High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The exhibition was not merely a diversion. To businessmen who attended it was an eye-opener, and provided inspiration to improve their own and the country’s fortunes. One example will suffice, but it was replicated numerous times. A man called Sloane came from America, prepared to sell the British patent rights to his new wood-screw. Hitherto, all screws had had blunt ends, which meant that holes had to be bored for them using a gimlet. Sloane’s idea had been to make his screws with their own pointed end, thereby having their own gimlet. He had also developed a way of making the screws more quickly and cheaply, using machinery far less labour-intensive than existed already. An industrialist from Birmingham, John Sutton Nettlefold, manufactured screws. On his visit to the Crystal Palace he at once saw the potential of Sloane’s inventions for his own business.

  To buy the machinery and the idea of the pointed screw required a capital investment of the then gigantic sum of £30,000: but Nettlefold feared that if he did not buy the rights one of his competitors would, and that would be the end of his business. For more than two years he negotiated with Sloane and finally, in 1854, acquired the rights. This would have implications for more than just British manufacturing. Unable to command so large a sum of money himself, he asked his brother-in-law, Joseph Chamberlain, to come into business with him. Chamberlain ran the family shoemaking business in London and was a leading Cordwainer: his was a very different line of business from his brother-in-law’s. After much thought, he saw the potential of Nettlefold’s idea, but determined to have his own man in the business in Birmingham to oversee his investment. His son Joseph, later widely known as Joe, then just eighteen, was sent to Birmingham to train as a manager in his uncle’s business. Once Joe Chamberlain met Birmingham one of the great political careers of the Victorian era would be launched.73 It was estimated that when young Joe went into the family firm the whole of England was turning out 70,000 gross of screws a week. By 1865 Birmingham alone was making 130,000 gross, and Nettlefold & Chamberlain 90,000 gross of those.

  Engineering had ensured that the great Crystal Palace would not be uncomfortable when packed with visitors at the height of summer. Many of the 20-foot sashes could be removed on hot days to improve ventilation; great panels enclosed cotton cloth that would reduce the heat from the sun; and a system of largely concealed wooden guttering, cleverly designed by Paxton, drained away through hollow iron supports the inevitable condensation to avoid it either damaging anything or dripping on the clientele. The building could hold 40,000 visitors at any one time – 25,000 were at the opening ceremony – and had 10 miles of frontage for exhibition space.

  Nothing like it had been seen in Britain before, or indeed in the world. And it was Albert’s triumph. His hopes for world peace and amity growing up as a result of the internationalism of his concept may not have amounted to anything: but the spectacle he created was world historic, and one that resonates to this day. It came at a cost to his health, for he was naturally fragile: and the effort he put in, not just for the exhibition, but in securing its legacy in the decade of life that remained to him after the doors closed, took its toll. He wrote to his grandmother in Coburg on 15 April, a fortnight before the opening, that ‘I am more dead than alive from overwork. The opponents of the Exhibition work with might and main to throw all the old women into panic and drive myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am to be responsible, and against all this I have to make efficient provision.’74 Yet from the perspective of the twenty-first century, what Albert achieved by these exertions and trials was a quantum leap in the modernising of Britain.

  V

  Two days after the exhibition opened Albert was guest of honour at the annual Royal Academy dinner: and the success of his venture was already so palpable, with scores of thousands of people queuing up for admission each day, that he was given an ecstatic ovation. The success continued. By mid-August 1851 it was clear that all the estimates of revenue had been extremely pessimistic. When the exhibition closed and the totting-up was done the figures were staggering.75 There were a total of 6,039,195 admissions. In the final week alone there had been 518,277. This additional traffic benefited other tourist attractions. Windsor Castle had had 129,400 visitors in 1851 compared with 31,228 in 1850; the British Museum’s numbers had risen from 720,643 to 2,230,242. Even Deptford Dockyard had seen an increase from 3,313 to 4,465. The exhibition itself had taken £506,100 6s 11d (of which £74,349 15s 3d was for refreshments) and spent £292,794 11s 3d (including a bill of £22,357 for the Metropolitan Police), leaving a surplus of £213,305 15s 8d.

