A Thing in Disguise

The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton (Text Only)

Kate Colquhoun

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007439881
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Biographies historiques

PART 1

EARTH

CHAPTER ONE

Milton Bryant is a small and pretty rural village some 50 miles from London, raised slightly above the Bedfordshire plain, modestly protected from change now, as it most certainly was in the early 1800s, by its position on the edge of the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Estate. At that time the village formed part of the collected farms of the Woburn Estate, containing a manor house as well as a public house, a collection of cottages and gravel pits, a village pond and a Saxon church. Half a mile away is the site of a now vanished mansion, Battlesden Park, and a further 2 miles away is the market town of Woburn and its abbey.

On 17 May 1810, aged 50, Joseph Paxton’s father William, a farm labourer, was buried there three months before Paxton’s seventh birthday. The boy’s family were now poorer than ever. Later in life, when he was wealthy and enjoying a fine dinner, he is said to have remarked, ‘you never know how much nourishment there is in a turnip until you have had to live on it’.

There are few documents relating to the early years of Paxton’s life. It has been suggested that his father was a tenant farmer, rather than a labourer – the disparity in incomes of the two positions was not slight – but his name does not appear in any of the rent books for the Woburn Estates, nor is there any mention of him in the land tax records for the area. William may have farmed his brother’s land or he may have laboured at Battlesden Park, where two of his sons subsequently became bailiffs. Whether he farmed or laboured, he worked on land in a county famed for market gardening, where smallholders cropped wheat, barley and some oats.

Joseph Paxton had been born on 3 August 1803, the seventh son and last of the nine children of William and Anne, who had moved to the village by the time their fourth child was baptised. His parents had been married for about 22 years, and both were in their early forties. By 1803, their eldest child – also William – was twenty and soon to be married and it is likely that five or six of the other children still lived at home. They were John (16 when Paxton was born), Henry (14), James (11), Thomas (9), Mary Ann (7) and Sarah (about 3) – all packed into a small labourer’s cottage.

It was an auspicious year for a future gardener to be born. In 1803 the Liverpool Botanical Gardens opened and the Horticultural Society was conceived; Joseph Banks sent William Kerr to collect plants in China and Humphry Repton was about to publish his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. In the wider context of their lives, England stood on the threshold of great political and social upheaval. On the one hand, the French Revolution of 1789 had heralded democracy; on the other, Georgian aristocracy were still pursuing their lives of privilege. The demand for universal suffrage would grow in fervour right up to and beyond the First Reform Act of 1832, but now the transition from a feudal and agricultural order to a democratic and industrial society was just beginning.

From the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century, towns had been growing as labourers moved from the land to work in ‘manufactories’ with their new power looms, the spinning jenny and, by the latter part of the century, steam power. Demand for new textiles and manufactured products was stimulated by the wars that had raged for years with France and by 1815 many of these factories had become great mills. Later, the demand for iron products for roads, bridges and railways would accelerate the migration as people packed into industrial towns like Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sheffield, swelling them by an average of 50 per cent. The population of England doubled between 1801 and 1850.

By the time Paxton’s father died, the distress of agricultural and factory workers alike was growing. The Luddite riots of 1811–12, where the workers’ anger was directed not so much at the machines as at the bosses who refused to negotiate with them over pay and conditions, erupted and the perpetrators were, for the most part, deported to Australia. As veterans returned from the French war in 1815, post-war depression and its consequent poverty set in. Crucially, cheap wheat imports were banned by the new Corn Law – a measure which maintained the high price of bread and the increasingly dismal lot of the labourer. By 1816, the price of bread had risen sixteenfold over fifty years.

In the countryside these radical changes were less obvious, though its economic structure was changing, too. The French wars had raised the cost of food and in 1803 many potato crops failed. So there were more people and less food, a distress compounded by the enclosure system, which had begun at the end of the previous century, and which meant that labourers were no longer able to use common land to grow vegetables, forage for firewood or graze animals. Wages were not increased to compensate for the loss of these auxiliary resources – so that, earning only seven or eight shillings a week, most labouring families were subsisting on a diet of tea, potatoes, some cheese and bread. Yet the pace, if not the quality, of life in the country was still broadly as it had been for centuries. Nothing travelled faster than a galloping horse and rural life followed the traditional agricultural calendar of Valentine’s Day, May Day, Summer Harvest, the village feast, hiring-fairs at Michaelmas, Guy Fawkes, late-November seeding and Christmas. Only rarely did events of national importance punctuate their rhythm: in 1814, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, there was mass celebration in Woburn, where houses were decorated with oak boughs and flowers and there was street feasting.

