by Simon Heffer
By 13 July 1865 the sum of £100,200 had been subscribed by a select group in ‘important official positions’ and among the committee. It was then agreed to offer debentures to a wider public.145 The grant of land on a 999-year lease at a nominal rent was equivalent to a contribution of £60,000; but the cost of the actual building, including internal and external decoration, was estimated at £200,000. The commissioners promised to guarantee a quarter of this sum and to advance £2,000 for preliminary expenses. The rest had to be raised by subscription; and the grant of land would only be made if, by 1 May 1867, sufficient had been pledged to the hall by the public. It was to be funded by selling debentures: £1,000 for a private box on the first tier that would seat ten, £500 for a box in the second tier seating five, or £100 for a seat in the amphitheatre. The seats bought would be ‘practically perpetual’ – they would last as long as the 999-year lease.146 It was now planned that the hall would seat 5,600 people. The seats for sale would raise £250,000, the surplus to be invested for the maintenance of the hall; the other seats would be offered for sale at each event. The interest in a box or seat could be sold on, bequeathed or sublet. The committee did not doubt these seats would be a ‘remunerative investment’.147
There was one complication. Fowke, who was only forty-two, died suddenly in December 1865 of a burst blood vessel: just before he expired, sitting in a chair, he announced: ‘This is the end.’148 Fowke, as an engineer rather than as just an architect, had started to specialise in buildings with vast floor spaces: he had also just won the competition to build the Natural History Museum. He had been unwell for months, a condition brought on by overwork in seeking to finish the plans for the museum. Long rests in Switzerland and Eastbourne had not helped. Cole visited him in the latter and ‘found him very weak with expectoration’.149 What to do with the Albert Hall was the more pressing problem than the museum. It was wondered whether to change architects: but a foreigner was considered out of the question and Scott, the obvious alternative, considered too expensive in his love of elaborate decoration. Instead, and mainly for reasons of economy, Fowke’s plan was persisted with where possible, the work being taken over by another of Cole’s cronies, Colonel Henry Scott.
The following April it was agreed to proceed with Fowke’s design for the exterior as well as for the interior. Cole drove this decision, despite intensive lobbying from George Gilbert Scott. Cole trusted the Royal Engineers not to be profligate. Colonel Scott did not have too much to do in terms of design: a more convenient siting of the cloakrooms, the provision of crush rooms, better lighting in the corridors and on the stairs, and the stairs to reach each level outside, rather than inside, the corridors. The biggest change was that the floor of the arena would be sunk, but it was understood Fowke himself had contemplated this.150
Fowke’s vision of his building in red brick and terracotta would be realised. The decision to appoint Lucas Brothers as builders was taken in July 1866; the firm had built Liverpool Street Station and the Royal Albert Docks. The estimate was agreed at £199,748 (to include £27,000 for ‘terra cotta ornamentations’ and £8,000 for the organ).151 The other modification was to make the hall more of an oval and less of an oblong.152 As Henry Scott told his fellow architects at RIBA in January 1872, he had interfered only reluctantly with Fowke’s plan: ‘Whilst I have always considered that my late brother officer and friend was naturally gifted with unusual architectural and constructive ability, I have not had equal confidence in my own.’153 The exterior was 272 feet long by 238 feet wide, and built from 6 million bricks and 80,000 blocks of terracotta.
The Queen laid the foundation stone on 20 May 1867, assisted by the Prince of Wales and the committee. A huge marquee was erected over the arena, to accommodate 7,000 guests. The Prince made a speech; Derby, by now Prime Minister, handed the Queen some coins and Granville handed her a glass vessel in which she placed them; the Queen placed it in a recess in the stone, with the aid of a trowel, handed to her by Mr Lucas, the builder. One of Albert’s compositions, the ‘Invocazione all’Armonia’, was then played.154 It was announced simultaneously that the building would hereafter be known as ‘The Royal Albert Hall’, by the Queen’s command.155 As well as the crowd of subscribers and dignitaries, there was a large gathering of the public, taking a rare opportunity to see the reclusive Sovereign.