  Those who had participated in the success had their rewards. Cole was presented with a special gold medal and made a Companion of the Order of the Bath; Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Paxton was knighted, as was William Cubitt. Dilke was offered a knighthood but turned it down, thinking he should have had a baronetcy; he eventually had one when he acted as a commissioner for the 1862 exhibition. Scott Russell was the only officer not to be honoured, and complained vociferously. The main players were also offered money out of the profits. Dilke, Playfair and Cole were all offered £3,000, though Dilke told Granville he would not take the money and Granville suspected he really would turn it down. He did. Cole happily accepted it. Paxton was given £1,000 and many smaller sums were dished out to others.76

  On 10 August, while the event had almost three months to run, Albert wrote a memorandum noting that there was likely to be a surplus of £150,000–£200,000. ‘The question arises: what is to be done with this surplus?’77 He was not convinced the money should be used to maintain the Crystal Palace as a ‘winter garden’: he wanted to examine the objects of the exhibition, and to use the money to further them. He understood those objects to have been ‘the promotion of every branch of human industry by means of comparison of their processes and results as carried on and obtained by all the Nations of the Earth, and the promotion of kindly feelings of all the Nations towards each other by the practical illustration of the advantages which may be derived by each from the labours and achievements of the others.’

  This would be his guide; and it led him towards the belief that the purchase of the Crystal Palace as a ‘lounging place’ was not commensurate with those objects. He felt the connection with the building itself was ‘incidental’: it had been merely ‘a covering to our Collection’ whose purpose had come to an end. In any case, the commissioners were legally bound to have it removed by the end of October. What he proposed was using around £50,000 to purchase 25 to 30 acres of land on the other side of the Kensington road, ‘called Kensington Gore’. He wrote: ‘I would buy that ground and place on it four institutions, corresponding to the four great sections of the exhibition – Raw Material, Machinery, Manufactures and Plastic Art. I would devote these Institutions to the furtherance of the industrial pursuits of all Nations in these four divisions.’ He was determined that the legacy of the exhibition should be the continuing enhancement of education and knowledge.

  He felt each of these institutions should include a library and rooms for study; lecture rooms; an acre of glass covering for the purposes of the exhibition; and ‘rooms for Conversations, Discussions and commercial meetings’. The surplus space might be ‘laid out as gardens for public enjoyment, and so as to admit of the future erection of public Monuments there, according to a well-arranged plan.’ If desired, there could be a public conservatory. Albert mused that there existed many learned societies in England that pursued the aims and disciplines covered by his four headings: and he asked whether they could not be ‘united’, with a collection of their relevant materials, and ‘open and common to all Nations’ so they would ‘soon spread thei
r ramifications into all countries’. This, he felt, would perpetuate the aims of the exhibition, bringing ‘the different industrial pursuits of mankind, arts and sciences’ into a new mainstream rather than in their previous ‘state of comparative isolation from each other.’ He also noted the locality had already been recommended as a possible site for a new National Gallery, and that would fit well into his general plan. ‘I am perfectly aware that this is but a very crude scheme requiring mature consideration and practical tests in its details, but I thought it my duty towards the Commission to lay it before them at as early a moment as possible, in order that the remaining weeks of the Exhibition might be employed in investigating it, or that we might be led by that investigation to the discovery of a more feasible plan.’

