On the Anniversary of Turner's Death: A Giveaway

It's a week of anniversaries and art.  JMW Turner (1775-1851) died 160 years ago today.  "I never miss an accident" he once said, and true to his word, he was out on the night of the fire at Westminster in 1834. Armed with his two notebooks he spent hours absorbing the colour and drama of the scene, both on land and water.  I haven't been able to get all of his watercolour pictures of the fire into my book (one of them, and the two famous oils will be), but here are some wonderful reproductions of the rest from Tate Britain which houses the Turner bequest.  They are not on permanent public view at the gallery because that would damage them, but they can be studied in person on request.  In 2005 they were displayed alongside works by Monet and Whistler, and it is obvious the debt which those two other artists owe to England's greatest painter.

For more information on Turner's paintings of the 1834 disaster, I recommend the very interesting catalogue by Katherine Solender, Dreadful Fire! (Cleveland OH, 1984) produced for the 150th anniversary of the fire by the American gallery which holds one of the oils.   It's now out of print, but during my research, I managed by mistake to acquire two copies of this small but fascinating paperback from separate secondhand bookshops.  I have one in good condition to give away - if you'd like to win it, please follow this blog (if you're not already) and add a comment or two about Turner or these paintings, or both, by 31 December.  I'll choose a winner at random from contributions.

Albert and the Armada

At 11pm on 14 December 1861 at Windsor - 150 years ago today - Queen Victoria declared beside the sickbed of the Prince Consort, ‘Oh, yes, this is death!’.  Her husband of 21 years, was gone, aged only 42. For many years it was believed that Prince Albert (1819-1861) had died of typhoid, as written on the death certificate by the royal physician, Dr Jenner, but Victoria also believed that her husband had died from overwork and worry occasioned in part by the latest antics of their eldest son, the future Edward VII.  However, Albert had been aware of some sinister symptoms - probably stomach cancer - for at least four years before his death, which he kept from the Queen, and it was probably this, combined with pneumonia caused by being caught in a rainstorm returning from a confrontation with the Prince of Wales at Sandhurst, which actually killed him.

The last moments of HRH the Prince Consort (Wellcome Library)

Albert's awareness that something was seriously wrong with him accounts for his manic activity in the years before his death, and one of those activities included the Royal Commission on Fine Arts, a body he had been chairing since its formation in 1841. The Commission was responsible, among other things, for commissioning the fine art and sculpture for the new Palace of Westminster - much to the disgust of Charles Barry, its architect. At the time of Albert's death, one of its major projects remained unfinished: a replacement scheme for the Armada Tapestries, lost in the 1834 fire.


The intention of the Commission was that six panels in the Prince's Chamber of the new Palace should contain painted facsimiles of some of the lost tapestries but only one sample had been commissioned by 1861 (by the pre-Raphaelite, Richard Burchett), when Albert died.  With his impetus gone, and with the costs associated with building and fitting out the new Houses of Parliament rising alarmingly, the scheme was never finished, and the empty spaces were simply infilled with Pugin wallpaper.


The Prince's Chamber, with two of the empty panels
visible, wallpapered in red

Then in 2007, the American philanthropist Mark Pigott donated a sum to the House of Lords Collection Trust, to complete the scheme.  As a trustee, and head of the Parliamentary Archives, I was able to visit the artists' studio set up at Wrest Park, an English Heritage property (one of the few viable places where the creation of the massive canvases was possible) during the creation of the five remaining paintings.  It was a fantastic day, with curators, historians, publicists and funders all coming together to see the amazing work in progress led by Anthony Oakshett.

Monumental painting in progress at Wrest Park

Oakshett painting one of the five layers which comprise each artwork

Reconstructing the tapestries in paint, when the originals had been consumed by fire and the only source was some 18th century engravings, was a huge challenge as these articles in The Spectator and History Today explain.  The massive, finished, paintings were first put on display in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords over the summer of 2010 so all the detail could be seen close up by the public - including the fabulous dolphins and sea monsters with their silvery highlights. 



