February 2013 Reviews

By David Killingray and Elizabeth Purves

Reviewed by Imogen Wedd

SEVENOAKS: an historical dictionary edited by David Killingray and Elizabeth Purves(Phillimore 2012 256pp ISBN 978-1-86077-736-3) £14.99

As its name tells us, this book is structured as a dictionary or gazetteer, which has enabled the editors to include contributions from over 120 local people and organisations. This is a wonderful format for pooling local knowledge from all quarters, and an attractive project for a local history group with a range of members’ interests and expertise. In this instance, the Sevenoaks Society and the Sevenoaks Historical Society have been the originators, and an admirable job of editing and indexing the entries has been carried out by David Killingray and Elizabeth Purves. The format is, perhaps, not the most accessible for the general reader. If you are looking for a historical narrative for Sevenoaks, this will not satisfy you. For a winter evening by the fireside I would still recommend Gordon Ward’s 1931 Sevenoaks Essays.  However, it would be churlish to criticise it on that account, when its objective is different. It is packed with information, and an excellent bibliography provides a good supply of further reading. Above all, this is an attractive book to dip into or with which to while away the odd half-hour. The introduction describes it as ‘written by the people of Sevenoaks, for the people of Sevenoaks’, and that is undoubtedly its primary market.

The entries include people, places, buildings, organisations, and general subjects.  For example, opening the book more at less at random gives entries on New Beacon School, New Inn, newspapers, North Downs, William Brook Northey and the Nouaille family. Did you know that Siegfried Sassoon was a pupil at New Beacon School, or that in the eighteenth century Greatness Mill was owned by a French Huguenot family who used it as a silk mill? Elsewhere, it fills in for us the details of the Austen family connections with Sevenoaks, those of William Lambarde’s descendants, and of the great Victorian historian S.R. Gardiner, commemorated by the annual Sevenoaks Historical Society lecture. The entry on Sevenoaks School reminds us that it is one of the oldest schools in the country, cathedral schools excepted; the entry on the Poetry Society that it was founded in 1910 and had its one thousandth meeting in 1994.

Some of the difficulties of the format for the general reader, not least ‘where to start’, could have been addressed by including entries on periods in the history of the town. ‘Romans in the Sevenoaks area’ tells us that there is no evidence of Roman settlement on the site; I looked in vain for Saxon Sevenoaks, or Medieval Sevenoaks, or even ‘Settlement’, so discovering  when was the first settlement on the site was difficult. Predictably, the First World War and the Second World War are represented, there is an interesting entry on the Civil Wars, and even one on the Zulu War (though, curiously, not the South African Wars, and only a passing reference to the Royal West Kent Regiment in which so many local men served). Similarly, the use of generic entries could have been improved; an entry on ‘Rebellions’ would have drawn together the entries on Jack Cade’s Rebellion and Wyatt’s Rebellion, and the Swing Riots, for those who do not already know about them.  One should cater, I think, for the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know. The entry on hospitals provides an excellent example, putting in context the entries on a number of local people, places and institutions, whereas I am not sure that a definition of domestic servants, without any reference to Sevenoaks itself or any cross-references, really warranted an entry.   

Each of us will have a personal list of omissions, but this is in the nature of things. I would have liked an acknowledgement of who had contributed an individual entry, and a little more information about evidence and sources throughout the text. We are told that Sevenoaks is named after seven oak trees and was often spelled Seven Oaks until the nineteenth century, but no reference is given to sources (although Wallenberg appears in the bibliography), and there is no discussion of the linguistic development of the name, or explanation for the still common short form of ‘Sennocke’.  Occasional references are given to original sources such as the tithe survey of 1841, and sometimes to further reading in the bibliography, and cross-references are given in bold italics.

Maps and pictures appear lavishly throughout the book, and have clearly been judiciously selected and carefully annotated in detail. They provide a great source of ‘dips’ into the book on their own. All in all, this is an interesting, valuable and detailed look at the history of Sevenoaks and, subject to the above minor criticisms, a great editorial achievement.  

IMOGEN WEDD

Imogen Wedd is a graduate of Sussex University and the Cambridge MSt in Local and Regional History, and is currently researching the impact of gavelkind on seventeenth-century Kentish communities. She grew up in West Kent.

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By A T Marks

Reviewed by Peter Bysouth

THE THREE COUNTIES HOSPITAL GASWORKS 1857–1952 by A.T. Marks (privately published by the author, 48 Mossbank Avenue, Luton LU2 9HH: 2012 32pp no ISBN) £4 inc p&p

The Three Counties Hospital at Fairfield Park was the nineteenth-century asylum built for the mentally ill of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire. This small booklet explores the operation of the hospital’s gas works. The author covers the development and maintenance of the works, the men who ran the plant, and a tabulation of the hospital’s quarterly consumption and cost per 1000 cubic feet.  He notes that the hospital had 950 gas lights by 1876 rising to 2000 by 1910.

It appears that life was hard for the gas men. In February 1863 ‘the gas man complained of the comfortless state of his house especially in bad weather’. George Roberts, addressing the hospital administrators in 1902, complained that ‘My years of service here are 23 years this day and age 60 years and I find that as our gas consumption at this institution means carbonising 30 tons of coal a week my health is so broken up that I am totally incapacitated from following said employment’. The author has gathered many such interesting snippets from the hospital’s minutes, ledgers and the log of its gas works that provide a valuable insight into a rarely explored aspect of hospital life.