  At the end of September Albert put the question to a meeting of the Commissioners. This prompted a letter from one of them, Gladstone, on 4 October. He found the plan ‘thoroughly congenial to the concentrated aim and character of the Exhibition’.78 Parliament had long recognised the social benefits of establishing museums, and not just in the metropolis. William Ewart, the MP for Dumfries, had brought in a bill in 1844 to enable town councils to start museums and art galleries in the new manufacturing centres. It was said that the great result of such an enterprise would be that, as experience in London had shown, ‘the people had deserted the public houses, preferring to visit places where they could improve their minds, and refresh and strengthen their bodies’.79 Montagu Gore, the MP for Barnstaple, had backed the policy as one ‘improving the morals and purifying the spirits of the people, to extend the basis on which rested the foundation of peace, security and national prosperity.’80

  The capital would always be called upon to give the lead. As such, Cole had the idea of touring the exhibition before it closed and offering to buy up exhibits that could form the basis of a collection. His notion was that they would serve as teaching examples for students at the Schools of Design. Thanks to Granville, Cole secured £5,000 from the Board of Trade for the exercise. Cole had come to an arrangement with Granville, who had been vice-chairman of the Commission, to become General Superintendent of the Schools of Design, which could be part of the new estate at South Kensington. The Schools became a sub-department of the Board of Trade, which paid Cole a salary of £1,000 a year. He formed a committee to help decide what ought to be purchased, and included Pugin, then in the middle of designing the interiors of the new Houses of Parliament, but also in the last months of his life. Cole also set about establishing a network of provincial art schools under the Schools’ auspices.

  The Schools of Design already had a substantial collection, which the objects from the Great Exhibition swelled further. Cole secured from Albert the use of Marlborough House in the Mall as a temporary showcase for this augmented collection, but knew it would have to be removed in 1859 when the house became the Prince of Wales’s on his eighteenth birthday. Over the next twenty or so years until his retirement in 1873, Cole would engage in a classic exercise of empire building – for the good of the country. The collection, he determined, required a permanent home as part of the estate of learned institutions celebrating science and art that would become the legacy of 1851. Edgar Bowring, who had previously been at the Board of Trade, was then appointed Acting Secretary of the Royal Commission, in which post he undertook the laborious job of buying up the parcels of land that would form what would come to be called Albertopolis. Once the land was secured, Cole could go to work devising what to put on it. The collections of the Schools of Design formed the nucleus of the Victoria and Albert Museum. This project would be the start of the process that would bring a series of museums and educational institutions to South Kensington, the land for them bought with the profits of the exhibition.

  Over the next few years Cole, with help from expert antiquaries, toured various royal and government buildings searching out beautiful items shut away in cupboards or simply not used, and either borrowed or bought them for his new collection. He also collected what he called a ‘chamber of horrors’, items he felt failed the aesthetic test, and displayed these too, explaining their purpose in the museum: as well as becoming a pre-eminent fixer, Cole was making himself an arbiter of taste.81 By late in 1852 the collection had expanded greatly on the nucleus made up of material from the exhibition. The Queen had lent some Sèvres porcelain, which Cole, in an act that highlighted why the more fastidious of his colleagues found him vulgar and unlikeable, milked for all the publicity it was worth.

  VI

  Albert had the Office of Works make investigations about land purchase during the winter of 1851–2, and it found that a meaningful-sized plot could be as large as 120 acres, and cost anything up to £400,000. At this stage the question was partly one of the level of the collective ambition, and partly of the indulgence of the government, since the surplus was nothing like that much. Thomas Cubitt had been consulted and said that the price of £3,000 an acre being sought by local landlords was ‘much too high’.82 The government had already considered the land south of Kensington Gore as a possible site for a new, expanded National Gallery.

  There was also, at this intensely busy time for Albert and his men, the question of what to do with the Crystal Palace itself. ‘Nothing can be worse managed than the present movement to keep the Crystal Palace,’ Cole wrote to Grey on 20 April 1852.83 Cole himself wanted the building retained in Hyde Park: not purely to avoid a public row, but as a permanent exhibition space for central London. However, there was the small matter of the solemn undertaking given to the Office of Woods and Forests that it would be taken down, not that Cole himself would have had scruples about that. The Office itself was demanding compliance. Paxton was lobbying, not especially discreetly, to have the building kept where it was. A current of public feeling said that it should be retained as a great conservatory for London.