Installing the Paintings in the Royal Gallery for temporary viewing, Summer 2010

They were then installed high up in the Prince's Chamber next door where they look as if they they've been there ever since Albert's death, and in final - and fitting - fulfilment of his Commission's vision.

President Obama and the Lord Speaker, Baroness Hayman, under the
installed Armada Paintings in the Prince's Chamber, May 2011 (Parliamentary Copyright)

The Day Parliament Burned Down: Live!

Sunday 16 October 2011 is the 177th anniversary of the 1834 fire. Today I'm tweeting a 'live' feed of events from 1834 in real time on Twitter. I've prescheduled the tweets so I can watch as the come through: it will be fascinating to experience it myself in real time, rather than just writing about it. You can follow my feed even if you don't tweet yourself, by googling 'Dustshoveller' and 'Twitter'.  And next year, I hope, today will be the day The Day Parliament Burned Down is published.


If you've arrived here today as a result of seeing the story unfold on Twitter, you can find out more about the fire from the short 2009 BBC Parliament film on it here and here.

The Invisible Women

I've worked hard to get women into my book.  It's not been easy.  A day-conference I attended earlier this year run by the History of Parliament Trust contained a whole session on their problem of undertaking a decades-long academic enterprise which, by definition, had to concentrate on the biographies of MPs and Lords before the 20th century - all of the subjects being men. 

So, in The Day Parliament Burned Down there is Frances Rickman, a principal witness to the fire, with her mother, who lived in the Palace, who have left behind correspondence which can been researched.  Then there are grand women, like Queen Adelaide, and bohemian ones like the poet Letitia Landon, whose views on the fire were recorded.  But there are others too, who flit through the records and therefore the pages of my book, in shadowy fashion.  The Westminster pub landlady whose beer barrels were drunk dry on the night by those pumping the engines.  The nurses at the new Westminster Hospital.  The terrified doorkeepers' wives in the Palace who first discovered the fire.  The waitress at Bellamy's whose uniform was burnt. The ladies in the crowd who fainted in the crush, and those scrambling up to their ankles in mud on the shore of the Thames to get a better view. The prostitutes in the back streets of the Devil's Acre slum nearby.  And the women whose lives were changed forever when their husbands were killed or seriously injured due to the disaster.  I wish I knew more about them. I never will.

John Rickman, Census Man

22 August marks the 240th anniversary of the birth of John Rickman (b. 1771). Successively Speaker's Secretary and Clerk Assistant of the Commons, Rickman was a brilliant polymath: a proto-statistician, founder of the UK Census, reforming Parliamentary official and friend of Byron, Charles Lamb and Telford.  He is also a key figure in the story of the 1834 fire at Parliament.

This year has of course been census year in the UK: possibly the last one ever.  Amid all the publicity about it, few remember Rickman's original vision.  His interest was piqued by the contemporary debate about population growth and the causes of poverty.  In 1798 the political economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had published An Essay on the Principle of Population which sought to identify the causes of national prosperity and personal happiness by linking population trends with the availability of food.  The view at the turn of the 19th century was that the British population was falling, and Malthus considered this a harshly utilitarian inevitability:  a series of checks such as war, famine, delayed marriage, contraception and so on, would  (by a form of natural selection, though it was not called this at the time) lead ultimately to a more sustainable and content populace, less likely to revolt.  Rickman, however, believed that the population had continued to rise without ill effect, and created the Census to collect the necessary data to prove whether this hypothesis was true or not, and to aid the government in military recruitment and the continuing discussions over reform of the old Poor Law.  In fact he had first put forward his proposals in an essay written in 1796, two years before that of Malthus whose views he continued to oppose until his death.  The 1801 Census was passed by Act of Parliament after Rickman came to the attention of Speaker Abbott (and was subsequently his private secretary).  He continued his work on refining and testing out new questions in the 1811, 1821 and 1831 censuses, also back-projecting population trends for the 18th century based on parish registers, which turned out also to be pretty accurate by modern standards. 

