By Ellen O'Brien - “PhD student, book lover and tea addict, I spend my days researching and writing, with help from my bunny George. History is not quite so visible in Australia as in England… but it's there if you know where to look!”
Studying history can be a lot like late-night-procrasti-searching through the labyrinthine corridors of Wikipedia… you start with something fairly innocuous– a country house servant and a silver vase, for example– but one clue leads to another, and before you know it, you’re so far down the rabbit hole, you need a small crane and a search and rescue team to bring you back up.
Studying history can be a lot like late-night-procrasti-searching through the labyrinthine corridors of Wikipedia… you start with something fairly innocuous– a country house servant and a silver vase, for example– but one clue leads to another, and before you know it, you’re so far down the rabbit hole, you need a small crane and a search and rescue team to bring you back up.
This has been my experience with a recent fragment of
country house history– a relatively small part of the interminable PhD effort–
one that keeps drawing me back, and each time, revealing something new. This
fragment was initially the subject of a small conference paper on the relationship
between servants and objects in the Victorian country house, and, unable to let
me go, has morphed into a full-length article on objects as sites of memory,
and the vagaries of servant memoirs.
Let me show you the fragment, as it first appeared to
me.
What Gorst
might have looked like, polishing the silver and how Gorst might have looked, in
his footman’s livery).
In his memoir, Of
Carriages and Kings, Victorian servant Frederick Gorst recounts a little of
his time at Court Hey, the country house of Richard and Walter Gladstone,
nephews of the four-times prime minister, William Gladstone. Gorst was especially
reflective, for a footman, often impressed by a sense of ‘handling history,’
and, in the course of his duties, of being ‘allowed to glimpse, to touch for a
moment, the lustrous past.’[1]
Surviving
photograph of Court Hey, which was demolished in 1956.
One day, while cleaning the unused family silver that sat
tarnishing in the vault, one item caught his eye. It was ‘an exquisite silver and
gold vase about three feet tall… a copy of the famous Warwick vase,’ and had
been ‘a legacy of Mr. Robertson Gladstone to his sons.’[2] (Gorst’s employers).
What the Gladstone Vase might have
looked like. (This is actually a set of wine coolers in the same design, that
was owned by the family).
Mr.
Robertson, as the story goes, had been given the vase as a thank you present
from the merchants of Liverpool, in ‘recognition of his munificent and timely
gift’ of money to the starving workers and mill hands in the city. Why were they starving? The year was
1833, and slavery had just been abolished. There was now no sugar coming into the
once-busy port, and ‘thousands of workers were idle and starving.’[3] However, the apparent
generosity of Robertson Gladstone is clouded by one rather uncomfortable fact:
his fortune came from the Gladstone family sugar plantations in Demerara… and
the slaves who were forced to work there.
1835 Abolitionist poster
The
Gladstone family’s opposition to slavery was a source of some consternation to
Gorst, who offers a strangely misleading account of their involvement in the
matter. This deception has been the focus of my enquiry, but first, I
investigated the vase, and its many historical connections and reincarnations.
It
is an interesting case of an object possessing manifold cultural associations: the
vase was not just a symbol of Britain’s participation in slavery, but is an
exact replica of the Warwick Vase, which is linked to key figures of the late
eighteenth century, and Britain’s diplomatic and classical past.
Dated
to the 2nd century AD, the original Warwick vase was discovered by a
Scottish painter, Gavin Hamilton, in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli,
and sold to Sir William Hamilton, a British diplomat. Sir William was an
obsessive classicist who amassed large collections of vases, and, in the
tradition of the ‘Grand Tour’, smuggled many back to England, despite an embargo
on exporting antiquities (cough, Elgin marbles, cough).
Engraving of the ‘famous Warwick
Vase.’
It
is faintly ironic that the most famous of Hamilton’s vases bears the name of another
collector. Having attempted, and failed, to sell it, Hamilton passed the job
onto his nephew, Charles Greville, who was the younger son of the old Earl of
Warwick (Hamilton’s brother-in-law). Greville made valiant, repeated attempts
to carry off the deal, but he was not successful, and in the end, he sold it to
his older brother, the Earl of Warwick, after whom it has been called ever
since.
The Grevillea: named after Charles
Greville.
Charles Greville is an interesting character (not
least because the native Australian ‘grevillea’ plant was named after him-
trust me, it’s exciting if you like gardening…). However, his rather more
spectacular claim to fame comes through his mistress, a young woman called Emma
Hart. Greville, who needed to find and marry a wealthy heiress, palmed Emma off
on Hamilton, who took her to Naples as his mistress, and eventually married her
there, after a five-year relationship. It was during their time in Naples that
Lady Emma Hamilton (sound familiar yet?) met Lord Nelson, and the rest, as they
say, was history.
Emma
and Nelson: Britain’s favourite Napoleonic romance.
‘Take
Lord Nelson with one limb,
Lady
William Hamilton she fell for him,
With
one eye and one arm gone west,
She
ran like the devil and she grabbed the rest.
If
women like that like men like those,
Why
don’t women like me?’
(George
Formby)
.
And
so, we circle back to Frederick Gorst, and his silver vase. It is possible to
see how a single piece of silver, locked away in a cupboard, polished by a
pensive footman at the end of the Victorian era, can take us right back through
some of the more significant events of the preceding century. We have an object
that is invested with historical meaning, that is linked to one of Queen
Victoria’s prime-ministers, the Gladstone family’s role in the abolition (and
support) of slavery, to England’s presence in the Mediterranean at the end of
the eighteenth century, to their infamous habit of acquiring antiquities, and Britain’s
favourite, Napoleonic romance.
At
a quick scroll through, the flow of images in this post seem entirely
disconnected– but they are not. They highlight the fact that, whenever you read
about history, you will find moments of interconnectedness, association, and
those wonderful flashes of ‘Well I never…’ Of course, if you’re feeling worn
out and fed up with serious research, you can always do the same thing on
Wikipedia for an hour or three… I highly recommend it.
