People
Part of my work across the last year has been to increase the levels of information held for objects in our collections, making them available to the public via our online database. Information on how to search the database is at the end. I recently came across a record with a slightly fuzzy image of a man, (which was out of focus when the photo was taken many years ago). Through the fuzziness I could see the face of a man who looked like he was sleeping. I scrolled down to read the short and simple record that told me that this was the “corpse of Benjamin Tatham”.
Why had somebody drawn a picture of the recently deceased Benjamin Tatham? Well it may seem strange now, but post-mortem art was fairly common in the past. Initially only the wealthy could afford to commemorate their dead with a mourning portrait. Later with the invention of photography post-mortem photographs became affordable to many, for some this would have been the only image to remember their loved one by. A search on Google reveals many photographs of deceased people, including this image of German Emperor Frederick III who died in 1888.
German Emperor Frederick III
Our drawing of Benjamin Tatham was created by Hitchin artist Samuel Lucas Senior. It’s thanks to Samuel and his prolific sketching output that we can look upon the faces of many Hitchin residents of times gone by. The image below is a sketch he made of school master Benjamin Abbot of Tilehouse Street.
Benjamin Abbot
Both the image of Benjamin Tatham and of Benjamin Abbot entered our museum service at the same time on 12 August 1940 among a collection of many Lucas sketches, close to a century after they were drawn. This means that the post-mortem drawing of Benjamin Tatham stayed with Lucas and was not given to Tatham’s family. Perhaps Samuel Lucas visited the family to pay his respects and, ever the sketcher, could not help himself but sketch a final image of Tatham posed in his bed, or coffin. Perhaps the image stuck with him so much that he jotted down his memories at a later time. Maybe this formed a preparatory sketch for a later image given to the Tatham family? We think this is the only drawing of the dead that Samuel Lucas Senior created.
What do we know of Benjamin Tatham himself? Well we know that in life he worked as a woolstapler, a dealer in wool, on Bancroft, just around the corner from our museum. Trade directories show him operating from Bancroft in 1823, 1832, 1839 and a final appearance of 1846, perhaps suggesting his death shortly afterwards. To the best of our knowledge this is the only image of Benjamin Tatham to survive to the modern day. Samuel Lucas’ simple but moving sketch allows Benjamin Tatham to live on into 2021. More than one hundred and fifty years after his passing, we can look at this picture and imagine the man, dealing wool in Hitchin, walking the same streets we walk and interacting with the other residents captured in Lucas’s sketches. Perhaps he is amongst the crowd of people in the Lucas painting of the Market Place.
Samuel Lucas Senior’s Market Place painting
You can explore our collections database via the link below.
This week’s post for LGBT+ History Month features a personal reminiscence from the Leader of North Hertfordshire District Council, some insights into the equalities policies that the council has created and a reminiscence by the blog author.
NHDC leader Martin Stears-Handscomb, a 70year-old councillor who lives in Letchworth and is married to Ian, writes:
Growing up in Isle of Wight in the 1950s and 60s, being gay was not an option. Indeed, ‘being gay’ didn’t mean what it does now and by the time I went away to Uni in 1969, I was engaged to a girl. I was questioning my sexuality and maybe that was why that relationship didn’t last.
Homosexuality was illegal until 1967 and only then in private. As far as I knew I had never met a gay person – apart from an older lad at school who had been made fun of and accused of “being a homo”. I didn’t want to be “one of them”.
I met a lovely woman when I came to work in Stevenage. One thing led to another and in 1976 we got married. Twenty years and four children later the marriage ended – mainly because for me, political activism came first.
That was the time of the Clause 28 attack on gay people, but I knew I was gay. Being married to a woman had always been something of a miracle to me and it wasn’t likely to happen again.
There were few gay role models then (Warren in TV’s This Life only seemed to manage a one-night stand. I was interested in finding a companion).
As a Baptist Christian, I was fortunate to attend a church in Hitchin where the Minister knew me well enough to listen when I came out to him and accompany me on my journey of accepting myself. I became part of LGBT Christian groups helping churches understand who gay people are. It is not a matter of choice but a matter of integrity!
In 2001 I attended the national conference of Baptists in Blackpool and there met Ian, who was to become my Civil Partner in 2008, the day before he retired. Yes, we do meet our needs as partners, but it is as much the little things that cement our relationship. Holding hands on a quiet beach and getting our feet wet. ow I feel when he takes me in his arms…
While I have been very fortunate, I am conscious that many LGBT people are much less fortunate, such as the 21% who suffered hate crimes in the last year. That’s why people like me need to share our stories and why I am so proud that Hitchin is planning its first Pride event.
