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Harrow on the Hill by Joseph Murray Ince -
Charlotte and Henry passed by this countryside when visiting London. |
The mid-September fields glowed with a second yield of colour. Harvest was close to an end. Toiling farm families welcomed rest against straw bundles, and while carts of hay pressed through the rutted ground, dogs barked, children waved, and mottled farmland gave way to villages. Through the coach window, Charlotte's thoughts were cramped elsewhere.
This was the first time Charlotte would view Henry's life through the eyes of his childhood. She had heard stories, each with a strand of names that faded into the next without a bit of solid ground to stand them on, but this was different. Meeting Henry's London relatives was inevitable, and Charlotte was nervous. She had no way of knowing if letters from Henry's mother, or perhaps his Aunt Mary Ward, were sent beforehand talebearing her past. And her social standing could only fuel the matter. They would have carriages, ladymaids, perhaps even a manservant. Holding a profession or trade was frowned upon in high gentlemanly circles, but in Charlotte's mind, Henry's family had attributes that could make up for it. They had education and upbringing. Land? Maybe, but to her racing mind, it did not matter. They entertained associates and acquaintances well beyond her scope, and she had very little. To Charlotte, the shakiness of the coach was all from her own heart trembling.
Earlier in the year, Henry's brother Joseph finished his studies with artist David Cox, moving from Hereford to London. It was a bold step to seek a livelihood as a painter, and it soon brought Joseph back to the metropolis of his family roots. Charlotte and Henry had left Swansea not long after they married and made their way about thirty miles northwest of London to Tring, a small Hertfordshire market town set among stretches of pastures and sloping woodland of the Chiltern Hills. Securing their seats days in advance, they caught an early morning ride on the notoriously overcrowded Young Pilot coach from Tring's Rose and Crown Inn. It had been months since they saw Joseph, and his enthusiasm was always missed. He had a way of brightening the moment, the same way he could pull sunlight through the sky with just a few simple strokes. They planned to visit Joseph first, then his aunt, Mrs Cowell. They talked about calling in on several cousins, one recently married and another returning from Jamaica, and especially an uncle, George Saunders. With each name he spoke, Charlotte had a twitch in her stomach. She sat silently hoping to persuade Joseph to call on relatives with them, for he had that cherub-like look she found so easy to hide behind and his foresight lightened up the heaviest of rooms.
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| The Young Pilot coach schedule from Tring, Hertfordshire to Snow Hill, Middlesex, Fall 1926 |
Henry and Charlotte arrived at the King's Arms, Snow Hill, with plenty of daylight to be had and set out from High Holborn, down the breadth of Oxford Street, along the edge of Paddington, to where Joseph lodged off Edgeware Road at 31 King Street West. All the stories Charlotte heard of London could not prepare her for the sights, smells, and sounds that whirled her senses. Her eyes darted from the frivolous to the unendurable, with the streets so crowded at times that she had no choice but to share the same breath with fancy footmen and ragged women touting turnips and apples. Little boys were selling shoestrings, and aged men were peddling eels. Tinkers clinked counter rhythm with workers on scaffolds. They passed by shops of jewellers, hairdressers, hatters and bankers. There were knife grinders, rag sellers, vendors of baskets and finely carved wooden ware, and hawkers with teapots and spoons dangling from sticks. Buildings of all sizes transformed into splendid structures and then toppled back into shacks again while the odour of slaughterhouses and sewage morphed into the most delightful scent of ginger and penny pies. While clouds of soup billowed from pastrycook doorways, sparkling trinkets called to her from the drabbest of places. To Charlotte, the almost three-mile walk must have seemed as if life itself was a coin tossed into the air, landing where it chooses, birthing an existence, of whatever that might be.
Still, Charlotte was eager to know this place. It had been nearly fifteen years since Henry's family moved from London to Presteigne. As often as Henry commented that with each return, he was left familiar with only the traffic of Oxford Street and fog mixing with the heavy air of coal smoke, Charlotte knew better. She could see the excitement in his eyes.
Henry was the grandson of William Ince, a Westminster, London-born cabinetmaker whose craftmanship as Ince and Mayhew graced stately homes and noted estates, including those of the royal family. Henry was six years old when his grandfather died in 1804. Although too young to remember the company's workshops filled with commissions of ornate cupboards, tables, chairs, sofas, chest of drawers, bedsteads, secretaires, and more, embedded in Henry's earliest memories were his grandfather's designs. Among sculpted flourishes and marquetry medallions were inlaid rambles of honeysuckle and sunflowers. There were peacock feathers etched with vines and berries, decorative paintings of harpists and cherubs, pier glass and giltwood, all regal and imaginative and with only the finest selection of coloured woods. To his little boy eyes, carvings of imperial rams and lions, with wide-eyed owls and bold, mythical flying creatures, never escaped his attention.
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| Ince and Mayhew Embellishments |
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Serpentine Commode (cabinet)
of sycamore and marquetry. |
William Ince was a humble and generous man. We know this by the contents of his letters and the display of devotion in his will. Henry spent the first years of his childhood in homes furnished by his grandfather, including the house where Henry was born on October 3, 1797, in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. Henry's father was stationed in Bristol with the Royal Berkshire Militia as an assistant surgeon during this time. There were two other houses furnished for them by his grandfather. One on Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, near Whitefield Chapel, the non-conformist church where three of Henry's grandparents are buried. The other house, genteel and newly built, was located at 2 Upper Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square. This is where they lived when his father, transferred from the militia to regular service in 1800, serving as an officer and assistant surgeon to the Coldstream Guards. Two years later, his father, at age thirty, retired on half pay, transferring to the Royal Tower Invalids, where he provided medical care to soldiers at the Tower of London.