© Parliamentary Works of Art Collection

But it is as a senior Parliamentary official (number two in the administration of the House of Commons) that he appears in Conflagration.  When fire broke out at the Palace of Westminster in the early evening of 16 October 1834, he was snoozing at home after a good dinner with some friends at his club, The Athenaeum. His account of the disaster, and those of his wife and feisty daughter Frances (on whom more in a later blog post), are some of the most thrilling eyewitness descriptions which survive, because the family watched the fire as it headed right towards them in their house in the Palace precincts as they frantically packed up all their belongings. Their letters and notes provide the backbone of several chapters in Conflagration. So what happens to them, their servants, their possessions and their lovely home? My lips are sealed until publication day...

The Looooooooooooong 18th Century

I recently enjoyed a little lunchtime flurry on Twitter after asking about when the "Long" 18th century ended, in people's opinion.  That's because Conflagration makes the case for 1834 as one of the possible dates when the 18th century comes to a halt for various reasons.  (In fact, I also argue that 1834 is the last gasp of various institutions and practices from the middle ages).

In his book Waterloo, Andrew Roberts describes the battle as the exclamation mark at the end of the century, but I think it's much later, even though traditionally 1815 is often the end of school and university courses in the UK.  Dates which Twitter correspondents came up with included 1820 (end of Regency), 1830 (death of George IV, revolutions), 1832 (Great Reform Act), 1837 (accession of Victoria), 1848 (more revolutions) and even 1850.  And working backwards, the eighteenth century might even begin in the 1660s (or even the 1640s!) for some.  In the USA, 1812 is seen as the end of pro-British aspirations.

The whole periodisation issue is a bit of a red herring anyway, and obviously artificial.  After all, we don't go around thinking we're living through the dying days of the long 20th century.  People today might be tempted to view 9/11/2001 as the "end" of the 20th century - but will it really be seen as that in 250 years' time? I doubt it.  In Europe we're still living through the fallout from the Cold War: the point is, to contemporaries of any time or place, right now and before right now is seamless.  So it's all relative.  But still fun to play around with - many thanks to all the tweeps who sent in their ideas!

Picture Perfect

Things are moving on quickly now.  I've signed three copies of the contract, and have filled in an author publicity form.  Now I have to choose pictures for the book and send a list to OUP before the end of the month, so they can start getting licences for those which I'm not getting from work.  Selecting them is difficult - there are at least a hundred I could use, but I have to get it down to 35.

In the end I decided the easiest way was to lay everything out on
the floor to see how they looked side by side...



On the Burning of Parliaments

I'm just back from Berlin where I was attending a conference run by the ECPRD - the association of European Parliamentary libraries. Usually I don't go to these events as they're not often about archival stuff; however, this year the theme was "Parliamentary history and its communication to the public" which was right up my street.

Anyway, working on Conflagration has raised lots of questions in my mind about what Parliamentary buildings are for - beyond housing their restless inhabitants. They can be symbols of democracy or tyranny; secrecy or openness; bureaucratic inertia or thrusting innovation; all these and more.  And when they burn down the symbolism is enormous, as are the decisions taken afterwards to replace them (or not).

Few Parliamentary buildings in the world can be more moving than the Reichstag in Berlin, which is where last week's conference was based.  The burning of the Reichstag in 1933 (staged as a "Communist" arson attack by the Nazis) ushered in Hitler's rise to power. It was never used by Hitler or his regime, and lay derelict throughout the war. It was then further damaged in the Allied bombing of Berlin in the last days of the war, its dome reduced to a phantom skeleton and its walls scrawled with graffiti by the Red Army who had captured it.

As if that wasn't enough of a metaphor of the abandonment of democracy, after 1945 the building was situated only just inside the British zone of occupation.  Subsequently, the Berlin Wall ran 7m from one of its flanks, placing it barely inside West Berlin.  Close to a bend in the River Spree, the opposite bank of the river was in East Berlin, and a considerable number of people were killed by DDR border guards trying to swim towards the Reichstag building and - therefore - freedom.  The West German government had decamped to Bonn but continued to use an undamaged part of the building for committee hearings (much to the annoyance of the DDR government).