There are several differing reports of Paxton’s schooling. Given the death of his father and the consequent poverty of his family, it is fairly extraordinary that he made it to school at all. Education did not become a requirement by law until as late as 1880; farmers generally opposed the few free schools available, preferring their children to work in the fields for a few pennies, and conservative opinion considered popular education dangerous and undesirable. Some churches introduced Sunday Schools since this was often a child’s only free day, but weekday teaching for the working classes was rare.

There was no school in Milton Bryant until 1853, but there was a free school for boys at Woburn, started by the 1st Duke of Bedford. In 1808 it was rebuilt, reorganised and run on a voluntary subscription. According to a report in 1818, it was ‘large, of stone, three storey in height, containing two large classrooms besides many other apartments’. Working-class schools like this functioned on the pretty disastrous monitor system in which apprentice teachers passed on, by rote, what they may have rather ineffectually learned themselves, while one master supervised the entire school. Few working-class children had more than two or three years of desultory education, and few could do more than write their names.

There are no records of pupils at the Woburn school but it seems likely that Paxton attended, however intermittently, making the long walk from his village twice a day, since he could certainly read and write proficiently by the time he joined the Horticultural Society in London in 1823. In 1808, the Duke of Bedford reported to his friend the Liberal peer Samuel Whitbread that there were 104 boys enrolled there, of whom about 80 attended regularly; the hours were 9 a.m. to midday and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The school was divided into eight classes run by monitors and assistants, with one supervising master; the first class of boys were taught the alphabet by printing on a sand desk, repeated twelve times in a day, and the second class – in which the boys were streamed according to ability – wrote their alphabet on slates and learned words and syllables as well as spelling from cards. In subsequent years the boys learned arithmetic and were allowed to write in copy books once they had mastered joined writing; the monitors read from the Scriptures, while the boys sat in silence with their hands on their laps, and in the afternoon, Isaac Watts’ hymns were sung.

Paxton’s first job in a garden was about to be offered. The 6th Duke of Bedford was one of the most important patrons of horticulture (the science of the culture of plants). His garden was his great love and had become a centre for innovation and experimental gardening. Designed by Repton – the most fashionable landscape designer of his day, who worked widely in Bedfordshire between 1804–9 – the Duke’s garden had begun to receive some of the botanic treasures being introduced by collectors from around the world. More significantly for Paxton, in 1808 the immensely rich and possibly insane^* Sir Gregory Osborne Page Turner also employed Repton to lay out his gardens at Battlesden Park. The elaborate series of watercolours of the completed garden which he commissioned from George Shepherd shows iron conservatories, luxuriant flower gardens and great groups of trees.

Paxton’s eldest brother, William, had become the bailiff and superintendent of the estates at Battlesden Park on a salary of £100 a year. In 1816, when his youngest brother was fifteen, William took on two leases there. The first, in March, was for 28 acres of meadow or pasture at a cost of £65 a year and included an understanding that he would take on a servant and a horse at his own expense, but keep all rents and profits generated on the land. The second, in December, formed an agreement to rent the entire garden ground for four years at a cost of £16 16s. This comprised ‘four pieces of garden ground used as kitchen garden, fruit garden, old orchard and nursery, pond garden and house garden’, about two and a half acres in total. Also a cottage, ‘but not the pleasure garden nor the hot houses or plants and ponds thereon’. The fruit garden alone was enormous: filled with peach, nectarine, apricot, damson, cherry, plum, pear and apple trees as well as raspberries, currants and gooseberries.

The running of Battlesden had become something of a Paxton family business. His brother, Thomas, now ran the home farm at Potsgrove (part of the Battlesden Estate); he leased land from Sir Gregory as well as acting as his land agent, successfully occupying 415 acres and employing 21 labourers. Paxton probably went to live and work with William as a gardening boy at Battlesden from around the date of these leases when he would have been fifteen or sixteen. In gardens filled with fruit trees, flowers and, since there were hothouses, presumably exotic and tender plants as well, he was first introduced to the wonders of botany and horticulture and began to learn the rudiments of his trade. Paxton’s granddaughter, Violet Markham, suggests that William treated him very severely and he ran away to Essex where he was taken in by a Quaker, who encouraged him to return to Battlesden. It is impossible to substantiate this story, though it is clear that later in life Paxton, far from hating William, remained fond of his much older brother, taking time out of hectic schedules to visit him and his family.