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| The Ince home at 2 Upper Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square (now 67 Grafton Way) |
In 1806, Joseph was born, and the family moved to 29 York Buildings, Marylebone, situated about a mile away on the rural outskirts of London. Once an area scattered with old estates, it was now clustered with fashionable homes, all built in rapid succession for the "middling sort" - those who found themselves beneath the aristocracy but floating somewhere above the broad definition of "working class". Their home had both a front and back garden, and as in all the other dwelling places they leased, it was brick, four stories high, and with two good-sized rooms on each floor. Several doors down set back from the road, was the Marylebone Workhouse and Infirmary, a substantial structure that housed more than a thousand inmates at the time. I cannot help but wonder if Henry's father occasionally assisted there.
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Where Henry lived at 16 Baker Street North, Marylebone
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Henry was ten years old in 1808 when the family relocated again, this time just up around the corner to 16 Baker Street North. Their backyard was adjacent to the old Allsop's Farm cowyard. To a young boy in a congested world of towering structures and expanding pavement, whatever remnant of farming there was must have seemed quite magical from his window. Those romantic years may have influenced Henry later in life when he tried his hand at farming. This is where the family stayed until their move to Wales a few years later.
Up the street was a cricket field. One would pay a shilling to watch the games in the summer months. On Sundays, the family most likely walked the short distance to Hyde Park, where there were two popular springs. The first was a mineral spring for drinking. On fair weather days, a woman would sit with table and chairs, pouring glasses of healthful water for a fee. Domestic help frequented the spring, filling jugs for their masters and children of all classes were encouraged to run ahead and drink their fill.
Further down the path was the second spring. This one was used mainly for healing, sought by those wishing to restore weak eyesight and by mothers for dipping infants and small children in its curative waters. Henry's father knew the benefit of mineral water and very likely carried some home with them. I would not be surprised if baby Henry or Joseph were bathed there.
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Hyde Park on a Sunday, 1804
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William Ince and Ann Stephenson's 1762 parish marriage entry
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Henry's grandmother was Ann (Nancy) Stephenson of James Street, Grosvenor Square, the daughter of George Stephenson and Jane Raynor. She was nineteen when she and William wed in February 1762, at St. George's Hanover Square, sharing the same wedding day as her sister Isabella and William's business partner John Mayhew. Ann was a dedicated woman, overseeing the ever-growing household as her husband built up his cabinet-making business. They had thirteen babies in a little over twenty years, including eight children born within the first ten years of marriage. Looking through their life, it seems William and Ann were well acquainted with sorrow, for out of the thirteen children, only six survived into adulthood. In later years, the dissolution of the Ince and Mayhew forty-year-long partnership played hard upon the two of them. Ann disputed John Mayhew's claims in chancery after William's sudden death in 1804, when seeking a fair settlement of company assets in support of her husband's skill and proficiency. Ann died in 1806 and John Mayhew in 1811, but the counterclaims continued until twenty years later, when in 1824, the remaining business funds were distributed to the surviving Ince and Mayhew children. What brought them there is not entirely known, but there were questions about money, keeping the books, and who contributed the most to the business. We do know that William Ince was primarily associated with the creative end of the enterprise and John Mayhew with the business portion.
1824
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Location of Ince and Mayhew showrooms and workshops (yellow)
and family residences (marked in red) on and near Marshall Street, Soho
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Henry was nine when his grandmother Ann passed away at age sixty-two, and the Ince home on Marshall Street, near Golden Square, soon went up for auction. He remembered staying there sometimes, watching his uncles immersed in games of chess or enchanted by the crisp lilt of his aunt playing the harpsichord. The rooms of the house were filled with carved mahogany furnishings. Colourful carpets spanned the floors, and dark green damask chair coverings matched billows of draperies. There were satinwood tables, gilt frames and bird cages, shelves of his grandfather's many books and his grandmother's cherished set of Worcester blue sprig china. In the drawing room was a terrestrial globe. Sometimes, his father would point out where his uncle, Major William Ince, was stationed in India. Other times, he imagined spinning it around and around, shutting his eyes, letting it stop at the tip of his finger where he would pretend to travel. But mostly, Henry kept his hands in his pockets, for he knew if a servant tattled on him, it would be his downfall. He never saw all the rooms in the house and could barely recall all the faces that hung on the walls, but somewhere in the patter of footsteps and hum of voices over tea were sounds of workers and squeaky shop carts that he could still remember. This was the place he associated most with family.
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| Auction notice of Ince home on Broad Street, 1807 |
In hearing each story, Charlotte knew Henry was home again, and although millions of people lived in the London area, from his myriad of narratives, she amusingly concluded he was related to all of them. She just wasn't sure if she was ready to meet them.
(Hold on to your hat; there's more to come!)
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| Ince and Mayhew display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Gallery 514, commissioned 1769, for the Earl of Coventry. |
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Two excellent books concerning William Ince, both available on Amazon -
William Ince, Cabinet Maker 1737-1804
by Sarah Ingle (an Ince cousin)
and Industry and Ingenuity, the Partnership of William Ince and John Mayhew
by Hugh Roberts and Charles Cator. |