North Hertfordshire District Council has put in place policies to ensure that everyone, regardless of ethnic or national origins, race, colour, gender or transgender, age, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, trade union membership, political beliefs and religious beliefs. There are nine so-called ‘protected characteristics’ under the Equality Act 2010 (age discrimination, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief (including lack of belief), sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity), things that define who we are. The council’s policies state:
Equality focuses on valuing these differences in employee’s background and skills to create a diverse workforce.
It is recognised that to treat people equally does not necessarily mean to treat them all the same; it may involve the provision of different or extra facilities for people to enable them to achieve their full potential.
To achieve this aim the Council commits to apply the principals of equality (i.e. fairness, dignity and non-discrimination) to recruitment and selection, terms of employment, access to training, promotion and transfers and other employee benefits. No applicant or employee will be treated less favourably than another on grounds that are not relevant to the post.
The Council must follow The Public Sector Equality Duty, dated April 2011, which created a single equality duty covering all the protected characteristics. Under this, every employee has a responsibility to deliver services to the public without discrimination. The Council wants employees to never suffer any form of unfair behaviour such as bullying or harassment at work, and from the outset of their employment it asks that employees afford their colleagues with the same standards of behaviour as they expect from others.
If you go back little more than fifty years, none of these ‘protected characteristics’ were recognised and people could be discriminated against for the colour of their skin, their national origin, being a woman, being old, being of the wrong religion. Being gay wasn’t even legal for men and being outed in the press often spelt the end of someone’s career, the loss of their home and even imprisonment.
Thankfully, the world has changed, despite attempts to push back some of the gains (look at how the media deal with transgender people or how often ‘queer-bashing’ is reported, and you’ll see that there is still a long way to go). Society today is generally more open and accepting of differences, although it is always possible to point to exceptions. When I (Keith, the writer of the blog) was growing up, there were no positive role models: gay men were shown in fiction as tragic characters or as dangerous predators. On television, we were figures of fun (Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? was the tip of an enormous iceberg). Being a gay teenager in the 1970s meant believing that you were sick.
What changed, for me, was getting involved in the local punk scene in Lancaster, where I was at university in the late 1970s. The pub where the punks all met – the Ring o’Bells – was also the city’s lesbian and gay pub. This was no coincidence. Punks were as much outcasts as gay people, and gay nightclubs were often the only places that would let in people with green hair, nose piercings and bondage pants. I felt at home in the pub and got to know people on both the punk and gay scenes, which overlapped. I came to understand that I could no more hide my sexuality than I could hide the hair I had dyed blue. And, better still, that it made me feel better not to hide it. I became a DJ in an ‘alternative’ nightclub, playing punk, post-punk and New Wave music, thinking this was the only sort of career path open to me, despite my degree in archaeology.
The early 1980s – before HIV/AIDs became seen as a danger to society – was a time of ‘gender-bending’ musicians (such as target-“new”>Boy George and Annie Lennox), politically-motivated bands (Bronski Beat are perhaps the best known). It seemed for a while as if anything was possible and that full equality was about to happen. In the late 1980s, Denmark became the first country to recognise same-sex relationships and, slowly, other governments began to see that allowing same-sex couples to register their relationships was a good thing.
Concentrating hard to avoid dropping the wedding ring!
Progress was slow and, as I’ve already said, we still have a very long way to go. But the changes meant that I was able to enter into a Civil Partnership with my partner on 21 December 2005, the first couple in Hertfordshire to do so. In 2014, the Civil Partnership was converted to Marriage (and in a bizarre ceremony, the registrar dissolved the former to create the latter through the single press of a button on her keyboard, back-dating the marriage certificate to the date of our Civil Partnership). Bahkti and I recently celebrated our Crystal Wedding anniversary. As a teenager struggling to come to terms with why I didn’t fancy girls but paid a lot more attention to the men’s diving in the Munich Olympics of 1972 when sport didn’t interest me in the slightest, I would never have though that married bliss was something I could ever experience.
The world has indeed changed, and so have I.
