Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  ‘B’ is there, in several incarnations, but most evidently as a little boy of about seven wearing a Norfolk suit, a straw hat with a round brim like a halo, and a solemn, slightly apprehensive expression. In his hands he holds, but loosely, as if paying more attention to the camera, a toy steam engine – a delectable, long-funnelled antique with brass trim that would now change hands for hundreds of pounds. The front of the engine points downwards, as if rehearsing the angle of that famous engine that would, a dozen years later, burst through the buffers of the Gare Montparnasse on the Left Bank and hang perilously over the street below, billowing steam. This, the young man to be, would see for himself.

  There is another photo, clearly taken the same day in the same studio, in which B holds a toy sailing boat. His inattention to this, too, makes me think that these were studio toys provided by the photographer, and that the little boy was by then already more interested in pictures, in buildings, in gardens, in sketching – the passions that were to illuminate his adult life.

  This child, christened Albert Alfred like his father before him but always known as Bertie, lived in St John’s parish, Lewisham, then a new and highly respectable suburb. Home was first a stuccoed, semi-detached villa and then, as both the family and its prosperity increased, a larger and more imposing detached one. (Devotees of E. Nesbit’s Bastable family may recall that they live in a similar quarter of Lewisham at the same period.) In the 1880s, while Bertie was growing up, country fields still opened out at the end of the road. His father was a successful publisher and bookseller dealing principally with medical works. His mother was the daughter of a long-established Lewisham family, the Simsons, who had originally made their money in ship-building, then in timber. Her father, the maternal grandfather, was Master of a City livery company. Bertie had two sisters and a younger brother. The family went on long seaside summer holidays: by and by Bertie would be sent to a little boys’ boarding school and later to Charterhouse. A classic start in life in the comfortably-off upper reaches of the middle class who set the tone for England.

  But where had the first Albert Alfred started? Where did his origins lie? The information is surprisingly sparse, but that fact in itself tells a story.

  Stephen Tendall or Tindall, the young man who was driving a coach regularly between London and Dover in 1814, when Arthur Jacob took the Dover road, can have had nothing to rely on but his wits. Probably born in a parish called Ticehurst,1 some twenty miles from Hastings, he came of a family who from father to son had worked the land on the Kent and Sussex borders. Family mythology, by the Lewisham days, always referred to them as having been ‘yeoman farmers’, but the scattered evidence of later nineteenth-century Census returns for the East Sussex area suggests that many of the clan were paid farmhands rather than owning land or cattle themselves. If Stephen’s father did farm in his own right, it was a modest holding, insufficient to support a family of any size.

  Stephen, of the same generation as Arthur Jacob, would have grown up in the company of farm horses. Coach-driving was a logical step for such a boy, one that took him into a much more exciting world than that of the muddy lanes round Ticehurst. It was the Indian summer of the coaching era, with scores of them coming and going every day from London’s inn yards. Skill, movement, fun, the camaraderie of the post-houses along the road, and the great and growing city itself – what more could a restless young man want?

  But twenty-odd years after the Battle of Waterloo the coach business began to go into a steep decline. The railway, bringing affordable long-distance travel within reach of a mass of people for the first time, came with a roar and a gust of sulphurous iron breath and swept the coaching empires away. Where the beat of hoofs had resounded, an unnatural quietness settled on the ancient highways and on the turnpikes. Inns that had been key staging-posts, earning a fortune for their owners, shut down one after the other or sank back into being country ale-houses.

  The London, Dover & Chatham Railway opened its first section, as far as Greenwich, in 1836, and continued to push towards the coast. A rival London to Brighton line was already being built, and soon an extension of this would be planned, via Lewes, to Hastings. Shrewd men must have seen clearly what was to come, and Stephen Tindall was apparently one of them. Judging from the baptismal records of a number of his children, he had been living in the heart of Hastings, then a relatively small fishing port with a sprinkling of summer visitors, for the last dozen years. His occupation during this time was regularly given as ‘coachman’. But in 1840, the year which is usually cited as the beginning of the end for the long-distance coach trade, his occupation was stated on an official document as ‘fly driver’. A fly was a four-wheeled cab hired for short-haul journeys, in particular for conveying passengers to and from the new railways stations.