PETER T. BYSOUTH

Peter Bysouth was awarded his doctorate by Warwick University in 2010.  He has recently published the results of his research into the changing nineteenth-century economies of a group of very small towns in the extra-urban matrix of north-east Hertfordshire.

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By Joan Tucker

Reviewed by Sean ODell

FERRIES OF THE UPPER THAMES by Joan Tucker (Amberley Publishing 2012 224pp ISBN 978 1 84868 967 1) £19.99

Having been asked to review the first part of a study on this subject (Ferries of the Lower Thames: Amberley, 2010) for the August 2011 edition of The Local Historian, it is gratifying to receive a second book by this author for consideration. As the title suggests, this work examines the River Thames and its crossings from the source, officially noted as Thames Head—a spring near Trewsbury Mead—through to Old Windsor and Staines. Here the river passes the former site of the London Stone (an obelisk near the river bank marking the western boundary of the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London) and the point at which the first book begins. I noted in the earlier review that the study was a welcome addition to the historiography of the capital’s principal waterway, dealing with a somewhat neglected facet of river life, and that an investigation into the working lives of those who carried fare-paying passengers across the river adds a great deal to our understanding of those whose livelihoods depended on inland waterways. These observations apply in equal measure to this work, as it extends its coverage to the remaining more rural and discreet reaches of the Thames.

The book is divided into fifteen chapters; the first is concerned with the evolution and detail of early methods of crossing the river. These range from simply wading across, constructing and using fords, poling, plodging (using stilts) and stepping-stones to the development of ferries and bridges at favourable and established crossing points. The author notes at the outset that although there are no ferries now operating on the Upper Thames, there had been on average one per mile between Kew and Lechlade. Many of these crossing places date back to prehistory. Chapter 2 examines these crossing places on the upper reaches, while the following two chapters consider the historic administration of the river by examining firstly the Thames Navigation Commission and subsequently the Thames Conservancy. As the need to transport heavy goods to and from London grew during the medieval period, control and regulation was necessary; these chapters detail the evolution of the management of the waterway from statutes included in the 23rd clause of Magna Carta, via navigation Acts passed during the reign of James I, to the transfer of control of the navigation of the Upper Thames to the Thames Conservancy in 1866. Towpaths are the subject of the short but important chapter 5; the remaining chapters deal with the ferry sites, operators and their historical and social context in geographical order: Lechlade to Newbridge, Newbridge to Oxford (chapter 8 deals with Oxford alone), beyond Oxford to Culham, Clifton Hampden to Wallingford, Wallingford to Gatehampton, Whitchurch to Sonning, Wargrave to Marlow, Marlow to Maidenhead and finally Bray to Staines.

As before, the author does not just simply concentrate on the details of the ferries themselves; wider contextual historical detail is given. A number of key attributes complement the well-written and comprehensive text. Numerous contemporary photographs, prints, diagrams, maps and drawings illustrate the narrative extremely well and the 26 colour plates are especially well-chosen and superbly reproduced. An extensive range of primary and secondary sources inform the work throughout, and as before the work is comprehensively referenced. A full bibliography and useful index are provided. An earlier book by this author (Ferries of Gloucestershire) was awarded the Railway & Canal Historical Society’s ‘Road Transport Book of the Year’ in 2010. With this publication, Joan Tucker now provides us with a thoroughly researched, detailed and engaging study of a fascinating aspect of daily working life along the River Thames. 

SEAN ODELL

Sean ODell gained his Master’s degree in local and regional history from the University of Cambridge and has a PhD from the University of Essex. He lectures at the Colchester School of Art, Colchester Institute, and part-time at the Centre for Local History, University of Essex.

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By Val Bott

Reviewed by Ralph Dickson

HOGARTH'S HOUSE by Val Bott (Scala Publishers 2012 47pp ISBN 978 1 85759 754 7) £6.95

For a short time at the beginning of the eighteenth century the London intelligentsia lived happy lives. Some of this happiness is transmitted by this book about an artist who wrote about his work, and was part of that intelligentsia which had houses in London and in the country. William Hogarth, the great satirical painter, had a residence in what is now Leicester Square and also one in rural Chiswick. He learned painting at the academy in St Martin’s Lane and at the free academy run by Sir James Thornhill, the royal painter, at his home. Later on Hogarth reopened the St Martin’s Academy, where he taught. The carefree attitude of the times can be seen in the spontaneous tour of north Kent undertaken by Hogarth and friends. His charitable work included active support of the Foundling Hospital to which he donated some of his paintings. Children from the hospital stayed with Hogarth at Chiswick.

This is a well-written, beautifully produced book with excellent illustrations. It is not a room-by-room account of the Chiswick house, but rather a summary of its condition at various times, describing not only the house but also the garden, which was much celebrated at the time. Hogarth lived there 15 years, his widow staying on after his death. The author has researched the other owners (before and after), and this makes interesting reading. It is clear though that in a short time the area was becoming ‘developed’ and losing its ‘intellectual’ character. There have been attempts to sell the house for demolition but public-spirited individuals, charities and the Heritage Lottery Fund have stepped in to save it, out of respect for Hogarth. It is now a museum, well-decorated with a collection of prints, and admission is free.

RALPH DICKSON

Ralph Dickson is a retired law lecturer.