On reunification, a massive project was launched to reinstate the Reichstag as the Parliament building of the Federal Republic of Germany.  The Bundestag (MPs) would meet there, and the Bundesrat (ministers representing the German Laender) would have seats in the chamber, even though their building was on Leipziger Strasse (and had been unused during the DDR era).  Just like the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament after 1834, entries from architects were anonymous.   First prize was won by Sir Norman Foster, the British Architect (in fact, the top three winning plans, unknown to the judges at the time, were from non-Germans - the others being a Spaniard and a Dutchman).  More symbolism: former enemies helping to rebuild its neighbour's shattered Parliament building.

Foster made the portico which had originally been intended  for the Kaiser into the main entrance for the public (it was never used by the Kaiser in an act of contempt).  The inscription Dem Deutschen Volke (To the German People) over its entrance says it all.  The design of the dome was finally agreed on after 27 attempts, and Foster himself was not keen on the idea of a dome at all, having originally designed a tent-like canopy over the whole building.  But despite his reluctance, it was built, and the dome has now become one of the major tourist attractions of the whole city, pulling in 2m people who walk round its spiral construction each year.

Just as striking, for me, were the buildings of the Parliamentary administration.  The Marie-Elisabeth Lueders Haus and the Paul Loebe Haus were both built in a deliberately concrete brutalist style redolent of the DDR.  It was intended as a way of never forgetting the past, but the difference is that these buildings are punched through with glass walls: for transparency in every respect.  The M-EL Haus is built right over the site of the former Berlin Wall itself and memorials to those who died crossing the river outside can be seen from its window.  To cross from there to the main Reichstag building you have to move from the former East to West Berlin via a footbridge.  The whole site is a memorial to Berlin's past, present and future Parliamentary history - immensely thoughtful, stimulating and moving.

Even the Soviet graffiti from 1945 on the interior walls
has been uncovered and restored: looking as fresh as the day it was written. 

Inside the Dome

The Man Who Saved Westminster Hall

Today is the 150th anniversary of the death of Superintendant James Braidwood. He was the man who saved Westminster Hall in the great fire of 1834 through the innovative firefighting techniques he had first developed when fire chief in Edinburgh.

His death was both tragic and horribly ironic. He died at the enormous Tooley Street warehouse fire in 1861, when he was buried under a falling wall - his body was retrieved only two days later. The iron firedoors which he had designed and recommended for all such premises had been left open, causing his death. If there was one other fire between 1666 and the Blitz which deserves the dubious accolade of being the 'greatest', beside the 1834 blaze, it was the Tooley Street conflagration. The Westminster fire was certainly the more significant, but Tooley Street was bigger and more prolonged: the tallow inside the warehouses melted, and set fire to the Thames for two weeks afterwards. A plaque marks the spot of the 1861 fire, today close to London Bridge station.

In 2008 a statue to Braidwood was finally erected on Parliament Square - but not the one in Westminster, the one off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. But perhaps his greatest memorial is Westminster Hall, still standing after 900 years, because of his efforts and those of his men.

Talking Titles

A yummy lunch today with Lady Antonia Fraser at the Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain. Tate sits on the site of the Millbank Penitentiary where Joshua Cross (one of the labourers who started the fire) did time.  And of course it houses the Turner watercolours of the 1834 fire, along with the rest of the Turner bequest, so all very evocative.


We talked about the old Palace of Westminster in relation to the Great Reform Act: that's to be the subject of her next book, entitled "The Perilous Question".  Should I rethink my title? Perhaps "The Day Parliament Burned Down" would be better? It certainly does what it says on the tin. It might be a better subtitle at any rate than "The Burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834". On the other hand, as my agent points out, "Conflagration" is nicely historical and has typographical possibilities for a strong cover.

The bottom line is: which option will sell the most books?

The Parish of St John's Smith Square

More strolling round Westminster of a lunchtime, on the way back from Pret (mine's a Hoisin Duck wrap, a mango pot and diet coke, since you're asking).  I like finding pockets of the borough which are pretty much as they would have been in 1834 (except for the cars) ...