The hall’s charter of incorporation set out the purposes for which it might be used: national and international congresses for the furtherance of science or art; concerts; prize-givings by public bodies and societies; and various sorts of exhibition, including agricultural, industrial, artistic and scientific and ‘generally any other purposes connected with Science and Art’.156 Mrs Henry Cole laid the first brick in November 1867. Work proceeded quickly, and subscribers were invited, on any of the Saturdays in June 1868, to visit and inspect progress. The construction of the roof began on 6 May 1869. The contract specified the hall was to be finished by Christmas Day 1870. A programme of concerts, organ recitals and other musical events was planned for the summer and autumn of 1871. One of the mosaic friezes around the outside of the building stated the purpose of the enterprise: ‘The Hall was erected for the advancement of the Arts and Sciences and the work of industry of all nations in fulfilment of the intention of Albert, Prince Consort.’
The Queen visited the almost-finished hall in December 1870, sitting in the Royal Box and elsewhere in the higher parts of the auditorium while musicians performed for her. She liked what she heard, and saw: as she left she observed: ‘It looks like the British Constitution.’157 The State opening was on 29 March 1871. The hall was full. Many of the Queen’s ministers were present; she had a guard of beefeaters; and a vast orchestra assembled on the stage. She, inevitably dressed in black, was so overcome that her son had to complete her speech, made in response to his own. It was he who said: ‘The Queen declares this hall now open.’158 The Sovereign was conducted to the Royal Box to hear ‘a Cantata, with words from the Bible, composed expressly by Sir Michael Costa’, with full orchestra and chorus; she then left, before ‘a miscellaneous concert’.159 There had been a variance of Fowke’s final plan: it had been adjusted to accommodate 7,100 people rather than 5,600. At £206,716 11s 3d it came in 3.4 per cent over the estimate. There was plenty of money: the debenture scheme had been so successful that it had had to be limited. New ideas grew out of the hall, according to the 1872 report of the committee responsible – such as for ‘a series of cheap concerts for the people’ and ‘a national training school for music’.160 The second of those would come in a little over a decade, with the establishment of the Royal College of Music. The first would take another seventy years, when the bombing of the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place caused the shift of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts to the Albert Hall.
XI
The training school for music was perhaps one of the more necessary institutions for a country that considered itself to be advancing civilisation. The Germans called Britain das Land ohne Musik – the land without music. Since Purcell’s death in 1695 there had not been a single native-born accredited genius in British music. Handel had come over with George I. Arne, Boyce and Sterndale Bennett had done what they could to keep English music alive in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but were light years behind Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz and Wagner.
Cole, as always, had a view. In his role at the Society of Arts he had commissioned a report in 1861 on the status and performance of the Royal Academy of Music, founded in 1822 and in cramped premises off Hanover Square. Albert had always hoped to have a conservatoire in South Kensington, and Cole could see that moving the RAM out of Mayfair would help fulfil that vision and solve the institution’s accommodation problem. However, when Cole approached the 1851 Commission in 1865 about helping fund such a move they rejected his proposal outright, for reasons of funding. Once the Albert Hall was up and running Cole and the Society of Arts thought again, and decided to propose a National Training School for Mu
sic as a separate institution from the RAM, but in Albertopolis. Cole had two advantages in 1873, when he made his new proposals, that he had lacked in 1865. The first was royal patronage – the Duke of Edinburgh, genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about music, agreed to head the committee to drive the project. The second was that a well-known South Kensington property developer, Charles Freake, had agreed to fund the costs of building such an institution, on account of his wife’s deep interest in music.
All Cole had to do was persuade the Commission to provide a site for Freake to build on: which, obligingly, it did. It leased Freake some land to the west of the Albert Hall at £80 per annum on a 99-year lease. The building was designed by yet another Royal Engineer and Cole protégé: his own son. The Duke of Edinburgh laid the foundation stone in December 1873 and the building opened in May 1876. The National Training School for Music was ambitious: it set itself up to be a conservatoire on a par with the finest in Europe. Its first principal was a man who would soon be the best-known writer of music in Britain, Arthur Sullivan. However, it quickly ran into financial difficulties: and the commissioners saw no more reason to fund it than they had seen to fund the RAM, had it moved.