  The document in question was the birth registration of his youngest son, Albert Alfred – the last child, and the only one to be officially registered according to the new regulations. According to family lore, seventeen other children had come before him. Stephen Tindall must indeed have needed his wits about him to provide for so many, even if not all survived infancy and, by 1840, the elder ones were bringing their own earnings into the family home. Stephen himself would then have been in his fifties.

  The only photograph of him, taken probably a few years later, shows a thin, commanding, canny-looking man with a big nose and a bald head, clean-shaven except for a frill of beard round his chin as was fashionable towards the middle of the century. He wears a velvet-collared overcoat open over a jacket with a shadowy check pattern. His white shirt and collar are almost covered by a soft black cloth held in place with a large tie-pin. He looks like a man with a whiff of the race-course about him, a good eye for horseflesh.

  Sarah, his wife, was photographed just once too, most likely on the same occasion. She must have been rather younger than her husband if she was still producing a baby in 1840, but over twenty-five years of child-bearing then lay behind her. In the photo she wears an elaborately decorated best cap with lacy lappets hanging down each side. Her grim expression is probably due not to temperament but to the fact that she has lost all her teeth. She could not read or write. This is apparent because it was she herself who registered, rather belatedly, Albert Alfred’s birth, and she signed the register with a cross. One more child was probably not what this middle-aged couple needed. Indeed, having registered his presence by the new, modern method, they seem to have failed to get him baptised. They were not assiduous church-goers, for three of their previous children had been baptised all together, as if to sort out an earlier negligence.

  Sixty years later, in 1901, which is the latest Census available for consultation as I write,2 a number of Stephen’s progeny and their descendants were still living in the much-expanded Hastings the railways had created. They were butchers and greengrocers; one was a baker and another a plumber and glazier, and one an insurance agent. Two others, stated to be living ‘on their own means’, had migrated to the more genteel part of town known as St Leonards, and another had retired along the coast to Worthing. Street directories of the same year reveal that one Miss Tindall taught in a Hastings infant school and another in a ragged school. Nothing about any of these obscurely useful lives would suggest that they had by that time a brother/cousin/uncle in an office in London’s Covent Garden, editing a medical journal and employing his own staff, in a specialised publishing firm he had built up himself and which was now the largest in Britain, with links in France and Germany and contacts all over the world.

  So how did this youngest of many children, son of an ageing cab driver in a small town and an illiterate mother, make his way so spectacularly in the world? How did he arrive at the big house with servants in Lewisham, the cultivated wife, the sons educated at famous public schools?

  The answer lies in a central truth about the Victorian era: it was a time of unprecedented social mobility and rolling change. The notion that it was a world in which everyone ‘knew their place�
� and that an impassable gulf separated rich from poor is a twentieth-century misperception, sentimental or accusatory according to the perspective of the viewer. We peer down history towards a period that is now fixed for us, with all outcomes known, and is therefore perceived as safe and predictable. We much underestimate the sense of turbulent material and social development in which our ancestors actually lived their lives.

  By the 1840s industrial growth was transforming the whole way of life in Britain. Small country towns were growing into smoky cities. London was expanding into a megalopolis, the first one the world had known. Steam ships began to complete in a few weeks journeys that recently had taken many months, and they brought the world’s goods to London and Liverpool. Railway trains started to carry people in a few hours to far corners of England. In the mid-century telegraphic cables spanned national frontiers and by and by the Atlantic, transmitting in minutes news of events a thousand miles away and thereby transforming the whole concept of news, information and opinion. Possibilities undreamed of by earlier generations seemed there for the taking, for those that had the wits, the courage and the stamina. In a prosperous place like Hastings, with its recent growth in well-to-do summer visitors indulging in the new luxury of hotels, you could not fail to be aware of the changes.

