliostro. As tensions increased Philippe challenged Cagliostro to a duel who responded sarcastically that he only fought with arsenic. Philippe armed himself with pistols, powder and ball and went around the town telling everyone that the moment he set eyes on the Count he was going to shoot him like a dog. Cagliostro demanded protection from the authorities but when it wasn’t forthcoming quickly enough he began accusing the mayor of Bienne of being in league with de Loutherbourg to destroy and the townspeople of being mean and treacherous. The pair finally parted on the worst possible terms and de Loutherbourg sought belated revenge in a pair of satirical caricatures of the Count.
 

Philippe and Lucy de Loutherbourg by John Hoppner

In 1788 the de Loutherbourg’s returned to London and Philippe shocked the artisitic establishment by announcing that he was abandoning painting to dedicate himself to mystical pursuits including the study of the kabbalah and working as a faith healer with Lucy from their house in Hammersmith Terrace. The pair claimed that by means of the  influxes that, according to Swedenborg, flow from Heaven to Earth  they could affect miraculous cures. The poor were admitted to the de Loutherbourg’s clinic by free ticket; Mary Pratt, an admirer of the couple, wrote a pamphlet A List of a Few Cures performed by Mr and Mrs De Loutherbourg, of Hammersmith Terrace, without Medicine in which she  claimed that 2000 people had been cured by them in just a few months "having been made proper recipients to receive divine manuductions". Eventually the numbers trying to gain admission to the clinic were so high that riots broke out amongst those waiting to be cured and the de Loutherbourg’s had to abandon their attempts to heal the London mob. He returned to art and confined his mystical pursuits to a more sedate circle of friends and acquaintances.

Philippe died on 11 March 1812 and Lucy on 28 September 1828. 

Further reading

Almost all the information in this post has been drawn from the fascinating work of Professor Iain McCalman of the University of Sydney:

"The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro."

"Mystagogues of revolution: Cagliostro, de Loutherbourg and Romantic London." 

"The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime."  
            

The man who launched the Great Railway Bazaar - James Joseph Berkley (1819-1862), Camberwell Old Cemetery

Berkley's monument in Camberwell Old Cemetery was paid for by public subscription

James John Berkley, born in Holloway in 1819 and dead in Sydenham at the age of 42 spent the best part of a decade in India building the first 20 miles of India’s celebrated railway network from Bombay to Tanna. He was most celebrated for the impressive feat of taking the railway into the Western Ghats but was dead before the first section of line was officially opened in 1863. Berkley trained and worked with eminent engineers such as George Bidder and George Stephenson both of whom recommended him for the job of Chief Resident engineer with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. Ill health drove him back to England and an early death.

Berkley's railway over the Bhore Ghat incline

He left behind a young widow and five children; his youngest daughter was born posthumously.  At the Annual meeting of the shareholders of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway held at the London Tavern in  October 1862 Sir William Tite MP addressed his colleagues on the loss of their Chief Engineer he “was anxious to make a recommendation, that an acknowledgment should be made of their appreciation of Mr. Berkley’s services, that gentleman's death being, as he believed, mainly attributable to the influence of the Indian climate while engaged in carrying out the works on their line The directors proposed to erect a stone tablet to Mr. Berkley’s memory on the Bhore Ghat incline, hut he thought t it would be only just that they should make some provision for Mr. Berkley’s five young children. Mr. Berkley had insured his life, but he had not lived long enough to make adequate provision for those dependent upon him, and he proposed that the meeting should authorise the board to pay over to Mr. Berkley’s executors 1000/. for the benefit of his family.”

Berkley’s son, James Eustace, also became a railway engineer. In 1896 newspapers reported scandalous details of his divorce. The jury granted the wronged husband £1500 damages from Captain Hawkes but the plaintiff gallantly agreed not to enforce if Hawkes married the divorced Mrs Berkley:

DIVORCE SUIT. £1,500 DAMAGES. Divorce Division Thursday

James Eustace Berkley, railway engineer, living in India, obtained a decree nisi, and costs, in an undefended divorce suit, in which Captain Hawkes who was formerly stationed at Secunderabad, where petitioner and his wife resided. In 1894 respondent came to England on a visit to her mother. Co-respondent also visited England at the same time, and Mrs. Berkley wrote to her husband stating that she had met Captain Hawkes, with whom they had become acquainted in Secunderabad, and that she had been out fishing with him in his yacht. Subsequently she wrote stating that she had misconducted herself with Hawkes. By consent the jury awarded the petitioner £1,500 damages, but Mr. Berkley agreed not to enforce payment, provided Captain Hawkes carried out his intention of marrying the respondent within six months.



Berkley's portrait on his funeral monument