The commissioners suggested that the RAM and the NTSM might merge: but the matter would become more complicated yet. In July 1878 it was announced that a College of Music would be established under the patronage of the Prince of Wales: a Royal Charter was obtained for the institution, which opened in 1882. As it opened, the NTSM closed, and the Royal College of Music moved into its premises, staying there until 1894 when the grand building, by Blomfield, that it now inhabits on the south side of Prince Consort Road opened. The RCM was a different matter altogether. It had as its first director Sir George Grove, a remarkable man best remembered today for the dictionary of music that bears his name.
Grove had been a distinguished engineer. He had, inevitably, been an associate of Cole, as an official for the Society of Arts, and had managed the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. He raised funds prodigiously for the RCM, helped not least by having the Prince of Wales’s name to bandy about. The Prince used his brother the Duke of Edinburgh’s love of music to enlist him to help the fund-raising drive: and by the time the RCM was formally opened by the Prince in May 1883 it had funds of over £110,000. In 1887 Freake gave the RCM the building, picking up a baronetcy in return. Grove persuaded the first two great composers of the English musical renaissance – Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford – to join him as senior professors. From then on success was secured: fifty years later the RCM had trained most of the great composers of the early twentieth century, such as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells, Bliss, Britten and Ireland. It was exactly what Albert had envisaged. However, the fulfilment of his belief that there should be scientific institutions in Albertopolis would take until the end of the century and beyond.
XII
The Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum and what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum were Cole’s direct legacy: the rest of the estate, which now includes the Science Museum, the Royal College of Music and Imperial College, is also indebted to his drive and vision. Predictably, his departure from his official role with the Commission and the government came after he decided to pick a fight. It was with Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gladstone’s first administration, and a man with many of Cole’s characteristics but an even more lethal turn of phrase and a piercing intellect. Colonel Henry Ponsonby, one of the commissioners, told the Queen in 1873 – when the fight with Lowe occurred – that Cole had exercised ‘despotic power’ in South Kensington.161 It was decided to split Cole’s many functions between several officials, and to persuade him to retire.
Although his caustic and bullying manner was well known to the commissioners, they believed that the Queen should honour him for his work. Gladstone had persuaded her that so numerous and vitriolic were Cole’s enemies that to knight him in the Order of the Bath – the accolade normally given to senior and accomplished civil servants – would be a public-relations disaster. Disraeli was scarcely more impressed, but managed to persuade the Queen to knight Cole in 1875. Any hopes that this would buy Cole’s silence were short-lived. His house adjoined the estate, in Thurloe Square, and he spent his declining years writing letters and pamphlets complaining to the commissioners and the wider world about the administration of his empire after his abdication. The last trump he had to play – certainly, he would have hoped, in the eyes of the Queen – was that the wishes of the late lamented Prince were no longer being discharged by the commissioners: and therefore the 1851 Commission, he argued in 1876, should be dissolved, and the estate passed to the government. He was ignored. Cole died in 1882, militating to the end.
For all his faults, however, Cole symbolises the can-do attitude that made not just Albertopolis possible, but also many of the achievements of Victorian Britain that still stand today. In cities other than London there are museums, concert halls, learned establishments, libraries and great town halls that are the product of the same mindset that Cole, taking his lead from his master Prince Albert, exemplified; one of ambition, and of a determination to create institutions of a grandeur and permanence that would project not just the names of their creators, but the advances made by Victorian civilisation, for ever.