Sappho in 1988
In the summer of 1998, Sappho went missing. It was not the first time she had left the plinth she had occupied for more than sixty years, having previously been abducted, albeit briefly, by persons unknown in 1994. Sappho, of course, was long the only public statue in Letchworth Garden City, having been a resident since 1907. A representation of one of the greatest and earliest of Greek poets, the story of her statue is a curious one and a story that leads us directly to an unnoticed aspect of early Garden City history: its potential attraction to members of the developing homosexual subculture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
Sappho the poet
Little is known about the life of Sappho, who is supposed to have lived during the eighth century BC on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. Although she was highly regarded as a poet in the ancient world, no collection of her work has survived from antiquity and much is known only through quotations, adaptations and translations into Latin. It is unclear why this should be the case, but many high-quality literary works of Greek antiquity are lost to posterity (such as the plays of Menander); perhaps this is in part due to the low status accorded Greek literature in the post-Roman west and in part to the destruction of archives with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Sappho’s reputation to later centuries rests largely on the sexual ambiguity of her poetry. Many of her love poems appear to be addressed to women and her reputation in the ancient world was as someone who celebrated same-sex desire. The obsolete term sapphic and its more recent synonym lesbian to refer to women who are attracted to other women commemorates her.
The statue
The statue’s second home on the corner of Broadwater Avenue and Broadway
Sappho was created in 1886 by the sculptor Thomas Nelson Maclean (1845-94), a resident of Chelsea. There does not seem to be any information about his choice of subject for the work, which was originally called, intriguingly, ‘Our Sappho’. Given the poet’s well-known reputation, it is tempting to speculate that Maclean depicted a female poet of his acquaintance, perhaps even a lesbian poet. The statue was cast bronze and depicts the poet seated, her right hand raised as if declaiming.
It is not clear if the statue was intended for public exhibition or, indeed, if it was ever exhibited by Maclean. Among his effects when he died, his wife Katherine decided to part with it when she later remarried. Her sister, Isabelle Linnell (1870-1958), had moved to Letchworth Garden City soon after its foundation, having heard a lecture about the Garden City movement in London in 1903. She persuaded her sister to present the statue to the Garden City, which was done formally on 3 January 1907.
At first, the statue was set up in Lytton Avenue in 1907, where it remained for a short time before being moved to a nearby site in Broadwater Avenue. It was moved again, to the site of a public garden between Norton Way South and Pixmore Way in July 1936. Until 1935, this had been the site of the Garden City’s first swimming pool, which closed when the new lido on Norton Common was opened, allowing the old site to be converted to a garden. They were dedicated to Councillor Charles Francis Ball (1870-1933), first Chairman of Letchworth Urban District Council. The plinth was added in March 1939.
Some Letchworth Garden City characters
Isabelle Linnell
Isabelle Linnell was born in Reigate (Surrey) in 1870. As a young woman, she became involved with the committee of a campaign to protect workers in the ceramics industry from lead poisoning caused by working with lead-based glazes. She first heard of the Garden City movement through a lecture given in 1904. Together with her friend, Marguerite Borissow (1869-1946), she cycled to the developing town of Letchworth Garden City to investigate properties there. She seems to have been taken with the place and soon moved to Eastholm Green, where her friend’s family also took a house (the Borissows are recorded at Burwash, 5 Eastholm Green, in 1906 and at 10 Eastholm between 1926 and 1947, while Isabelle was at 12 Eastholm in 1946).
The Crockery, Isabelle Linnell’s shop on the corner of Eastcheap and Station Place; she is standing in the doorway
In the so-called pioneer years of the Garden City, she established a shop selling ceramics that did not use the hated lead glaze. It was known as The Crockery and was located at 3 Leys Avenue, opening on 29 June 1908. Her assistant at the time was George Bates, whom she described in 1956 as ‘an entertaining and helpful person’. The business appears to have been a success, as she moved into new premises on the corner of Eastcheap and Station Place within a few years. Her assistant in the new premises was a Miss Clarke. It continued in the same location from 1912 to 1934, when a retiring sale was held on 29 November.
After closing The Crockery, she seems to have diversified her interests, becoming manager of St Nicholas’s Church of England School from 1937 to 1940. By 1947, she was Director of The People’s House on Station Road. In 1953 a letter from her was published in Town and Country Planning under the heading ‘A Business Woman’s Experience’, in which she reminisced about her early days in the Garden City. A further letter to The Citizen, published on 5 October 1956, includes details about her time at The Crockery, although time seems to have confused her memory of dates although not spans of time (she remembered it closing in 1938 after ‘20 happy years’, following three years in the original premises). By this time, she was no longer living in Eastholm but had moved (albeit a short distance) to 10 Norton Way North. She died 26 June 1957 and is buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Norton.