Aged fifteen, Paxton left his brother in order to work at the estate of Woodhall near Walton in Hertfordshire. The house had been bought by Samuel Smith in 1801 and Paxton was to work there under the charge of William Griffin. He was lucky. Here was an eighteenth-century park and woodland, with new gardens lately built around the house, run by an ardent horticulturist and reputed fruiterer. Griffin was the author of a treatise on the ‘Culture of the Pine Apple’ as well as a paper on the management of grapes in vineries; he was a part of the coalescing horticultural establishment and his name appears in 1824 among the first subscribers to the new Horticultural Society Gardens at Chiswick. A professional with a reputation for giving thorough and kindly instruction to the young men who worked with him, it is entirely possible that Griffin filled Paxton’s head with stories of the new society in London and that he encouraged the boy to think of a time when he might apply to them for a position in one of their gardens.

After an apprenticeship of about three years, the young Paxton was attracted back to Battlesden Park and the gardens, where he found himself in charge of the excavation of a large lake called the New Fish Pond. Great amounts of earth would have been removed by hand and in wheelbarrows, relying largely on observation and reasoning rather than any engineering calculus. By 1823 Sir Gregory was already showing signs of the insanity into which he would soon collapse, and was declared bankrupt with liabilities of over £100,000 – the entire contents of his house would be sold at auction by Christie’s the following year. Paxton had witnessed the sort of upper-class profligacy that would later find its echo in his patron, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. The house and gardens at Battlesden have not survived, but this new fish pond, with its island, bulrushes and the company of swans, can still be found today, surrounded only by fields. Its construction provided Paxton with experience he would later call upon as he undertook huge earthworks at Chatsworth.

On 14 April 1823, aged 62, Paxton’s mother died and was buried in the village church at Milton Bryant. One month later Paxton’s uncle Thomas followed her. Paxton’s thoughts turned to London and the chance of advancement through the profession of gardening. He was almost 20 and, with the incarceration of the lunatic Sir Gregory, he was out of a job. Some records suggest that he obtained work first in the gardens at Wimbledon House, leased by the Duke of Somerset, and it is certain that his brother James was a gardener there. Perhaps it was here that sibling disaffection raised its head. Many years later the Duke of Devonshire wrote to his gardener that it would take only one word from Paxton to secure James a position as gardener and bailiff to Lady Dover, yet the Duke imagined that Paxton would not like to recommend his brother.

It has also been suggested that at around this point Paxton went to work in the gardens of the famous nurserymen Messrs Lee and Kennedy in London, though there are no records to support this. Whatever the case, by November 1823 Paxton had turned his attention to the new gardens of the Horticultural Society in Chiswick, and in so doing, secured the direction of his own future.

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^* He was regularly in court to determine his state of mind. In December 1823 he was found to be of ‘unsound mind', rather than a lunatic. The jurors heard that hundreds of clocks and watches were found scattered all over the house in Bedfordshire, in a serious state of disarray. Morning Herald, 13 and 20 Dec. 1823.

CHAPTER TWO

Side by side with the political and social revolutions sweeping Europe ran a cultural revolution most keenly associated with the growth of science. Interest in plants and gardening, which had been developing throughout the eighteenth century, leapt into a new life which some have called the fourth, garden revolution. From the Romans to John Tradescant in the 1620s, new plants had been arriving in England regularly if slowly. Tradescant himself had brought the apricot from Algiers as well as the first lilac. But from the middle of the eighteenth century plants were coming from all corners of the globe, predominantly from South America, the Cape and, later, North America. Between 1731 and 1789 the number of plants in cultivation increased over fivefold to around 5,000. The thirst for information about new plants was becoming insatiable and driving a need for new publications. Philip Miller at the Botanical Gardens in Chelsea then dominated the gardening world with his massively popular Gardener’s Dictionary of 1731 and, at Kew, William Aiton’s first full catalogue of plants, Hortus Kewensis, was first published in 1789.

Initially, new trees such as the tulip tree and magnolia, as well as hugely popular plants like the first American lily, Lilium superbum (which first flowered in 1738) were shipped back to England mainly by settlers. By the later part of the century, voyages of exploration such as Cook’s three expeditions between 1768 and 1779 were unearthing unimagined botanical riches^* set to transform the English garden and the role of the gardener in it. So many new plants were arriving in Britain, that Miller saw the species at Chelsea increase fivefold during his tenure alone. On 1 February 1787, the first periodical in England devoted to scientific horticulture, The Botanical Magazine or Flower Garden Displayed, edited by William Curtis, was pub...