  Certainly a gulf between rich and poor was there, but it appeared more bridgeable than ever before. When Albert Alfred was growing up there was much more basic education available than in previous eras, as ‘National’ and ‘British’ schools multiplied in the towns and villages, costing only a penny or two a week per pupil. Huge numbers of people still lived, as they always had, below the poverty line, in ignorance and want, but by the 1860s these ‘dwellers in the abyss’ were at last attracting concerned attention from journalists writing in new, popular papers – papers whose very existence, to instruct and entertain a large new literate commercial class, was a sign of social evolution.

  There were chances out there to be seized, and what better field than the rapidly expanding one of paper and print? Paper, which in the past had been expensively manufactured from rags, was now, thanks to imported wood-pulp and new technology, being produced far more cheaply. People, whose immediate forebears had been content with the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress and a several-days-old news-sheet passed from hand to hand in the ale-house, now became voracious consumers of print. Newspapers, handbills, advertisements, headed stationery, magazines, practical and self-help manuals, part-works and books and yet more books poured from an ever-increasing number of presses. Printers and distributors turned themselves into publishers. Lending libraries and railway bookstalls spread across the land. Specialised scientific and technological periodicals appeared. In Paris, and in their expanding empire in other world capitals, the Baillière family were part of the same phenomenon.

  Exactly how Albert Alfred began to make his way in this field, after what can have been little more than a basic education in the 3 Rs, I do not know. Typically, working-class origins leave scant record, since there has usually been no one on hand with the inclination or the leisure to value the family history. Photographs, letters and legal documents have been few or non-existent; oblivion soon closes over departed names. And, ironically, the fact of a man doing well in later life has usually served, in the socially sensitive past, not to illuminate his origins but to obscure them further.

  It seems that, in his teens, Albert Alfred took the train up from the coast to London to seek his fortune. Or perhaps he was sent up by his father, who knew a likely lad when he saw one. There is no tradition that another family member, such as an elder brother, paved the way for Albert Alfred; though marriage records, for the Hastings church which many of the Tindalls attended, do indicate a possible cousin who worked on the local news-sheet. I am fairly sure that Albert Alfred did not serve a traditional apprenticeship to become a Master Printer as, had he done so, that reassuringly solid credential would have been incorporated into the brief family lore on him. The old, decorous system of seven years’ formal learning was often bypassed now in this most modern of trades, as clever youngsters learnt their skills on the job and then hastened to set up on their own.3

  Albert Alfred’s eventual obituaries, as a well-known figure in the book trade, spoke vaguely of him having found employment, as a young man, ‘in a commercial firm’. One may be fairly sure that this was to do either with paper or with print. Here, no doubt, he picked up the working knowledge of printing and costs that a more liberally educated young man ‘going into publishing’ typically lacked. He must also have acquired the rudiments of book-keeping, though, for many years, his own firm seems to have run successfully with none of the careful accounting that would later become standard. Such was the nature of Victorian entrepreneurship, and in the twelve-hour days that were commonplace then in offices huge amounts of work were summarily got through. Under the obituarists’ evasive fictions about Albert Alfred’s childhood – ‘yeoman farmer’, ‘educated privately’, fictions which he himself had no doubt encouraged – are buried what must have been many subsequent years of passionate energy and ruthless endeavour, self-confidence and sheer nerve.

  Long after he was dead, his grandson was to remark that he had always felt the founder of the family firm to be ‘a bit of a rogue’, but perhaps, in the world in which he had made his way, that had been necessary.