First up, Lord North St, looking towards St John's, Smith Square. 

The St John's parish engine was one of the first on the scene of the fire.



Fancy railings outside well-to-do townhouse in
Lord North Street



St John's, Smith Square, famously known as "The Footstool"
because Queen Anne apocryphally kicked one over when asked

by the architect Thomas Archer what it should look like

(four towers at each corner sticking up in the air).  Nice restaurant, too!



More modest dwellings on Gayfere Street - I love the wonky
line of the windows and door frames of the terrace.



Looks respectable enough today: St Margaret's
Church, the next parish along from St John's.  But at
the time of the 1834 fire, this green lawn was a graveyard
and well-known cruising ground, where William Bankes MP
was caught with a soldier called Private Flowers



Kerb Crawling for History

Despite some strange looks, I've been studying the pavement outside the east end of Westminster Abbey recently.  We know that in 1834 there was a street plug (ie access to underground fire mains) in "Speaker's Corner", which was the name for the outside area between the apse of Henry VII's chapel and the Chapter House (as well as the better known area inside).  I'm wondering if the water main still flows along the same route and this manhole cover is the current day access to it - signalled by the yellow fire hydrant sign.  A tad nerdy maybe...?

Slumming it in Westminster

At lunchtime today, I walked down Old Pye Street, once one of the worst 'rookeries' in London.  Both Joshua Cross and Patrick Furlong, the labourers who started the 1834 fire, lived nearby.

Today the street is lined with Peabody Trust mansion blocks, built there in the late 19th century, when the "The Devil's Acre", as it was called, was cleared.  The Trust still provides social housing for Londoners in the heart of Westminster.

The Old Pye Street Estate buildings are red and black striped brick (above), while the nearby Orchard Street Estate round the corner (below left) is yellow and grey.  Above all, they are elegant and dignified.









The End of the Road

As a reward to myself I visited the London Fire Brigade Museum in Southwark today. I had tried to get on a tour two or three times previously but kept having to cancel due to pressure of work.  I really wanted to visit to do some picture research for the book.  Anyway, this time I made it, and saw some original fullsize historic fire engines.  None were exactly from the 1830s, but there were some models of the kind that would have been used at the Westminster fire - as below...

Horsedrawn engine.  Note seat for the driver at the front
and the tank on the back, with the concertina-ed levers tucked
in at the sides which would be straightened out at the scene
and then used to pump water through the tank by teams of volunteers

Here on a different model you can see the levers outstretched with
hoses piled on the top, and other kit such as ladders strapped to the sides

I also saw examples of the wooden water pipes that ran under the streets at the time (known as 'trunk mains' for obvious reasons).  The narrow end would slot into the thick end of the next trunk and then be tarred over to make it waterproof...

... and James Braidwood's battered epaulettes (with the LFEE monogram on them), which were removed from his uniform after he died at the Tooley St Warehouses fire in 1861.  Ghoulish but fascinating.

Vulgar Clatter and Clamour

Sent off chapters 7 to 10 today to my prospective agent, at the end of a day of leave.  Feel very pleased.  Also sailed over the 99,000 word mark with some last minute splicing in of new sources.  One of my favourite bits added today:

Contemporaries described the fire as (amongst other things), “fearfully imposing” and “the acme of sublime terror”.  Sometimes the effect was eerie, even chilling.  In the darkness, viewed from the white-stuccoed palazzi overlooking the trees across St James’ Park, “the many and monster-tongued flames…seemed to be moving and twisting, seeking fresh objects to involve in the ravening jaws of destruction.”  The moon turned blood-red as fire-charged smoke ran across its face.  The inhuman sounds of the wind and the flames were, “deeply awful, and seemed as distinct from the vulgar clatter and clamour of the mob, as do the solemn notes of the cathedral organ from the squeaking of the itinerant hurdy-gurdy”.