Less is known of her friend Marguerite Anne Borissow, although she too became a prominent member of early Garden City society and also never married. Born to an English family of Finnish origin in Lille (France) in 1907, she was the secretary of the Christian School Union, the Garden City Co-operators Ltd and the Garden City Women’s Guild, and was a member of the Education Council. Her work with the Women’s Guild continued into the 1920s, at least. By 1930, she was Présidente of the Cercle Français at The Settlement, a position she held until 1935. Evidently an accomplished linguist, she was a tutor in French, Italian and Latin. At one time, she was also treasurer of Letchworth Girl’s Club.
We do not possess any documentation about Isabelle Linnell’s sexuality, which is hardly surprising, given the period at which she was living. However, she remained unmarried and it is unclear if her friendship with Marguerite Borissow could be described as ‘companionship’, an early twentieth-century euphemism for an emotional relationship between two women.
Margaret Thomas
The case of the artist Margaret Thomas (1842-1929) is better known. She was born Margaret Cook in Croydon, but her family emigrated to Australia in 1852. After studying sculpture in Melbourne and exhibiting regularly from 1857, she returned to England in 1867. She studied art in Rome, Paris and the Royal Academy, earning a silver medal for sculpture in 1872. She became a successful portrait artist and made enough money to retire early and spend her time travelling, painting and writing. In the 1870s, she met Henrietta Pilkington (1842-1927) and the two fell instantly in love and spent the rest of their lives together.
The Artist: Margaret Thomas’s self-portrait
The couple enjoyed the adventure of travelling in distant lands and meeting exotic people. They left England for Brittany in 1888 and travelled on to Rome. Margaret wrote about their trip through Spain and Morocco about 1890 in A Scamper through Spain and Tangier, dedicated to ‘My dear friend, the companion of these wanderings’. They spent a journey through the Middle East in 1897 painting scenes and people. Margaret wrote Two Years in Palestine and Syria about their travels, published in 1900, in which she included pints of some of her paintings. In 1901, they travelled to Denmark and Margaret felt that it ought to be better known by English travellers.
They settled in Letchworth Garden City in 1911, living in a recently built cottage called Countryside on Croft Lane in Norton. Henrietta died two years before Margaret, who published a collection of poems called Friendship: Poems in Memoriam in her memory. The couple is buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas’s Church in Norton and Margaret had the words The sweetest soul that ever looked with human eyes. Friends for sixty years engraved under Henrietta’s name on the gravestone. Margaret is regarded as one of the foremost Australian women artists of her day.
There is little doubt from Margaret’s published record of their friendship that she and Henrietta were very much in love. They lived as a couple for more than fifty years: Margaret’s statement that they had been friends for sixty years on their shared gravestone shows her typical disregard for dates (she even managed to misquote her date of birth on several occasions). We cannot know more than this and there is little reason to speculate about their private lives.
Homosexual subculture in the early Garden City
There is an a priori likelihood that the ideals of the Garden City movement found particular resonance among the homosexual subcultures of early twentieth-century England. That it has not hitherto been remarked upon need not surprise us: early Letchworth Garden City was renowned for its ‘eccentrics’, who were gently (and sometimes not so gently) lampooned in popular publications of the day. Women’s equality was promoted from the outset, which may have provided an additional draw. Above all, with the Cleveland Street scandal and the Wilde affair still recent events, it was not a time when public displays of minority sexualities were acceptable or advisable. The Garden City pioneers were imbued with a sense that they were going to change the world, to bring about a reconciliation between town and country, worker and employer, and rich and poor in a spirit of co-operation for the common good. In this way, they have parallels with the Uranians and other gay cultural movements of the fin de siècle.
Looking at these issues does raise the question of whether we have the right to speculate about the private lives of people in the not-so-distant past. While Margaret Thomas and Henrietta Pilkington were clearly romantically tied, we know nothing about their behaviour behind closed doors, much less about how they regarded their sexuality. The problem is compounded in the case of Isabelle Linnell, about whom we have only information about her public persona. We do not even know if she remained close friends with Marguerite Borissow after moving to Letchworth Garden City.
Is curiosity about such matters voyeuristic and invading the privacy of the dead? We would have fewer qualms speculating about opposite-sex attraction and activity and most people would regard such matters as legitimate historical questions. We can make a case that worries about attributing same-sex attraction to the dead are part of a lingering sense of shame about homosexuality and bisexuality. Perhaps there is feeling that by attributing such behaviour to people, we are somehow slandering their memory, while remaining free to attribute heterosexual affairs to anyone.