  It was in the mid-1860s that Albert Alfred, then about twenty-five, was thinking of branching out on his own. My guess is that he sought work as a ‘jobber’, a broker who undertook to organise the printing and distribution of writings by individual customers. By then he had managed to get acquainted with some doctors, probably because Fleet Street and the Strand, then the centre of the paper and print trade, was also the area of King’s College Medical School, Charing Cross Hospital and, at that time, the British Medical Association. Born into a different class, would he have liked to become a doctor himself ? Certainly he was later to acquire a great deal of heterogeneous medical knowledge. He apparently had some hand in the marketing of a medical paper edited by a successful surgeon who practised near Piccadilly. This surgeon, said to be ‘original in his views and bold in expressing his opinions’, took to young Albert Alfred Tindall. When two other surgeons with whom he was in touch, similarly proprietors of a medical journal and also well known for forthright views, were in difficulty with their printing arrangements, Tindall was suggested as a useful fellow to come and look into the problem. These Dublin surgeons were, of course, Arthur Jacob and his son Archibald.

  Arthur had, in theory, relinquished editorship of The Medical Press to Archibald several years before, but was still very much a presence. Archibald was a man given to enthusiastic building schemes that were not always practical. (After his father’s final retirement, when Archibald took possession of the house in Ely Place, he tried to construct a wholly unsuccessful conservatory on a sunless back roof.) He conceived the idea of printing The Medical Press himself at the small Dublin office from which it was run. He imported a printing press, which almost at once threatened to fall through the joists of the upper floor on which it had unwisely been placed. At this point, useful young Tindall was summoned from London to catch the night packet.

  It was his first big chance, and he seized it. In no time, he had assessed the problem, and the Jacobs. He suggested to them that he himself was the man to take on the printing and the distribution of the journal in London, particularly since the London surgeon was thinking of retirement and the two journals might be amalgamated to reach a far larger joint readership.

  And so it happened. Soon, Albert Alfred Tindall became much more than just a production manager for the enlarged journal: he was eventually, for many years, its sole editor. Long after, his granddaughter wrote of his first appearance in Dublin, ‘he had no social standing, but he was good-looking and had charm.’ (So, an honorary Irishman, perhaps?) ‘He also had a fine baritone voice, and the Jacobs loved singing. By degrees, they domesticated him.’ One might rather sa
y that he possessed the natural skill to tame them, and to make himself indispensable to them and their journal.

  He had, as yet, no office of his own. He quickly rented a room just off the Strand from a bearded, food-stained middle-aged man named Cox, who lacked his dynamism but had inherited a small publishing concern. Religious periodicals were Cox’s speciality, in that era when religious convictions were a middle-class passion. He also, in an odd pairing, published books on ‘artistic anatomy’. Exactly how Albert Alfred lived and built up some capital during the later 1860s it is hard to tell, but by 1870 he had had the inspired idea of commissioning and publishing himself the first of a series of Student Aid booklets, designed to help medical students pass exams. Aids to Surgery, price one shilling, sold and sold. General practitioners kept copies by them for decades: you never knew, in those days, when you might be called on to remove an appendix or perform a hasty Caesarean by oil lamp in some remote house. Aids to Anatomy was for years marketed as ‘A pocket version of Gray’s’, till the publishers of the famous Gray’s Anatomy itself finally complained. Aids to Anatomy even featured in a music hall song, ‘My Little Pocket Gray’.

  At about the same time as the first Aid booklets appeared, a second big chance came Albert Alfred’s way. With the recommendation of the Jacobs, he had got onto terms with the London office of Baillière. The proprietor, Hippolyte Baillière, Jean-Baptiste’s younger brother, died in 1867. His sons were already established in the family interest in New York and Melbourne. His widow tried to carry on the London firm but without success; debts mounted. She had been born in England, where her royalist Continental family seem to have taken refuge from the first Napoleon. She did not want to settle in France, where his nephew, the Emperor Napoleon III, still held sway. She had plans to go and live with a relative who had married into an Anglo-Irish family and was currently settled in a seaside suburb of Dublin – not far up the railway line from where Archibald Jacob had bought a holiday home for his growing family. I think it was the Jacobs who suggested that, once again, the energetic young Mr Tindall might be the man to come to the rescue.