  Parliament voted in April not to keep it in Hyde Park – enthusing that ‘the new Palace will be very splendid, if carried out according to the present elevations and plans.’84 Sibthorp had not, despite the success of the exhibition, come round to the idea of it, or embraced its civilising mission. He had not, on a point of principle, been to see it ‘stuffed with fancy foreign rubbish’. He said of the ‘so-called Crystal Palace’ that ‘if anybody offered him a thousand guineas’ he would not enter it as ‘the very sight of it almost sickened him’.85 If it stayed where it was it would simply rob the poor of more of their shillings in the name of ‘recreation’. It was ‘a transparent humbug’. Once it was settled that the building would not stay in Hyde Park the chairman of the Brighton Railway bought it for £70,000, the money paid on the spot, and proposed to move it to Sydenham, in Kent, to which the Brighton Railway would run a service.86 It stayed there, as a great tourist attraction, until destroyed by fire in 1936.

  During his short chancellorship in 1852 Disraeli, keen to ingratiate himself with the royal house, was helpful in obtaining additional government funds for the building of Albertopolis. He told Albert he had seen ‘at once the necessity of securing as large a space of ground as possible. If therefore the commissioners should expend £140,000 in the purchase of property, he thought the Govt should be prepared to lay out £150,000 more.’87 Albert replied on 10 June 1852 to say how ‘very much pleased’ he was that the scheme could go ahead.88 The total purchases he intended cost £250,000; the other £140,000 would come from the surplus.89 A group of rich men – led by Albert – had clubbed together to give a guarantee to the Bank of England for a total of £150,000 against the loan sought to buy the land in Kensington. Albert was good for £10,000, as was the Duke of Bedford; Samuel Morton Peto promised £50,000. Some other well-known names promised smaller amounts: the Dukes of Buccleuch and Devonshire £5,000 each, Paxton £2,500, Cobden £1,000. There was a great enthusiasm to be associated with a project on which Albert had given such a visible lead.90

  Cole soon began sending Albert proposals for museums that could be built on the site.91 Albert was also keen on th
e government’s idea of the National Gallery’s being relocated there, and corresponded with Derby on this subject in early August.92 The School of Mines had been in touch about a geology museum; and there had also been an approach about a School of Practical Art. Not all potential inhabitants were so enamoured of the idea; Derby wrote to Albert in December 1852 warning him that the Royal Society had already raised an objection, since it wished to relocate to near Carlton Mews, and he intimated that other learned societies might have a similar view.93 When the Queen opened Parliament on 11 November 1852, the intention to proceed with the scheme was proclaimed. ‘The Advancement of the Fine Arts and of Practical Science will be readily recognised by you as worthy of the Attention of a great and enlightened Nation’, the Queen said from the Throne. ‘I have directed that a comprehensive Scheme shall be laid before you, having in view the Promotion of these Objects, towards which I invite your Aid and Co-operation.’94

  Alert to the need for influential allies, Albert sought to have Disraeli elected to the Commission, which was still run by Granville. He had just ceased to be Chancellor, with the defeat of Derby’s administration on the Budget of December 1852. Albert told Disraeli that in his view ‘it would be of the greatest importance that you should become a member of our body.’95 Albert was keen to see established a ‘department of practical science’ within government to complement what he hoped would be achieved by educational institutions in Kensington, with a minister in charge of it.96 The Privy Council Office took responsibility for the State’s involvement in education, but Gladstone, who had succeeded Disraeli, persuaded the Prince that were such a post to be created it should be within the Board of Trade: not least to avoid the inevitable struggles over religious questions whenever the Privy Council disbursed an educational grant. Edward Cardwell, the Peelite President of the Board of Trade, was charged, in January 1853, with doing this as soon as possible.