CHAPTER 10
THE HEROIC MIND: ALBERT AND THE CULT OF THE GREAT MAN
I
FROM THE MOMENT when Carlyle stood up in May 1840 to give his first public lecture in his series On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, the idea of the Great Man pervaded much Victorian thought. It was a natural development for a society that was beginning to question, and even to repudiate, Christianity. Whereas examples of moral conduct had hitherto been drawn from religious teaching, now they were drawn from the lives of men. What also drove Carlyle to celebrate greatness was his contempt for democracy, for he felt great social change and improvement could come only through significant individual acts of leadership of which only great men (women did not enter into his consideration) would be capable. His edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches, followed by his eight-volume life of Frederick the Great, were his leading contributions to this genre.
Following Carlyle’s example, much subsequent Victorian narrative history is told through great men – though in the majestic work by his disciple, Froude, on the Tudors, Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I are used to embody, respectively, the wickedness of Catholicism and the virtues of Protestantism. Macaulay’s history of the Glorious Revolution is told not least through the characters who made it, notably William of Orange himself. It was also the great age of biography: Stanley’s life of Arnold was an early example, then George Gleig’s life of Wellington (he also wrote on Clive of India) and later John Forster’s life of Dickens.
Once this cult of the great man embedded itself in the Victorian mind it fed, quite naturally, into a subsidiary cult of death, in which the life of the departed great man was commemorated and celebrated out of reverence to him, and by way of example to others. It was seen notably in the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. On the day after his death in September that year the Illustrated London News demanded ‘a public funeral, such as was never before seen or imagined in any other country’.1 They were not disappointed. Thousands of soldiers in full dress uniform, many of them mounted, with military bands playing appropriately mournful marches, followed the massive bronze funeral car – which resembled a small steam locomotive, drawn by twelve horses – from Hyde Park Corner to St Paul’s Cathedral. In it, a coffin of scarlet and gold stood on a black and gold pall and rested under an ornate canopy. Greville thought the proceedings ‘all well done’, except the car, which was ‘tawdry, cumbrous and vulgar’.2 He claimed the design had been directed by Albert, which was ‘no proof of his good taste’.3 Carlyle felt the car ‘more like one of the street-carts that hawk door-mats than a bier for a hero’.4 The public, however, lapped it all up, as they did Tennyson�
�s ode on the subject: ‘Let us bury the Great Duke / To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation . . . the last great Englishman is low.’
Death became an important part of Victorian culture. A nation increasingly conscious of its stature, and of its history, felt that marking the passing of great men in an ostentatious and indulgent way was de rigueur. It validated the average Briton’s idea of himself as much as the standing of the deceased. As the secularism that fed the worship of great men advanced, it fed the elevation of death into a cult of its own. Committed Christians sought to emphasise the Resurrection to eternal life, and those of weaker or no faith sought alternatives to the comforts of religion. Although life expectancy increased considerably during the nineteenth century, it remained common for children not to reach adulthood, for women to die in childbirth and for men to be scythed down in their thirties or forties. Elaborate mourning rituals were established not so much to honour the dead, as to honour the cult of the dead. The higher classes wrote letters on black-edged paper for a number of months after a bereavement (the time depending on the closeness of their relation to the dead person). Social engagements were forgone. Black was worn. The lower classes closed their shutters or curtains when a funeral passed through the neighbourhood, and men in the streets removed their hats. Women especially were expected to endure a period of prostration, real or metaphorical. Culture absorbed and reflected the cult: Tennyson’s popularity, as we have seen, rested not least on his triumph with In Memoriam, which became almost the theme music of the cult, deeply beloved by Queen Victoria herself.
The ritual of the funeral became extensive. Funerary monuments became elaborate – the zenith, or nadir, of this aspect of the cult being reached in the tomb in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of the Queen’s grandson Prince Eddy, who died in 1892. A vocabulary of euphemism about ‘the departed’ and his joining ‘the heavenly choir’ evolved to allow Victorians to discuss this most compelling of subjects without having to use any unduly stark terms. An even more unsavoury obsession grew up with ghosts, spiritualism and the afterlife, capitalised upon by the growing number of charlatans who posed as mediums and held seances: though their exploitative trade would not really take off until after the holocaust of the Great War.