Firemen to the Rescue

Yesterday (Friday) I had a quick chat with some of the fire safety guys at the Houses of Parliament.  They are all ex-firemen so they really know their stuff.  I wanted to make sure I understood the technical details of the descriptions of the fire from contemporary newspapers and other sources I have been working on.  We discussed 6 or 7 extracts from the book which I had queries about.  Now I know much more about pyrolysis, flashover, the reasons why flames are different colours, and the melting points of different metals.  All fascinating.   Today (Saturday) I spent an hour in the Bodleian Library checking some references in various online databases of 19th century periodicals and newspapers - a real boon for researchers, and something it would have been impossible to cover twenty years ago.

James Braidwood, hero fireman of the

1834 disaster, photographed in much later life

Would You Read this Book?

Well, today's the day when things got serious: I sent off my prologue and first three chapters to a literary agent.  I won't say which one here, since I might not get anywhere and will then look a total fule.  But if I do, you'll be the first to know.  I should get a yay or nay before Christmas.

I also had to include a synopsis, ie 500 words, summarising the book (87,000 words).  It was incredibly difficult, but after much headscratching and at least six attempts, I was pleased with the end result.   Here it is, for your delectation:

Conflagration: The Burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834

A new government is in power at Westminster. Politicians are unpopular. Radical, reforming legislation is being passed. Government departments are being hit by cuts or being closed down, while on the streets people are concerned about threats of terrorism and police brutality towards protesters. The year is not 2010, but 1834 and the 800-year old Houses of Parliament are about to be destroyed by the most significant fire in London between 1666 and the Blitz.


When workmen begin burning a huge pile of tally sticks in the furnaces under the House of Lords' chamber at dawn on 16 October 1834, they set off a chain of events which changes the nation forever. Throughout the day there are increasing signals of danger, but no-one is inclined (or has the power) to intervene. A vast chimney fire explodes out of the building some twelve hours later, so enormous that it can be seen by the King at Windsor, and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs. No one who witnesses the fire ever forgets it.

In front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses including cabinet ministers, sweeps, soldiers, civil servants, poets, coalheavers, journalists, sailors, labourers, surgeons, waterboatmen, architects, clergymen, antiquarians and inventors, the blaze destroys Parliament's glorious old buildings and their contents. They include St Stephen's Chapel (the House of Commons) and its cloisters, the Lesser Hall (the House of Lords) and its Armada Tapestries, and the Painted Chamber, once one of the sights of medieval Europe. Westminster Hall is saved only through monumental effort and a lucky change of wind direction. Amazingly, no-one is killed, but many are injured and the historic losses - which include the records of the House of Commons - are devastating. While some people are ruined by the fire, just as many thrive from it.

The blaze is finally brought under control at three in the morning, though it continues to burn for days afterwards. It has a huge impact on contemporary politics, government, culture and the popular imagination. Two great Turner paintings, Dickens' early work, a Public Record Office for the United Kingdom, the first Metropolitan Fire Brigade and, of course, a new Houses of Parliament all rise from the ashes. Yet today, this national catastrophe is a forgotten disaster, not least because Barry and Pugin's monumental new Palace of Westminster has obliterated all memory of its predecessor.

This book is an attempt to redress that balance, tracking the fire, its causes and consequences, hour by hour, over the course of a day and a night. In the process, its political and social context is revealed, including details of the slums of Westminster and the frenzied expansion of the West End; the plight of the London Irish; child labour, sinecures and corruption in high places; firefighting techniques and floating engines; the Great Reform Act and the new Poor Law; Captain Swing and arson at York Minster; the cruising grounds of gay London; the parlous state of public buildings and records in the Georgian period; and above all the symbolism which many contemporaries saw in the spectacular fall of a national icon.

What did the fire look like?

I was really interested to see this BBC video of the fire at Hastings pier, East Sussex, which burnt down last night.  I think it gives an insight into what the 1834 fire may have looked like from the south bank of the Thames: reflections in the water, sparks falling off the sides, and afterwards a great cloud of smoke rising from the smouldering ruins.

Me (and others) nattering about the Fire on the BBC - Part 2

Me (and others) nattering about the Fire on the BBC - Part 1